2023: Favorite Books & Other Writing

Past years’ editions: 2020, 2021, 2022

Why do we write; why do we read?

Susan Sontag said that “the modern author’s ethical task is not to be creator, but destroyer, destroyer of everything believed wholeheartedly.” Perhaps, a similar task can be set for the reader: to alternate the kind of reading that only confirms what we already know with an open-mindedness that is willing to rethink, reknow, and unknow.

György Lukács wrote that the novel is a “negative mysticism for godless times.” Jon Fosse echoes Lukács in saying: “Literature becomes the secularized world’s mysticism. The author becomes the secularized world’s ascetic mystic.”

Considering everything that happened in 2023, it is almost a surprise – and certainly a pity – that not more people turn to books as a possibility to see the world from a different perspective than that of the grim politics served across all digital media.

In recent months, I’ve encountered many versions of the idea that poetry (and creative writing in general) possesses the negative capability to explore and represent the world in a way that science, politics, and economics can not. Poetry can contemplate the world via immediate sensation, can leave space for the mysterious and the inexplicable. In addition to reaching the writer’s and reader’s minds, poetry can reach through to the psyche (from the Greek psychē (‘soul,’ ‘life,’ ‘breath’).

In 2023, my reading preferences shifted from literary fiction to essays, non-fiction, and poetry. My new favorite genre is the philosophical-lyrical essay, mostly written by poets. As I began to spend more time dabbling with my own writing, I preferred to read books that inform but do not affect my own writing style.

Looking back at this year, I am positively amazed at how many strange and influential books found their way to my bookshelf (as always). Back in January 2023, I hadn’t the faintest clue that I would end up in London, studying Creative Writing (MA) on the non-fiction prose pathway.

John Cage said: “It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else. Here we are now.” And the now I have arrived at, although complicated, is also intricately exciting.

Before attempting another annual reading timelapse from January >> December, I’ll share the list of my top 10 favorite books read in 2023. Scroll down for the full list of book recommendations. As always, most of the books I read were not published this year. For a list of the best books of 2023, see the one by LitHub.

My top 10 books read in 2023:

Living in the World as if it Were Home by Tim Lilburn
Vectors and Smoothable Curves: The Collected Essays by William Bronk
Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard
An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays by Jon Fosse
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World by Jemma Deer
Zoographies by Matthew Calarco
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
The Lights & 10:04 by Ben Lerner
To 2040 by Jorie Graham

The year in reading

As I returned to Paris in January 2023, under the spell of Jon Fosse‘s Septology, I read his slim book of essays on literature and arts An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays and his ideas gently transformed my own.

For reasons forgotten, I set out to read about apocalypse in literature and cultural theory. I began with Apocalypse and Golden Age by Christopher Star which explores how the end of world was perceived by the Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. And, from there, I proceeded to the classic The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode which explores the human need to place ourselves on a controllable, linear timeline. “It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for co-existence with it only by our fictive powers,” Kermode wrote.

In February, while in Madrid, I read Jan Kaus’ essays on looking (“Vaade”) and wrote a review of the book for Looming. I was busy writing reviews for both Sirp and Looming all spring, including A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux (Sirp), The Thirtieth Year by Ingeborg Bachmann (Sirp), and The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen (Sirp).

March, April, and May passed as I dabbled with some short stories, meanwhile discovering the writing of Ben Lerner and going through 10:04, The Topeka School, and Leaving the Atocha Station. For a while, I found Lerner’s style informative of my own. And yet – I know that my personal style is much more baroque, rich in similes and metaphors.

Some lovely news came in. At the end of April, I visited Tallinn to receive the annual Debuting Writer Award from the Looming magazine.

And in May, I began applying for the English Literature and Creative Writing MA programmes in London. In the end, I got an offer from all the unis I applied to (kudos to my generous referrer). But I only made my final decision in late July, after I’d been accepted to the Creative Writing programme at the Royal Holloway University, London. I’d discovered the programme only in late June, while reading retro Granta magazines from the ’90s while escaping the 35°C heatwave in Florence and spotting an old advertisement. There were a few days until the application deadline. Talk about chances in life…

At the end of May, I packed all the books that I’d amassed during my 3-year Parisian sojourn into ten 30-litre boxes and moved them to a storage room. I handed over my apartment keys and set off to Provence and Italy for a long vacation.

Back in Estonia, I spent July and August writing my debut novel, about a woman spending her summer on a Finnish island with her sister’s daughter, grappling with the question: How to live on this planet as a human while knowing you are essentially hurting the world, its nature, and other living beings at every lived moment?

I read very little, over the summer Virginia Woolf’s The Waves being the only literary work. Ecocriticism and Women Writers by Justyna Kostkowska helped to sculpt my thinking about style, while Radical Animism by Jemma Deer, among others, informed the philosophical ideation.

On September 7th, the day I was to fly to London, I printed out three copies of the first half of the book, utterly drafty still, and handed them over to my family for feedback. I’ll continue working on it the next summer.

For now, I am working on a new project of lyrical essays, the first one being about breathing as a practice of restoring our connection with the non-human world. The Creative Writing course, while not as intense as I expected a 1-year MA programme to be, has been (unexpectedly) helpful in finding my voice and subject as a writer. Every week, we read 4-5 chapters from various books.

On top of that, I’ve continued my autodidactic studies in ecological theory (Jorie Graham, Annie Dillard, Robert Bringhurst, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, David Abram, Emanuele Coccia) Here’s a brief essay “What Is an Animal?” that I wrote as coursework in October.

In September, I discovered the poetic essays of Tim Lilburn, and ambitiously complex yet, for me, infinitely intelligent essays by the poet William Bronk. I asked my mom as a birthday gift the 6-week online seminar on New Ecologies by the Institute of Postnatural Studies and it (re)introduced me to the works of Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway, and David Abram among others. Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous is one of the best books I read this year.

I returned to Susan Sontag for her style and Simone Weil for her decreational thinking way ahead of her time (“Intelligence can never penetrate the mystery, but it, and it alone, can judge of the suitability of the words which express it.”). I discovered Alice Oswald’s Professor of Poetry lectures at Oxford, as well as interviews with Jorie Graham whose To 2040 is my favorite poetry collection published this year.

Last but not least, here are my favorite short stories of 2023 (a highly biased list as I didn’t read that many new ones). Most of them by the Old Masters, for better of worse. “The Stuntman” and “The Spy” by Rachel Cusk, “Seeing Through Maps” by Madeleine ffitch, and “The Hofmann Wobble” by Ben Lerner.

Last but not least vol 2: in October, I launched a monthly newsletter for sharing reading recommendations and glimmers of studying Creative Writing + roaming around in London. Read November’s newsletter and subscribe here.

Everything I read in 2023

Fave & moving fiction & poetry:

My TOP 10 favourite books read this year

Living in the World as if it Were Home by Tim Lilburn

“I do this [use language] not to be hidden but to touch what now appears to be out of range.”

The book-length prose poem (or poetic prose?) by Tim Lilburn resonated particularly well after having read the world-contemplating essays by William Bronk.

Lilburn questions the limits of language, the limits to what can be expressed in words. But also, the limits to what can be humanly experienced, sensed, and taken along from encounters with the Other.

“What is the source of this impulse to colonise the world physically, bending otherness into human forms?” Lilburn asks, echoing a question I have been exploring in my own recent writing: on what grounds can we humans claim that we know what an animal sees, feels, or senses?

The constant need to name, to control, to own. For what? Are we happier for that? Or would we be living in a healthier world if we had stopped at some point the effort to bend the whole world and its creatures to our will?

Some citations from the book:

“The world is its names plus their cancellations, what we call it and the undermining of our identifications by an ungraspable residue of objects.”

“The deer, the one nearest me, has no name; she is perfect unlikeness and is known best when desire leans into the cloud of her, as names assemble and withdraw around her. She merits all of these – body of lightning, gold-tipped, decorous – but is best known beyond them, known in a silence momentum with the intention and velocity of desire.”

“Look around: there’s enough to regret. Stand back from the monumental human striving over the last four centuries, this gleaming, rippling intentionality; lift your hands from the heaving controls; leave the building.”

Vectors and Smoothable Curves: The Collected Essays by William Bronk

When two of my new favorite authors – Ben Lerner and Kay Ryan – mentioned William Bronk as an influence, I knew this was an author to read.

vectors and smoothable curves by william bronk

Vectors and Smoothable Curves is a book of essays, and a curious one at that. Bronk, both in his prose and poetry, is preoccupied with the notions of ‘world’ and ‘reality.’ What he’s getting at is that there is a world (a reality) and a way to see and experience it. But this is not the same way that we, humans, see and experience it. And this is the primordial source of our unquenchable yearning for truth and understanding.

A demanding and mesmerising book. And yet – also deeply mind-altering once you let it carry you, once you stop resisting to question what you think is true.

Some citations from the book:

“We have an imprecise awareness of direction and force with which we attempt to locate and quantify: where are the points it translates between and strong and central are they?”

“We are in the real world as ghosts are in this world, of doubtful being, almost impalpable. The matter of the real world passes through us and we pass through the matter of the real world though, so to speak, neither is material, materiality being a concept of this world which we wrongly extend to areas where it has no bearing for support. To speak of us as real or to speak of us as material is not, in effect, to speak of us for it is to speak of something we are not.”

“Change is so important a part of experience as to be almost all of it. It is almost so that experience is the impression of change, And change is the essence of time.”

“Our interest in knowing how to interpret this inscription as cosmology is an interest in knowing how someone else failed as we do too.”

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard’s book of essays takes us to watch a total eclipse of the sun, the darkness approaching at befuddling speed.

teaching a stone to talk by annie dillard

It explores what it is like to be a weasel; and how to explain the human desire to always know more, to explore the Poles at the cost of one’s life.

Above all Teaching a Stone is a book of meditations on being human while sharing the world with other creatures and the unfathomable essence often named God but meaning very different things for different thinkers and writers.

I was charmed from the first essay, by the question and its elegant answer : “What does a weasel think about? He won’t say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf, and blown.”

Some citations from the book:

“You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If’ however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”

“Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.”

“Not we are no longer primitive; now the whole world seems not-holy. We have drained the light from the boughs in the sacred grove and snuffed it in the high places and along the banks of sacred streams. We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism. Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.”

“I had seen a partial eclipse in 1970. A partial eclipse is very interesting. It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.”

An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays by Jon Fosse

Jon Fosse’s Septology was the book I ended 2022 with, and its 700+ pages took their time to convince me.

an angel walks through the stage by jon fosse

Once they did, I was immersed in the meditative sentences, an acolyte to the point I felt like following up with some more Fosse. This time, I went for the Norwegian author’s essays.

In the short meditations in An Angel Walks Through the Stage, Fosse is questing for the essence of good art and literature. He gets close – both to the answer and to my reader’s heart.

If you’re not familiar with Fosse’s work and the 700-page Septology seems daunting, start by reading A Shining – a slim novella published this year. The subject matter aligns with Fosse’s previous work, echoing a theme of his Nobel-winning epic novel.

Some citations from the book:

“Meaning is a wonder. Thereby the novel is actually an insistence that wonder exists, and in this way, the novel offers an opening towards the divine.”

“Writing, good writing, will therefore always be a place where something unknown, something which didn’t exist before, is given existence. And the fact that writing is the place where something, in a certain sense even an entire universe, is created and given a kind of existence for the first time, is perhaps what I enjoy most about writing.”

“In Dante’s Middle Ages they configured four different methods of reading to correspond with four levels of meaning (sensus quadruplex). … The fourth of the methods is anagoge, there the reader is after the highest, mystical meaning (sensus mysticus), “where we, in concurrent secularized exposition, open up to the incomprehensible in literature, as incomprehensible, and thus also, I believe, open up to what literature actually is. We open up to the incomprehensible remainder. And that remainder is what is literature’s most valuable secret.”

“In theatre, if for a fleeting moment you feel an intense feeling which is simultaneously filled with an insight that you grasp with your whole being yet cannot explain, when theatre is at its best, they say in Hungary that an angel walks through the stage. Not across the stage but through the stage.”

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

First introduced to me at the New Ecologies seminar, I can’t recommend Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous strongly enough.

The book, if you’re willing to let it, will alter what you think about the “ideals” of the modern times: rationality and growth. Instead of chasing after taming all nature and the unknowabilities of this world, Abram points our attention towards that which can not be put into words nor numbers but experiences with our senses.

Through essays on shamanism, language, air, phenomenology, etc. Abram demonstrates how rational inquiry and the quest to vanquish the natural world has, in fact, distanced us humans from the very world we’ve all along desired to know and interact with.

But this is not to say that the book is anti-science. Quite the opposite. “It is certainly not a matter of “going back,” but rather of coming full circle, uniting our capacity for cool reason wit those more sensorial and mimetic ways of knowing,” Abram suggests.

It sounds like a plea for the rest of us: Close your eyes and see the world that is our home.

Some citations from the book:

“The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth. The invisible shapes of smell, rhythms of cricketsong, and the movement of shadows all, in a sense, provide the subtle body of our thoughts. Our own reflections, we might say, are part of the play of light and its reflections.

“For it is only at the scale of our direct, sensory interactions with the land around us the we can appropriately notice and respond to the immediate needs of the living world.”

“With the phonetic aleph-beth, however, the written character no longer refers to any sensible phenomenon out in the world, or even to the name of such a phenomenon (as with the rebus), but solely to a gesture to be made by the human mouth. There is a concerted shift of attention away from any outward or worldly reference of the pictorial image, away from the sensible phenomenon that had previously called forth the spoken utterances to the shape of the utterance itself, now invoked directly by the written character. A direct association is established between the pictorial sign and the vocal gesture, for the first time completely bypassing the thing pictured.”

Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World by Jemma Deer

Jemma Deer’s Radical Animism is an expansive thought experiment that pushes the limits on what we consider human and animal, and the relationship between the two.

No, not exactly… There are no limits or rules to defining these two worlds. Because the universe they exist in is the same. The animals are us and we are them. This relationship and its connecting threads are much more nuanced than that, of course, as Deer’s book invites us to see.

Jemma Deer comes from an English Literature background and also has a degree in Ecology. At some point, she realized she wanted to do something to help resist the climate change. So she made the switch. The two subject matters combine and intermingle across a wide array of subjects and authors, from religion to anthropology to etymology; from Freud to Derrida.

Some citations from the book:

“While the scientific discoveries of the twentieth century could or should have been the end of the very possibility of anthropocentrism (at least in its most crude or destructive manifestations), it was nevertheless a century in which the centrality of the anthropos (that is to say, the Graeco-European, scientifically and rationally minded, Christian, neoliberal, capitalist, white, male anthropos – and all of these categories are of course allied) continued to determine and justify our relation to the earth, to other species and to each other – the century in which, perhaps, Man became a master of doublethink, where morality and (in)justice became ever more entangled with power relations and the economic imperative of capitalist expansion gained rather than lost force (as, indeed, its structure demands).”

Animal: It comes from the Latin root anima, meaning air, breath, life, soul, spirit – which is also, of course, the basis of the words ‘animal’, ‘animate’ and their derivatives.”

Zoographies by Matthew Calarco

Zoographies walks the reader through the notion of Animal in the Continental philosophical tradition, from Heidegger to Levinas to Agamben to Derrida.

The author challenges the anthropocentric theses regarding animals, incl. that human beings and animals can be clearly and cleanly distinguished in their essence; and that such a distinction between human beings and animals even needs to be drawn.

I found the first section of the book, dealing with Heidegger’s metaphysics, the most interesting. Calarco analyses Heidegger’s distinction between humans and animals, and concludes that the philosopher limits ek-sistence to man alone – a notion that many other thinkers later challenged.

I’ve been researching the human/animal binary in Western thinking and ways of de-anthropocentralising our thinking. Humans are animals; and animals are capable of language and sensation. The silenced ethics of our denial that all animals are living beings with agency is what allows us to keep vanquishing the other (and our own) species.

Some citations from the book:

“Anthropocentrism is not simply a matter of placing the human being in the center of beings (something Heidegger is keen to avoid); it is also the desire to determine human specificity over and against those beings who/that threaten to undermine that specificity.”

“Animals lack man’s specific relation to language, according to Heidegger, because they lack “world.” World here does not simply mean “nature” or the “environment” but signifies instead the place in which the Being of beings comes to unconcealment. “World” thus understood presupposes the capacity for ek-sistence, for standing in the clearing of Being where Being comes into presence and departs, a possibility reserved for man alone. Plants and animals do not ek-sist outside of themselves in the clearing of Being, but simply live within their surrounding environments: “Because plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments but are never placed freely into the clearing of being which alone is ‘world,’ they lack language.””

“The human animal is also, according to Levinas, largely determined by these same biological drives, and it, too, lives primarily by pursuing “analytically, or animally” its own struggle for existence. It is only by breaking with this biological order of being that ethics and “the human” arise. … In a certain sense, then, Levinas’s entire philosophy is oriented around precisely this question: Where does the human animal break with animality and become properly human?”

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

A classic and perhaps a boring recommendation at that but then again… It was only this year that I read my first Woolf cover-to-cover. And the Woolf in question was The Waves.

Woolf’s writing is both wise and aesthetic – the two traits that I most search for in literature. I do not care about the plot or excitement or character building.

The Waves is a book about the passage of time, it follows six British upper-class children—three boys and three girls— from childhood to midlife. The story is told in a fluid stream of stream-of-consciousness whereby lies the book’s greatest achievement as well as the reason it is too complex for some readers. But I loved it, and would recommend anything by Woolf.

P.S. Janet Malcolm’s essay “A House of One’s Own” on the Woolf family history was another pleasant read discovered in 2023.

Some citations from The Waves:

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. “

“I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”

“There is, then, a world immune from change. But I am not composed enough, standing on tiptoe on the verge of fire, still scorched by the hot breath, afraid of the door opening and the leap of the tiger, to make even one sentence. What I say is perpetually contradicted. Each time the door opens I am interrupted. I am not yet twenty-one. I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.”

The Lights & 10:04 by Ben Lerner

“Lerner captures what it’s like to be alive now, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.”

I am unsure how I came to Ben Lerner’s 10:04. I may have read the marketing copy quoted above.

I was not disappointed – 10:04 was a uniquely witty novel, and Lerner’s knack for mixing his real persona with his fictional protagonists creates an uncanny fluctuation. Soon after reading 10:04, I discovered Lerner’s short stories in The New Yorker, I particularly enjoyed “The Ferry” and “The Media.”

Waiting for a magazine launch event to begin at the Foyles bookstore one November night, I spotted Lerner’s new poetry collection The Lights. Poetry and lyrical fiction, that is. I brought it home and read it, occasionally enchanted by the book’s wisdom, at other times zoning out because of its pretentiousness. Overall, I liked it.

Some citations and poems from The Lights:

“Walking at dusk through the long meadow, recording this prose poem on my phone, that’s my job, as old as soldiery, the hills, the soldered hills where current flows, green current. When you are finished recording, your lips are dried flowers. The trees are full of black plastic bags and hornets’ nests but not significance; the task of imbuing them falls to me. And it’s me, Ben, just calling to check in. I’m on the way to pick Marcela up from day care and just wanted to hear about your trip. I’m sure it must have been hard seeing him like that. Anyway, I love you and I’m here. Give me a call when you can. I’ll be around until the late nineteenth century, when carved wood gives way to polished steel, especially in lake surfaces. You know how you sometimes realize it has been raining only when it stops, silence falling on the roof, forming rivulets on the glass?”

“Some say the glowing spheres near Route 67
are paranormal, others dismiss them as
atmospheric tricks: static, swamp gas, reflections
of headlights and small fires, but why dismiss
what misapprehension can establish, our own
illumination returned to us as alien, as sign?
They’ve built a concrete viewing platform
lit by low red lights which must appear
mysterious when seen from what it overlooks.
Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself
and then gaze back, an important trick because
the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,
shuttling between the you and I.”

To 2040 by Jorie Graham

I came to Jorie Graham’s poetry via a long-winded path.

Listening to the ingenious interview with Christina Sharpe in the Between the Covers podcast, I spotted another one with Graham. And the podcast episode did not disappoint.

To 2040 is a poetry collection, however, Graham’s philosophical thinking is so expansive she could be writing, well, eco-philosophy. The collection itself, published in 2023, deals with the loss and survival in this disembodied world.

How to find a language in this world where we have lost our way? How to react to the fact that every 20 minutes, an animal or plant species becomes extinct? How to know the line between our real and virtual personas?

I recommend first listening to the interview with Graham, and then reading some of her poetry, e.g. “Before” which I love. Below is the full poem titled “Are We,” situated in a world where the ravens are no more, where even our memories become incapable of recreating the birds. They have been gone for too long. A beautiful poem to end this turbulent year, and to make us think more alertly about the future to come.

Are we

extinct yet. Who owns
the map. May I
look. Where is my
claim. Is my history

verifiable. Have I
included the memory
of the animals. The animals’
memories. Are they

still here. Are we

alone. Look
the filaments
appear. Of memories. Whose? What was
land

like. Did it move
through us. Something says nonstop
are you here
are your ancestors

real do you have a
body do you have
yr self in
mind can you see yr

hands – have you broken it
the thread – try to feel the
pull of the other
end – make sure

both ends are
alive when u pull to
try to re-enter
here. A raven

has arrived while I
am taking all this
down. In-
corporate me it

squawks. It hops
closer along the low stone
wall. Do you remember
despair its coming

closer says. I look

at him. Do not
hurry I say but
he’s tapping the stone
all over with his

beak. His coat is
sun. He looks
carefully at me bc
I’m so still &

eager. He sees my

loneliness. Cicadas
begin. Is this a real
encounter I ask. Of the old
kind. When there were

ravens. No
says the light. You
are barely here. The
raven left a

long time ago. It
is travelling its thread its
skyroad forever now, it knows
the current through the

cicadas, which you cannot hear
but which
close over u now. But is it not
here I ask looking up

through my stanzas.
Did it not reach me
as it came in. Did
it not enter here

at stanza eight – & where

does it go now
when it goes away
again, when I tell you the raven is golden,
when I tell you it lifted &

went, & it went.

My top 10 books read in 2023:

The year in reading

Everything I read in 2023

Fave & moving fiction & poetry:

Fave essays & memoirs:

Favorite and thought-informing non-fiction:

Mixed emotions x mixed genres:

No chemistry:

My TOP 10 favourite books read this year

Living in the World as if it Were Home by Tim Lilburn

Vectors and Smoothable Curves: The Collected Essays by William Bronk

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard

An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays by Jon Fosse

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World by Jemma Deer

Zoographies by Matthew Calarco

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

The Lights & 10:04 by Ben Lerner

To 2040 by Jorie Graham

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October ’23 | Read & Reviewed