David Foster Wallace called John D’Agata “one of the most significant U.S. writers to emerge in the past few years.” According to Andre Codrescu, “Here is an essayist who fears nothing.”  These comments reference D’Agata the essayist (who established his own hybrid voice in Halls of Fame) and not D’Agata the anthologist, but both “fearless” and “emergent” are equally suited to a description of D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay and his entire, massive, three-volume mosaic redefinition the essay. The trilogy’s first volume, The Next American Essay, anthologizes one essay per year from 1975 (the year of the anthologist’s birth) through 2003 (the year of the book’s publication). The Lost Origins of the Essay, though the chronologically first of the triptych, has just now arrived, and it endeavors to cover the formative moments of essaying that precede 1975. (The trilogy’s final volume, The Foundations of the American Essay, is still forthcoming.)

Of course D’Agata’s selections do not actually form an inclusive picture of every major essayistic moment in global literary history, and despite the book’s 600-plus-page heft, you still get the feeling that D’Agata may just be getting started. That said, the essays he’s selected do compose a brilliant constellation. He moves from the far shores of history in Sumer and Babylonia to the center of the classical cosmopoleis of Plutarch and Seneca and then east to the proto-essayists of China and Japan. Later writers include Montaigne and Bacon, Basho and Blake, and Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. And from the twentieth century, D’Agata plucks Artaud, Pessoa, Woolf, and Celan, but also Ana Hatherly, Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. Avant-garde and performative essays show up from Clarice Lispector, Kamau Braithwaite, Marguerite Duras, and Samuel Beckett. And D’Agata offers his own introductory words to each entry—the sum total of which compose a work that is as much an essay as any of the essays he’s introduced.

In his commentary on a surreal and haunting dialog written in South Africa by Azwinaki Tshipala in 315 C.E., D’Agata writes:  “Ask a friend: what is an essay? An essay, I suspect, is something to which your friend might turn to watch a problem being solved, a proclamation made, the world recorded honestly. After all, no matter how playful Seneca, Plutarch, or Theophrastus make their essays, let’s not kid ourselves about them: their essays are making arguments.” And there it is, I thought on my first reading. A clean definition of all of these strange angels cutting across the page: they’ve each their own voice and form, but in the end they all are rhetorical. They are making arguments.

But on a second read, I paid more attention to the rest of D’Agata’s treatment of the seventeen-hundred-year-old essay: “We might read these arguments through the lens of emotion, or experience, or a boldly clever adventure into the limits of human logic, but once we emerge from reading them aren’t we nevertheless changed? Haven’t we been moved? Doesn’t good art resist the intelligence only almost successfully? Or: is every essay an intelligence that inaugurates its own form?” It’s a subtle enough distinction that I breezed past it at first, but it constitutes the difference between changing readers’ minds and changing their way of thinking. In an essay about essays, D’Agata’s formula accounts for the difference between changing someone’s opinion on what constitutes an essay and changing their way of reading nonfiction.

Throughout this anthology, D’Agata throws everything in his arsenal against the misperception of nonfiction as “a genre that is merely a dispensary of data”—a “genre of negation.”  In his introduction to Basho’s “Narrow Road to the Interior,” for instance, D’Agata offers an etymology of memoir that reaches past the Latin memoria to “the ancient Greek mérmeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian mermara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mer-mer, ‘to vividly wonder,’ ‘to be anxious,’ ‘to exhaustingly ponder.’”

And this brings me to the best way I’ve found to express what D’Agata’s constellation is itself essaying: a thing that is both a form and an action, an etymology of the art of the essay.

About a Mountain, another of John D’Agata’s reconsiderations of the nonfiction genre, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in February.

Joshua Schriftman teaches and writes for a living but also has experience in marketing, travel, retail, sushi, and construction. He currently lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and daughter, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. He has essays of his own appearing in the spring issues of Ninth Letter and The Pinch.

Durrow’s debut novel explores modern multiracial identity within one mixed girl’s experience of love, family, class, and beauty in an American society still defining these ideas decades after the Civil Rights Movement. The main character’s perspective, if sometimes a bit sentimental, provides a precise lens through which to view a delicately complicated and shifting world.

Rachel, daughter of a mother newly emigrated from Denmark and a Black American G.I., opens the novel as the only survivor of a mysterious, tragic accident that leaves her in the care of her grandmother and the black community in Portland, Oregon. Her curly hair, light eyes, and fair skin are the source of much attention and scrutiny, forcing Rachel to examine what it means to be Black.

Like Nella Larsen’s biracial heroine Helga Crane in Quicksand, Rachel is a child of multiple worlds—White, Black, American, foreign.  At once an insider and an outsider, she strives to reconcile parts of her character that belong to rigidly separate lives.  She wonders what it means when friends tell her she “talks white” and worries that “the Danish in me [will] be something time makes me leave behind.”  She ponders how identity is tied to what others see and refuse to see, to the events that confront her unprepared in the present and those that remain only in her memory.

Interspersed throughout the narrative are the voices of other family members and witnesses to the accident, with their own versions of reality. Readers are reminded of how, like ripples in water, a tragedy affects an entire community. But the story remains Rachel’s—it is through her innocent-yet-haunting blue eyes, private ponderings contained in what she calls her “blue bottle,” and the wide stretch of blue sky she sees above that we experience the violence of the everyday, the loss of the past, and the hope for a future in which our vision of race and family and difference is inclusive and expansive.

Though Durrow compellingly shifts Rachel’s perspective to reflect her always-inexact, ever-changing insider-outsider position, at times she sacrifices the cohesiveness of the chronology.  Rachel’s age is too often uncertain, her voice more innocent than her experience would suggest.  Yet beneath the halting words lies a poetry that poignantly captures the pain and loss of death and separation from family. The reader can see the taunting looks of Rachel’s classmates, hear the Danish accent she suppresses, feel the widening circles of heat within her as she experiences her first kiss.

The Girl who Fell from the Sky, winner of the Bellwether Prize for best fiction that addresses issues of social justice, is a book that enlivens American identities of the past and the present. In these pages are echoes of our ancestors, Langston Hughes speaking to Nella Larsen, Nella Larsen speaking to Alice Walker, and this new voice—Durrow’s—speaking to us.

Heidi Durrow will give a reading and lecture at the University of Pittsburgh on April 13, 2010.

Liberty Hultberg is a Creative Nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh whose writing deals with multiracial identity.

A quarter of the way into Jonathan Lethem’s novel, narrator Chase Insteadman takes a break from the action to spend a short chapter describing the view from his window of a flock of birds in a church spire.  He’s described it already, but he tells the reader he wants to take make sure to get it right.  Then he completely fails to do so.   His description of language as the very thing that makes accurate description impossible is emblematic of the book.  “I employ it the way a dog drives a car,” he says, “without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible.  That is, of course, if dogs drove cars.  They don’t.  Yet I go around forming sentences.”  Attempts to find or convey some kind of meaning about the world consistently run headlong into the futility of language or the very idea of meaning itself.

Except, to say Insteadman takes a break in the action might be putting it generously.  There isn’t actually too much action to speak of.  Surviving off residuals from a teenage TV career, Chase Insteadman drifts aimlessly through the novel, attending fancy dinner parties, eating cheeseburgers in greasy spoons, and getting high in the ratty apartment of oddball ex-rock critic Perkus Tooth.  Insteadman indulges Tooth’s obsessions, from paranoid delusions about Marlon Brando and something called the Gnuppets to a religious awe of a type of pottery that can only be seen by bidding on it on ebay.  Yet anytime they might be in danger of following one of these obsessions into something resembling a plot, Lethem quickly moves them along to some new and equally fruitless pursuit.

Meanwhile, Insteadman’s astronaut fiancé writes love letters to him via weekly tabloids while trapped aboard a space station.  A giant tiger that might not actually be a giant tiger patrols the city, wrecking buildings that are coincidentally inconvenient to urban development.  A very literal grey fog hangs over the financial district.  Blending science fiction with surrealism, Lethem artfully renders a Manhattan that’s both strange and familiar, not to mention almost entirely populated by people with silly names.  The aforementioned Insteadman and Tooth are joined by the likes of Oona Lazlo, Laird Noteless, Georgina Hawkmanaji and Strabo Blandiani.  It’s the type of book where someone named Bloody Chicklets or Kilgore Trout could come strolling by at any moment.

There are dangers in following in the footsteps of Pynchon and Vonnegut.  For one thing, it isn’t the 60s anymore.  What once seemed new and profound now can seem an awful lot like random stoner-talk in Perkus Tooth’s living room.  Yet Lethem takes care to place such concerns in contrast to the novel’s hyper-modern surroundings.

Sure, there’s a conspiracy in Lethem’s Manhattan.  There are hundreds of them.  The question Lethem’s characters ask, though, is not what is reality? but in a place like this, what isn’t reality? The world Lethem creates can be a cold and alienating place.  Still, it has room for friendship, genuine human moments, and the promise that something new and indescribable lurks in the writing around every corner.

Steve Gillies is a current MFA Candidate in Fiction Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. He was born in Brazil, raised in Alabama, and spent a considerable amount of his adult life in Chicago. One time he made a comic book that was called “the stupidest I have ever seen” by a noted Environmental Chemist.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s second book of poems, Apocalyptic Swing, resonates with a quiet intensity. Issues of the body, love and sex, of fighting and falling and yet rising again because there is no choice flow through this collection involving a boxer who is caught up in the fight and world that exists around it in a small American town.

One time you hit a guy so hard

even he looked impressed before he fell
to the mat and started to seize.
She didn’t let you touch her for days

after that.

Calvocoressi works from within the ring, as poems become the victor, loser, referee, someone shouting from the crowd.  Small town concerns take precedence, become all that matter.  These poems are the lights, the sweat shining on the floor after, evidence of what’s left. Apocalyptic Swing holds a sense of struggle, fight and courage and power, combined with a profound feeling of loneliness that plays part, even as an entire community’s inhabitants become a single entity of pride, anticipating something better.

These poems draw on people who are struggling to survive, whether in the ring or in their everyday lives.  The boxer is any one of them, and he becomes the whole town, which could be any town, and they are all fighting, deserving to win, but usually walking away broken, beaten.

A sad history of short-lived triumph shifts through, coupled with hope.  This time will be better:

It will feel better than any floor
that’s risen up to meet you.  It will rise

like Easter bread, golden and familiar
in your grandmother’s hands.  She’ll come back,

heaven having been too far from home
to hold her.  O it will be beautiful.

Calvocoressi’s language is controlled with a confident, relaxed tone of honesty that quietly tells of a town and its people, one story, one memory at a time.  Her poems take the hit, get back up, train for the next fight, keep going.  Family and community encircle, push the importance of effort and love into the face, wrap it up between the knuckles, prepare for the punches.  Small wars, small fires move from mouth to mouth, family to friend, keeping everyone warm, and relying on the chain to prevail, to stay lit, to stay alive.  There is the fight and what’s worth fighting for—there cannot be one without the other.

Amanda Brant is a current MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.  She is originally from Indiana but now lives in Pittsburgh’s Southside with her dog, Maddie.  Her work has recently appeared in Invisible City.

If I recounted a handful of the stories from Maile Meloy’s most recent collection, the book would quickly begin to seem sensational.  In “Red and Green,” a teenaged girl has a sexual encounter with a much older man (a client of her attorney father); in “Lovely Rita,” a widow raffles off her romantic services to her dead husband’s colleagues; in “The Girlfriend,” the father of a murder victim, desperate to understand the mind of the man who killed his daughter, interviews the murderer’s girlfriend.  But what is most remarkable about Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It is that the experience of reading it elicits much more complicated responses than a simple summary of its plotlines might suggest.

A skilled sustainer of tension, Meloy writes stories that don’t so much resolve as arrive at a lingering uncertainty.  Like most real-life conflicts, the tensions at the center of Both Ways break only because some force shunts them aside.  In the final paragraph of “Travis, B,” after Chet Moran has had his hopes for intimacy dashed by a young lawyer named Beth, he stands in the darkness trying to determine how to proceed.  Just before the cold weather forces him inside, he takes the only action he can at that moment—he removes from his pocket the piece of paper that contains her phone number, memorizes it, rolls it into a ball, and throws it into the wind.  Such an ending contains within it both a finality—the piece of paper is gone, after all—and an uncertainty—if Chet intends to call Beth, why has he felt it necessary to rid himself of all physical traces of her?

It is Meloy’s economical use of language that enables her to sketch these stories in as emotionally complex a way as she does.  The A. R. Ammons poem from which this book’s title comes conveys in just sixteen words—“One can’t/ have it/ both ways/ and both/ ways is/ the only/ way I want it.”—the at-times excruciating nature of the decision-making process.  Similarly, in Meloy’s collection, the complications that underlie characters’ actions are lain bare in short sentences and paragraphs that feature the simplest possible diction.  In my favorite story in the collection, “Two-Step,” a medical resident, Naomi, listens as her friend Alice relays her suspicions that her husband is having an affair.  Five pages into the story, Meloy takes us inside Naomi’s head: “Naomi hesitated.  She had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously—or at least soon—be told the same thing.  It had been a difficult week” (94).  These three sentences entirely shift this story’s trajectory, but Meloy conveys this reversal in the simplest language possible—“It had been a difficult week” is one of the best examples of understatement I have recently come across.  Because she reveals Naomi’s adultery in such a matter-of-fact way, Meloy avoids the melodrama typically evoked by the other woman and, instead, extends the reader’s sympathies.

Both Ways is not perfect.  A Montana native, Meloy is at her best when writing about rural locales and the people who populate them; when the collection ventures elsewhere, Meloy’s characters lose some of their complexity.  In “Liliana,” the titular character reads like a caricature of a flamboyant European doyenne, and her miraculous return from the grave ends up indulging in the sensationalism that the rest of this collection so judiciously avoids.  Likewise, when the aging Argentinian hero of “Agustin” tries to help a former lover who has lost everything, he comes across as merely kind-hearted, not as a character with whom the reader feels aligned.

In the vast majority of Both Ways’ stories, though, Meloy’s unresolved tensions and her simple language help her to achieve near-mastery of the short story form.  These stories challenge the reader to do that most difficult of things—suspend judgment of characters and, instead, exist with them in the tensions they inhabit.

Loring Ann Pfeiffer is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama.

-Salvatore Pane

Editor-in-Chief

Readers who remember the final scenes of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s 2003 entry into speculative, post-apocalyptic fiction, may not be surprised to find that she has written a sequel. The Year of the Flood (whose narrative is staged simultaneously with Oryx and Crake’s) suggests an alternative to Crake’s diabolical destroy-the-world-to-make-it-new vision. Here, an anarchic cult called God’s Gardeners has reinterpreted the Bible to support a version of eco-Christianity, erected a hierarchic monastic order to ensure the success of its eschatological project, and reclaimed various ruined urban spaces so heavily under the heel of the all-powerful Corporation. The Year of the Flood, for the most part, attempts to offer a less problematic utopia than that imagined by Crake in the first novel, even if achieving it still requires the deaths of 99% of the world’s population in what God’s Gardeners call the “Waterless Flood.”

Though assuredly a worthwhile, thought-provoking, and interesting read, The Year of the Flood, like the soon-to-be overexposed film 2012, is yet another contribution to the glut of what I call “eco-jeremiads.” Atwood’s consideration of the apocalypse only exacerbates the manipulative and weighty rhetoric of the genre. While Oryx and Crake raised some serious metaphysical and ontological questions through its use of eschatological catastrophe, it is unclear what the new novel is attempting to accomplish beyond its gesture toward the generalized anxiety that “we should be more environmentally conscious.” In the same way that nuclear disaster narratives often merely point out the banally obvious—it would be really bad—The Year of the Flood relies upon the apocalyptic thrust of disaster primarily to highlight the author’s serious (if unambiguous) environmental engagement. It appears that Atwood truly intends much of this novel as a model for a lifestyle that moves past the “green” and “eco-friendly” into a wholly-revamped mode of operating in the world more naturally and responsibly. There are hymns interspersed throughout the book (and set to music on the website) that are explicitly intended for readers’ “amateur devotional or environmental purposes.” Major figures in history of ecological activism form a religious canon for the Gardeners: St. Rachel Carson, St. Dian Fossey, St. Al Gore, St. Julian of Norwich. But Atwood isn’t really exploring much territory beyond that of other eco-utopian or eco-apocalyptic novels (most notably the bundle of work from Kim Stanley Robinson).

Adam One, leader of God’s Gardeners, asks in his final speech, “Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a species?” If the major goal of this novel is to answer “No, we don’t, but we should all work individually toward a place where we would deserve that love,” then it is quite successful. But everything from Carson’s Silent Spring to Shyamalan’s The Happening has effectively already covered the same ground. For Atwood, the possibility of a collective, emergent movement capable of effecting change gets derailed in favor of a thrilling yet normative narrative with an emphasis on the individual’s relationship to the environment. Basically, The Year of the Flood comes off as being far more programmatic than aesthetic, and it is difficult to discern much in that program beyond the cliché: “think locally, act globally.”

(That said, if the endings of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are any indication, Atwood may be inclined to contribute one more post-apocalyptic novel to this universe. A third volume might provide an interesting and necessary engagement with our penal system and culture of ubiquitous surveillance. But we shall see.)

Bradley J. Fest, a PhD student studying 19th through 21st century American literature with an emphasis on literary representations of the apocalypse, recently reviewed Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for Hot Metal Bridge.

Ariana Reines notes in her brief preface that Charles Baudelaire began producing text for My Heart Laid Bare sometime around 1859 and composed notes for this work perhaps until his death in 1867. The intended result—an autobiographical work in which to “cram all [his] rage” —was never realized. In its place we encounter a collection of fragments, notes toward prospective essays, and personal musings. Baudelaire never intended to publish these fragments, and the sections progress rapidly through moments of unmitigated candor, oblique shorthand for future investigations, and autobiographical concerns over his debts, his health, his method, and his “greatness.”

My understanding of Reines’s translation is couched in a fair degree of ignorance; I do not speak or read French, and I have never seen the André Guyaux edition from which she draws. One scarcely needs to be a Francophile, however, to appreciate the vivid brevity that Reines brings to her endeavor. Norman Cameron’s previous translation (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1950), for example, presents the opening passage of the fifth section:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy. That is why she should be regarded with disgust.
Woman is hungry, and she wants to eat; thirsty, and she wants to drink.
She feels randy, and she wants to be ——— .
Fine characteristics!
Woman is “natural” — that is to say, abominable.
Moreover, she is always vulgar—that is to say, the opposite of the Dandy.

Reines’s interpretation reads:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy.
Therefore she is horrifying.
Woman is hungry and wants to eat. Thirsty, she wants to drink.
She is in heat and wants to be fucked.
Deserves it!
Woman is natural, which is to say abominable.
Also she is always vulgar, which is to say the opposite of the Dandy.

The success of Reines’s translation relies partly upon her willingness to displace a certain “etiquette”—which substitutes a long dash for “fucked” yet finds little fault in a description of women as “always vulgar”—in an act of fidelity to Baudelaire’s title. Reines’s rendering allows us to witness the corporeal fixation that suffuses Baudelaire’s text without the protective qualifications that attend a high register. I have no idea whose translation is more “accurate,” but Reines’s translation of “Deserves it!” where Cameron arrived at “Fine characteristics!” perhaps foregrounds the sensibility that each translator brings to the source text.

As an object (much like the press’s simultaneously released GLORY HOLE/THE HOT TUB by Dan Hoy and Jon Leon), this edition exemplifies Mal-O-Mar’s intelligent regard for formal novelty. (If there is a spoiler alert to be made, this is it.) Reines’s My Heart Laid Bare is printed on nine pages of full-sized newsprint, and the title is printed in a font size large enough to be read easily from the other side of the street. The decision to deliver the poem in this medium is endlessly intriguing: Baudelaire characterizes newspapers as “a tissue of horrors” in section 80, yet we encounter that opinion as readers in the present age, immersed in digitization and anxiety over the possibly imminent demise of proper newspapers. Of course, we must make the necessary distinction between newsprint and newspapers, and it may be that Baudelaire is granted a small victory here: the occupation of a form he vehemently despised. Edgar Allen Poe, cited in Reines’s translator’s note, elucidates both the text and its formal delivery:

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—”My Heart Laid Bare.” But—this little book must be true to its title.

Mal-O-Mar’s edition resides at the perimeter of the definition of a “book,” but it does manage to depart from previous English translations that bury My Heart Laid Bare within collections of Baudelaire’s works. As a discrete, self-contained object, however, we might still argue whether it manages to be “very little.” We can easily describe it as slim. Yet its physical presence is imposing enough to resist becoming the “disgusting aperitif” with which “the civilized man accompanies his morning meal.” Readers need no prerequisite reverence for literary objects to understand that Baudelaire’s text must be laid flat and opened wide.

Chad Vogler received his B.A. in English from UC Berkeley and currently attends the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is the assistant poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge. He lives in a house without a furnace in Point Breeze.