CAT Holiday Gift Guide 2023

No end-of-year list is complete without an excellent book of poetry. I’m a huge fan of Brandon Shimoda—if you haven’t already read The Grave on the Wall, put that on your list too—and I found Hydra Medusa beautifully dreamy and disorienting, stirring in its provocations and ethical considerations, moving in its evocations of the dead and disappeared. “How else is one to meet the petrifying gaze of history?” as Wong May puts it. Shimoda’s book will guide you with its wisdom, resistance, and language from the underworld.

Buy (opens in a new tab)Hydra Medusa(opens in a new tab) from Books Are Magic (Brooklyn, NY(opens in a new tab))

Tiffany Tsao is one of those brilliant writer-translators who is always undertaking unexpected and interesting projects, and this book is absolutely one of my favorite reads of the year. These 12 stories “ask what it means to be almost happy,” and they are funny and smart and irreverent and tragic. Pasaribu has one of those literary voices that can seemingly take you anywhere, and I can’t wait to see what they turn their attention to next.

Buy (opens in a new tab)Happy Stories, Mostly(opens in a new tab) from Point Reyes Bookstore (Point Reyes, CA)(opens in a new tab)

This translation is about ten years old now but very worth revisiting. Yoko Ogawa is a spectacular storyteller; you never know quite where her stories will lead you. Her characters are outcasts or else deceptively average people concealing dark secrets. What’s more, the stories are interconnected in surprising ways, so that one story’s protagonist appears like an Easter egg in the background of another. By the end you feel as if you’ve visited a small town and been let in on all the sinister gossip. Some of my favorites include a story about a man who runs a museum dedicated to human torture devices and another about a woman born with her heart outside her ribcage. These stories will remain seared into my imagination.

Buy Revenge from Green Apple Books (San Francisco, CA(opens in a new tab))

I picked this book up at Green Apple Books on the Park after hearing San Francisco writer Amy Berkowitz read from a more recent project and once I started it I couldn’t stop. A series of vignettes, this book builds page after page into an essay on chronic pain, trauma, work, and pop culture. Both deeply personal and relatable to anyone working, living, and suffering in the current world, Tender Points is well worth adding to your holiday reads.

Buy Tender Points from Pilsen Community Books (Chicago, IL)(opens in a new tab)

I got this book after hearing my colleague Public Programs Director Leslie-Ann Woofter rave about it. It was indeed “a slow burn,” but I loved the way Ørstavik wove episodes from a dark period of Norwegian history with the personal crisis faced by the title character in the face of her friend’s death and her move to a remote town in northern Norway. The perfect winter read.

Buy The Pastor from The Center for Fiction (Brooklyn, NY)(opens in a new tab)

I love every book of Jazmina Barrera’s that Two Lines Press has published, from On Lighthouses, her meditative exploration of lighthouses that offered escape during the early days of the pandemic in 2020, to one of the most complex and nuanced writings about the disorienting experience that is pregnancy and early motherhood I’ve ever encountered in Linea Nigra, to the wonderful Cross-Stitch, her first novel, in which we see the threads of friendship come together and be ripped apart against the backdrop of a history of embroidery and female artistic expression. Each one is a gem.

Buy Cross-Stitch from Yu and Me Books (New York, NY)(opens in a new tab)

Polly Barton’s years-long immersion in Japanese (a truly challenging, identity-shifting, and extremely personal undertaking wonderfully described throughout) is organized into fifty punchy chapters. Each suggests, in Barton’s appropriately poetic/academic style, a definition of a Japanese “sound.” But this is “defining” as squinting, as feeling in the dark for the edges, as excitement and fear and then joy, at last, upon understanding. Come for the wonderfully complex insights into Japanese langauge and culture, stay for the brilliant writing.

Buy Fifty Sounds from The Wild Detectives (Dallas, TX)(opens in a new tab)

If you enjoyed Celine Song’s film Past Lives, consider Duras, particularly her novel Emily L., which begins as an observation of—and the increasingly personal, loose speculation upon—one couple in a bar by another. It’s fictionmaking as everyday life and Duras’s invention is mood and menace: a feminist, modernist “Hills Like White Elephants” and so much more.

Emily L. is out of print—so this is an invitation to hunt for your own copy at your local bookstore!

Hilary Leichter’s Terrace Story is a shapeshifting, prismatic, and time-traveling, novel about home, family, grief, loneliness, and desire. Written in buoyant and surprising prose, Leichter builds an entire world in a disappearing terrace and collapses it just as quickly. I also can’t resist recommending Leichter’s first novel, Temporary, a surreal workplace picaresque that follows its narrator from a pirate ship to a witch’s hut among her other “temp” gigs.

Buy Terrace Story from Brookline Booksmith (Brookline, MA)(opens in a new tab)

Inspired by Jessica Gaitan Johannesson’s own life and experiences, the novel is set in Edinburgh and follows the life of a Swedish woman working at a museum in Edinburgh Castle. She has a Brazilian-born Scottish boyfriend who is training to be an NHS nurse and won’t speak English at all; he is trying to immerse himself in a Swedish language bath, to prepare for their future. The book is a collection of disjointed moments, feelings, and events; an abstract novel that explores how language plays a part in our work and our interpersonal relationships.

Buy How We Are Translated from White Whale Bookstore (Pittsburgh, PA)(opens in a new tab)

One of my most prized possessions is this special hardcover edition of Marie NDiaye’s seminal work—a memoir about how women in green haunt the author’s life. It’s a beautiful story told in overlapping vignettes, highly debatable vignettes, and studies in the human desire to find meaning in patterns and symbols. A short read that you can easily devour in one night, and reread for every night afterwards.

Buy Self-Portrait in Green from Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park, WA)(opens in a new tab)

A few of my close audiophile friends will indeed be receiving this essay collection as their holiday gift. Hanif Abdurraqib, on top of being a stellar poet, has created a scintillating investigation into pop culture, the music industry, and the concert-goer’s expected climate (one of Midwest Emo hazy basements). The essays make me laugh, cry, rejoice, and understand the power of connection in this highly digitized, extremely racialized world.

Buy THEY CAN’T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US from Lost City Books (Washington, DC)(opens in a new tab)

I read Seven Steeples on a road trip and somehow this book in which hardly anything happens was perfect for a long car ride. It’s about two “solitary misanthropes” who abandon contemporary life for a secluded house in the Irish countryside. Over seven years and seven chapters (which trace a year of seasons), Bell and Sigh seep each other, their house, and the natural world around them—their dogs, the beach they walk to, the mountain in whose shadow they live, the plastic and paper debris of daily life—until they almost disappear. A book that woke me up and slowed me down all at once—I loved it.

Buy Seven Steeples from Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI)(opens in a new tab)

The latest from Haitian literary doyenne Kettly Mars and translated by Nathan H. Dize (both Elektrik contributors!), this slim novel is an assemblage of fragments and silence-soaked confessions from a family navigating the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake. While the natural disaster looms, it is the careful tracing of personal fractures and the ways they are brought together again in the family’s flowering outdoor courtyard that give the novel its power. I read I Am Alive in February, but the quiet possibilities of relation and healing it offers have remained with me all year.

Buy I Am Alive from P&T Knitwear (New York, NY)(opens in a new tab)

When I was studying creative writing in undergrad, I became obsessed with the idea of setting as character and setting as reflective of character. Beijing Sprawl is the perfect example of this–the city of Beijing is, arguably, the main character in this interwoven collection of vignettes by Xu Zechen. Throughout these stories, a group of young men navigate love, capitalism, adulthood, and big-city living as they play cards on the rooftop of their apartment building, drink and smoke at the local dive bar, and watch pigeons flit about the cityscape. As they grow and change, so too does Beijing. And if you like this book, be sure to check out Xu Zechen’s Running through Beijing as well!

Buy(opens in a new tab) Beijing Sprawl from Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle, WA)(opens in a new tab)

I read the first sentence of Red Book of Farewells and didn’t put it down again until I finished it. It’s a coming of age story full of the fierce politics of adolescence, the intensity of first loves, and the ache of loves lost. Pirkko’s prose is full of feeling, humanity, and a dry humor that left me with cravings for more. Mia Spangenberg’s translation is seamless and reads like a swift moving river that carries you through to the end. One of my favorites!

Buy The Red Book of Farewells from Skylight Books (Los Angeles, CA)(opens in a new tab)

I adored Sarah Rose Etter’s first novel, The Book of X, and this second book is every bit as delicious as the first. It’s a story about Cassie, a woman who lives with a black hole. The black hole is ever present, ever out of reach, always shifting. The metaphor speaks volumes the character’s inner life and her relationship with anxiety. A surreal, darkly wonderful, and radical little book.

Buy Ripe from Avid Bookshop (Athens, GA)(opens in a new tab)

For undisclosed reasons, I spent 48 hours neck deep in Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad. I had never read it in its entirety, and frankly, never wanted to. You’ve already read the reviews and know that Emily Wilson does Homer unlike anyone else. So there’s not much that I can add that you don’t already know. But I too read the reviews and watched the interviews and was still unconvinced that more Homer would add anything to my life. I was wrong. Enchanted by its fierce beauty, horrified at its violence and gore, and gut-punched by the fury and grief of loss, I emerged from my Iliad-a-thon with a more acute understanding and awareness of human suffering than I ever thought possible—and somehow enjoyed every minute of it.

Buy The Iliad from A Room of One’s Own (Madison, WI)(opens in a new tab)