Tonight: virtual conversation with Patricia Engel
Join me and Patricia Engel online as we discuss her new book THE FARAWAY WORLD
Consider this newsletter a brief phone call from me. I promise to keep this short. Please expect more in a week!
Tonight, I’ll be in conversation with the extraordinary author Patricia Engel over Zoom thanks to one of Chapel Hill’s outstanding independent bookstores, Epilogue Books. We’ll be discussing her new story collection The Faraway World. You can sign up for the event for free or choose to also buy the book. You’ll be giving yourself a gift if you buy the book. I read it in one day and leapt from one story to the next. We’re going to talk about what it means to be a part of a diaspora, the challenge of making or keeping a home when you’re focused on survival, and what it means to be in exile—and doing all that work in fiction.
This week, I also read her most recent novel, Infinite Country. Thinking about these two titles, I wondered about the difference between an infinite country and a faraway world. One feels endless and without boundaries. The other is perpetually out of reach. The paradox of exile is the fact that you must learn to carry your homeland with you wherever you go and yet you’re never home. We have a lot to discuss tonight. I hope you’ll join us. The event begins at 6:30 so wind down your evening with us. More often than not, I listen to book events on my phone. There’s no perfect way to tune into virtual events, but I’m so grateful that the pandemic has made literary conversations more accessible.
In other news, the Washington Post ran my review of Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois this week. This was a fun assignment! Whether or not we have six more weeks of winter, we are in the thick of winter. It’s been foggy, damp and cold in North Carolina. People are always asking me for books that aren’t very heavy. I know what they mean. To be fair, I am notoriously into depressing books, but even I need to mix it up. Rest assured, though, my idea of light reading is still substantial.
Vintage Contemporaries transports you to a sweet niche of 1990s New York City nostalgia and the shine of friendship in one’s twenties. There are some darker elements in the book—cancer, loss, addiction, gentrification, workplace harassment, ambivalent motherhood, and the free-floating pain of a broken friendship—but especially for those of you who work or worked in book publishing and live (or lived) in New York City within the last 30 years, you’ll find a lot of pleasure in this fleet-footed novel that finds its muse in one of my favorite authors, Laurie Colwin. Dan Kois is a confident writer who trusts his instincts. From the pacing and details, you can tell this book gave him a lot of joy as he wrote it. There’s something really special about putting yourself in the hands of someone who knows how to make themselves at home in a story. I hope you’ll pick it up.
On the surface, you might find yourself thinking that Patricia Engel’s fiction demands more attention and endurance from a reader than say Vintage Contemporaries would, but I’d say that you’ll probably inhale all these books if you don’t overthink the immediate their descriptive differences. Engel is also a writer whose love of place and characters is deeply felt. Her two most recent books are relatively slim. She trusts her ability plunge the reader into the enmeshed world of her stories. Her language is vivid and evocative, but never overwrought. I come away from her books with a more clear-eyed view of the world, careful to avoid snap judgments and curious about the paths that take people from one homeland to another. Maybe that sounds really sappy to you, but wonder feels in short supply these days. It never fails to delight me that literature can take me out of my daily routines and make me see the world through new eyes.
Recent books that also shook me up include Camonghne Felix’s Dyscalculia, Maggie Millner’s Couplets, and Marilyn Hacker’s Calligraphies. All three of these books were written by queer poets, but only two of them are collections of poetry. Perhaps I’ll write more about them down the line, but some spirited messaging over Instagram lead me to finally order Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light and Water from my closest local indie Golden Fig in Carrboro. And as soon as I wrap up this installment of my newsletter, I’m going to finish reading my friend Gabriel Bump’s absolutely outstanding novel Everywhere You Don’t Belong. It’s a delicate thing to read a book written by a friend, but, oh, what magic it is when your friend has written a book that’s deliciously funny, tender, smart, insightful and propulsive. It’s beyond the bias of friendship that I recommend it to you before I’m done.
If you’ve read any of these books, let me know. This so-called quick phone call covered a lot of ground. In the meanwhile, I hope you’ll pop up tonight on Zoom. It would be great to see you in the infinite country online.