Faculty Picks for Spring

For English professors, the line between reading for work and “reading for fun” is quite porous. I’m halfway through Benjamin Moser’s 800-page doorstop of a biography of Susan Sontag. The book won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for a distinguished biography, autobiography or memoir by an American author. I’ve read several other Sontag biographies and her journals, and I find her thinking and life fascinating. I love the gossipy anecdotes and watching how her thinking and politics have changed. She’s such a brilliant and beautifully flawed thinker.

I recently decided to craft a class around her work, as well as the work of Joan Didion. It’s an author studies course for English and literary studies majors and counts for students studying women and gender studies. Though I’ve read a lot of Didion’s work, mainly her non-fiction, I hadn’t read much of her fiction, so over the break, I finally read “Play It as It Lays.” I love the way Didion and Sontag evoke a sense of place, especially in California and New York City, where I’ve spent large parts of my life. The more I began thinking about Sontag and Didion together, the more I began reading other utterly bold and strikingly cool women critics of the mid-century, outspoken readers of culture like Pauline Kael, Eve Babitz, Janet Malcolm, Hannah Arendt and others. I’ve tried to make room for them on the syllabus as well. I’m excited to bring it all together in my current class. Still, I’m also interested to see how the syllabus evolves over the years as I become even more familiar with these writers’ works. Teaching the class is an excuse to explore my curiosity about these critics.

I was introduced to former N.Y. State Poet Laureate Marie Howe’s poetry when Professor James Hoch invited her to campus a few years ago. I often return to her poem “Prayer” from “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.” “Prayer” contemplates how distractions complicate our efforts to integrate our spiritual lives and aspirations with the demands of daily life. Howe’s poetry often addresses these and related issues. She asks us to pay attention, appreciate and find what is beautiful, lovable and praiseworthy, even when the world is chaotic, difficult and disorienting. So, I’ve been returning to “What the Living Do” and “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time” these days. I’ve recently also enjoyed listening to a podcast interview with her from “On Being” a few years back.

“North Woods” is a very different read; a somewhat unconventional novel in which the characters come and go (sometimes quite unexpectedly), but the setting—a small plot of land somewhere in western Massachusetts— remains the same. Starting in the 1600s, the novel follows the series of people, plants and animals that occupy this woodland space and the houses built (and destroyed) there. Mason’s careful attention to describing the plants and animals brings the location alive. It helps us appreciate the land and the landscape as agents of their own and as essential parts of the lives of their human inhabitants. It took a few sections before I felt I was really in the flow of the novel’s structure, but once I caught on, I could hardly put it down.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American writer of Filipino and Indian descent. We hope to have her visit campus soon as a Schomburg Distinguished Visiting Scholar. The poems in “Oceanic” and the essays in “World of Wonders” are a warm reminder of our proximity and obligation to the natural world. I can’t think of a greater antidote to the pessimism of our times than the generosity and heartfelt commitment of this work. It’s light and clever but not arching, purposeful without feeling righteous.

The Marx Brothers were a vaudeville comedy act who, after spending two decades crisscrossing the country playing hundreds of shows between 1905 and 1920, became Broadway stars and then made five of the best comedy films ever. Julius “Groucho” Marx, with his distinctive glasses and mustache, remains a memorable figure today, even to people who have never heard his name. I have long been interested in the Marx Brothers, partly because their films are uniquely wonderful (especially those made between 1929 and 1933), and partly because I discovered the films when I was a kid, and they managed to burrow their way deep into my imagination.

Vaudeville is a very specific window into the United States. So many performers were immigrants or children of immigrants, so the people scratching out a living tended to reflect those most likely to be left out of the American Dream. Surprisingly, show biz ended up leading so many of them to fame and fortune. Take the example of Adolph “Harpo” Marx, who starred in 13 sound films from 1929 to 1949 and never spoke a word in any of them. Harpo was also the first American entertainer to visit the U.S.S.R., where he entertained confused communists and spied for the U.S. Then there is Herbert “Zeppo” Marx, the least memorable member of the act. Zeppo dropped out of films in the early 1930s, was involved in organized crime, became a Hollywood agent who helped others rise to fame and built the company that supplied the clamps that helped the U.S. drop two atomic bombs on Japan. Starting as a street thug, becoming a singer and comedian, cavorting with criminals and helping end WWII? What’s not to like about this story? Except, perhaps, those two atom bombs.

I’m reading or rereading all of these for pleasure or to satisfy some curiosity because they interest me differently: Williams and Cheever because of their powers of storytelling and ways with language; Kristeva to fill a specific gap in my reading; Malcolm because she’s among the late 20th and 21st century thinkers I admire most; and Longstreet because the work is arresting in its ability to horrify and delight. One thing that people are unlikely to know is that “Night-Blooming Cereus” is the only book Longstreet has published—at least to my knowledge—and that, while the book is relatively unknown and might be difficult to find, it contains short stories as strong and affecting as any one might read elsewhere.

I’m wild about first-contact stories; this is one of the most fascinating alien invasion stories I have read. I pulled the first book, “Three-Body Problem,” off a bookstore shelf a few years back because I thought it concerned gender varieties. However, the bodies in Liu’s fiction are heavenly ones in a distant alien system devastated by climatic chaos due to their orbits. The epic story begins during the cultural revolution, spanning many decades following.

My favorite part of this novel is how the author explores the diverse experiences and political perspectives of this turbulent period of China’s history and how he speculates what Chinese and Western perspectives would be in the context of a global response to an alien invasion. Both books provide an engaging way to learn about scientific theories.

I didn’t end up reading “Three Body Problem” until it was recreated into a Netflix series; I have a strict policy not to watch film versions until I read the books. A Chinese series also just aired on Amazon with a title closer to the Chinese, “Three Body.” Read the book first and expand your imagination!

I recently finished the novel “The Vegetarian” by Han Kang, the 2024 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kang is the first Korean woman to have been awarded the prize, so I naturally wanted to read something she had written. “The Vegetarian” is brilliant and undoubtedly one of the most influential and disturbing books I have ever read. I’m a big fan of Russian literature and Toni Morrison, which raises the bar relatively high. In reading about Han Kang and why she won the Nobel Prize, I discovered that she is praised for her ability to express the experience of trauma. I was deeply moved by the way she showed how the objectification and denigration of women have become so normalized by both men and women. What are the ramifications when no one thinks it’s abnormal to mistreat women, including the women who are being mistreated? Kang makes an incredible case that we are all imprisoned by the very oppressive systems we have internalized.