I need your assistance and advice. I’m a reader who knows what he likes, but to challenge myself, I want to explore other areas in literature. For example, I want to wander through books written by women. I have read very few works by female authors, and I’m not sure why that is the case. I read about 80 to 100 books annually, and my taste runs into the more experimental form of writing or books by eccentrics. Usually, an eccentric can’t help but write a weird work. I’m going through a Marcel Proust stage and think of him as eccentric. The fact that he is so focused on his culture and its world is a superb journey for me. Andre Breton’s approach to investigating his version of Paris in Nadja impressed me. I like travel books that deal with the traveler’s mental state. Still, female writers are not significant in my reading, which I want to change in 2024.
The women I read in 2023 are Marjorie Worthington, Lydia Davis, Izumi Suzuki, Ann Quin, Chantal Akerman, Anna Biller, Alexandra Auder, Edith Schloss, and Céleste Albaret. I’m reading Janet Malcolm’s In The Freud Archives, making ten women writers out of the 82 books I read this year. I share a presence with two authors, but mostly, I read these books because of either their subject matter (Marcel Proust, NYC social art history, Freud gossip) or because something about the authors made me want to read their writings. Ann Quin, for example, sounded like a fascinating figure. She was very much part of the 1960s London Soho world, and her work was attached to the French writings of Duras and Robbe-Grillert and the British novelist B.S. Johnson, a world of experimental writing I continue to explore. Tripticks and Berg are wonderful works by Quin. I wished Quin was still among the living because her talent would never have dimmed.
Lydia Davis is very much a literary hero to me. Not only for her brilliant translations by such greats as Marcel Proust, Flaubert, Michel Leiris, and Maurice Blanchot but her prose is exceptionally pointed and exact but never erases the sense of mystery. I’m truly addicted to her writing, and I have anxiety about the thought that I may have misplaced her books in my library space.
So yes, if you can comment on my page here on your favorite women writers - non-fiction, fiction, and poetry- it will be helpful, but I’m curious about my readers’ taste in literature.
Speedboat by Renata Adler is an interesting cross-genre book. For essays, When The Sick Rule The World by Dodie Bellamy. For short stories, Never Breathe a Word by Caroline Blackwood.
Ooh, what an exciting thread you prompted! Here’s some options to add:
• I second Ali Smith – her Seasonal Quartet blew my mind.
• I also second Claire Dederer’s Monsters, which was one of my favorite books this year.
• Have you read Rachel Cusk? I feel like the formal severity and wry humor of her Outline/Transit/Kudos trilogy might appeal to you.
• Joy Williams is amazing. I like her short stories, but reading her novel The Quick and the Dead was one of those experiences where I spent the whole time thinking, “Who would ever think to write a book like this???”
• I fell in love with Tove Jansson many years ago through her Moomin books for children, but this year I finally read one of her adult novels, The Summer Book, which was eye-opening. Experimental yet earthy, it encompasses all of the natural world, including the chilly and dangerous parts.
• Another favorite from this year was Information Desk, by Robyn Schiff – a book-length poem inspired by her time working at, well, the information desk of the Metropolitan Museum. A unique meditation on the value of art, in all senses of the term.
• Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay is an existential mystery par excellence.
• I don’t know that you dip into sci-fi that often, but the work of Ursuala K. LeGuin absolutely transcends that genre – some of her best are more like fictional works of anthropology than anything else. The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed are great places to start.
• I also highly recommend Joanna Russ’ The Female Man – more a work of experimental philosophy and feminist satire than the sci-fi genre it’s lumped into.
• Helen DeWitt – her lengthy opus The Last Samurai and her slim novella The English Understand Wool are highly indelible but utterly distinct explorations of erudition.
• Anything at all by Patricia Highsmith.
I think I’ve cluttered up your comments section enough, but I look forward to seeing where this journey takes you!