We’re riding this fire horse of a year, and I, for one, am needing to pull references for how to keep up, keep going, keep growing. My book recommendations for this spring—some old and some new—are not always easy, but always deeply enriching: a hearty full plate of a meal we need in these spiritually anemic times. These books are lessons in how to look at the dark and continue on. They are gifts from lives we don’t often get to live or touch. They’ll smack you awake, they’ll ease your spirit, they’ll tell you when to fight, and they’ll teach you how. They are my offerings to you as the light returns.
From the always fab independent press Semiotext(e) comes the first release of Tosquelles: Healing Institutions by Joana Masó in English, translated by Robert Hurley and Mara Faye Lethem. This book is a record of the psychiatric hospital Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in Nazi-occupied France, where psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles created a commune and refuge. Doctors participated in what we might now call holistic treatments alongside patients with soul-enriching activities like gardening, singing, and producing their own newspaper. Healing Institutions is a beacon of hope, showing us what mental health care could be, and has been. Available April 28.
The next rec is Solmaz Sharif’s Look, which was released by Graywolf in 2016. Sharif is Iranian, was born in Turkey, grew up in Los Angeles; she’s a brilliant writer with the accolades to prove it, if you need that sort of thing. Look teaches us how to radically respond to—and fight against—the horrors of our American government and its treachery. Once you’ve read it (or reread it), pass it around; it’s essential reading, and it’s as stimulating and provocative in craft as it is compelling and devastating in subject.
This next book came out last year and is a fantastic read. Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy by Tre Johnson is the celebration it sounds like it is. It’s also personal, researched, historical, and timely. Johnson is a journalist to his core, which means he knows how to wrap you up in a sentence and spin you until suddenly you’re at the end of the book and you don’t know how you got there so fast. Stories about playing Nintendo with his cousins sit alongside his learning of the death of Dick Gregory (which took place while he sat at a Chappelle show soon after the comic’s return from obscurity). Black Genius is a modern and profound take on the richness of Black culture in this country.
Steven Pfau’s Say Nephew: On Boyhood, Unclehood, and Queer Mentorship invites us into his family, providing a warm and complex portrait of what it feels like to be loved and nurtured in your queerness (in this case, by Pfau’s absolute ideal of a “guncle”) before you even know it’s there. Imagine being seen so deeply, so early. Pfau also brings in cultural and literary references for historical context on examining the complexities in gay culture. In these many micro and macro points of criticism, he reaches to understand his own role and responsibility in having received such rare early and loving guidance. A radical comfort in these times. Available May 26.
