Tag Archives: Yiyun Li

Forthcoming Books of Interest

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Titles are removed from this list as I acquire said books. Searching should lead you to these titles, but drop me an email if you cannot find any of them. I’m acquiring fewer books these days, but the following are mostly irresistible:

Yiyun Li, Must I Go
Karl Ole Knausgaard, In the Land of the Cyclops
J. M. Coetzee, The Death of Jesus
Roberto Calasso, The Celestial Hunter
Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader
Kate Zambreno, Drifts
Alistair Ian Blythe, Card Catalogue
Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume II
Luis Goytisolo, The Greens of May Down to the Sea: Antagony, Book II
Luis Goytisolo, The Wrath of Achilles: Antagony, Book III
Moyra Davey, Index Cards
Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, The Inhabited Island
André Breton and Philippe Soupault, Magnetic Fields
Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Count Luna
Miklös Szenkuthy, Chapter on Love
Paul Celan, Microliths
Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid
Amanda Michalopoulou, God’s Wife
Hans Jürgen von der Wense, A Shelter for Bells
Magdalena Zurawski, Being Human is an Occult Practise
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Mercé Rodereda, Garden by the Sea
S. D. Chrostowska, The Eyelid
László F. Földényi, The Glance of the Medusa
László F. Földényi, Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears
Hans Blumenberg, History, Metaphors, Fables
Jirgl Reinhard, The Unfinished

[11.1.20 – For ease I have now made this is fixed page, available from the menu bar at the top of the blog]

Forthcoming Books I’m Looking Forward to Reading

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  1. Roberto Calasso, The Unnamable Present
  2. Laura Nasrallah, Archaeology and the Letters of Paul
  3. Jan Zwicky, The Experience of Meaning
  4. Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End
  5. Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob
  6. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Anarchy’s Brief Summer
  7. Simon Critchley. Tragedy, the Greeks and Us
  8. Dan Gretton, I You We Them
  9. Clarice Lispector, The Besieged City
  10. Simone de Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 2, 1928-29
  11. Annie Ernaux, Happening
  12. Moyra Davey, Moyra Davey
  13. Claudio Magris, Snapshots
  14. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Sarah Richmond’s translation)
  15. Kate Zambreno, Appendix Project
  16. Christina Hesselholdt, Vivian
  17. Enrique Vila-Matas, Mac and His Problem
  18. Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature
  19. Geoffrey Hill, The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin

Forthcoming Books of Interest

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There is nothing like refitting a library to make one appreciate how extensive a reading-backlog has somehow established itself as an almost living being. It makes me think fondly of the Joanna Walsh short story. Her story rests on the irresistible premise that all your unread books might step from your shelves in the shape of a polyphonous reader to share with you some conversation and a glass of wine. (I recently contributed a personal selection of short stories, which included Walsh’s story, to Jonathan Gibbs’ terrific A Personal Anthology.)

I am trying to buy fewer books, but these are forthcoming over the next twelve months and will escape any such caution:

T. J. Clark, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come
Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography
Michelle Bailat-Jones, Unfurled
Maria Gabriela Llansol, Geography Rebels trilogy
Karl Ole Knausgaard, Inadvertent (Why I Write)
Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
Dan Gretton, I You We Them
Joshua Sperling, A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Writings of John Berger
Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us
Rachel Cusk, Coventry: Essays
Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End
Kate Zambreno, Appendix Project: Talks and Essays
Marguerite Duras, The Garden Square
Annie Ernaux, Happening
Mathias Enard, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants
Clarice Lispector, The Besieged City
Daša Drndic, E. E. G. and Doppelgänger
Agustín Fernández Mallo, Nocilla Lab

Yiyun Li: Reading Letters and Journals

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“What do we gain from wanting to know a stranger’s life? But when we read someone’s private words, when we experience her most vulnerable moments with her, and when her words speak more eloquently of our feelings that we are able to, can we still call her a stranger? I have convinced myself that reading letters and journals is a way of having a conversation with those writers, but surely it is as glib as calling perusing the music score of a symphony the same as listening to it. A conversation requires more than scribbling in the margin.
Sometimes I suspect that I am drawn to those who don’t converse with me because I have not outgrown a childish wish that they will teach me how to live. Or, a slightly more complicated version: I wish that they would teach one how to die.”
. . .

“All people lie, in their writing as much as in their lives. It frustrates me that I hold on to an unrealistic belief: there is some irrefutable truth in each mind, and the truth is told without concealment or distortion in a letter or in a journal entry. My obligation is to look for that truth; finding it will offer me the certainty I don’t have in me. With that certainty I will find a way to build a solid self. This burden I never take on while reading or writing fiction.”

To those that have read Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life offers something very different, another reluctant memoir: introspective without morbidity and philosophical without pretension.

Some Well-Intentioned Reading Ideas for 2015 (updated)

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These are not reading resolutions. Writers promising literary gifts lead me astray too easily for these ideas to be fixed in any way.

This year I read widely covering fifty or so writers, concentrating my reading more deeply only twice on Houellebecq and Anne Carson’s work. In 2015 I’d like to read more deeply into the work of some of my favourite authors: alternative Dante and Homer translations (and Adam Nicholson’s The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters) ,  more Ballard’s short stories, always more Beckett, John Berger, Roberto Calasso, more Anne Carson, the new Tom McCarthy, Robert Musil’s diaries, Hélène Cixous, Coetzee, Jenny Diski, Dostoevsky, Marguerite Duras, Pierre Hadot, Houellebecq’s new one if translated next year, Kafka’s short stories, László Krasznahorkai, Clarice Lispector, Bourdieu, Doris Lessing, Nabokov, Alice Oswald, Robert Macfarlane, Nietzsche, Atiq Rahimi, WG Sebald, Thomas Mann, Christa Wolf and Virginia Woolf.

Beyond these ‘old chestnuts’ (as Beckett called his favourite authors) I’m looking forward to unexpected surprises within the pages of the following new books, either missed in 2014 or due in 2015, by authors I have not read before:

  1. Kirmin Uribe – Bilbao – New York – Bilbao
  2. Claudia Rankine – Citizen: An American Lyric
  3. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor – Dust
  4. Ceridwen Dovey – Only the Animals
  5. Karin Wieland (trans. Shelley Frisch) – Dietrich & Riefenstahl: The dream of the new woman
  6. Can Xue – The Last Lover
  7. Anna Smaill – The Chimes
  8. Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith) – The Vegetarian
  9. Paul Celan – Breathturn Into Timestead
  10. David Winters – Infinite Fictions: Essays on Literature and Theory

There are several other writers whose older works I’d like to get around to exploring sometime soon including Jens Bjørneboe, Martin Shaw, Ivan Illich, Eva Hoffman, Ivan Goncharov, David Abram, Ágota Kristóf, Rebecca Solnit, Tomas Espedal and Elfriede Jelinek.

As always, distractions are greater than my ambition, but if I manage to take in a decent selection of the above I’m expecting a good year in reading. There are several other titles I have my eye on but I’m mindful of your patience and Molloy’s admission that ‘if you set out to mention everything you would never be done.’