There's a Book for That

Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month: Young Readers

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and this week—May 3 to May 9 —is also Children’s Book Week with the motto “Every Child a Reader.” Therefore, we are celebrating the following glorious stories, for children and adults to share, that honor the rich cultural history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders: 

THE MAGIC FISH by Trung Le Nguyen

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by the New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Booklist • Publishers Weekly

This beautifully illustrated YA graphic novel follows a young boy as he tries to navigate life through fairytales. Tiến still enjoys reading his favorite stories with his parents from the books he borrows from the local library. It’s hard enough trying to communicate with your parents as a kid, but for Tiến, he doesn’t even have the right words because his parents are struggling with their English. Is there a Vietnamese word for what he’s going through? Is there a way to tell them he’s gay?

ANY DAY WITH YOU by Mae Respicio

Kaia and her family live near the beach in California, where the fun of moviemaking is all around them. This summer, Kaia and her friends are part of a creative arts camp, where they’re working on a short movie to enter in a contest. The movie is inspired by the Filipino folktales that her beloved Tatang, her great-grandfather, tells. Kaia hopes that by winning a filmmaking contest, she’ll convince her great-grandfather not to move back home to the Philippines.

PATRON SAINTS OF NOTHING by Randy Ribay

A powerful coming-of-age story about grief, guilt, and the risks a Filipino American teenager takes to uncover the truth about his cousin’s murder.

THEY CALLED US ENEMY by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, Harmony Becker

A stunning graphic memoir recounting actor/author/activist George Takei’s childhood imprisoned within American concentration camps during World War II. Experience the forces that shaped an American icon—and America itself—in this gripping tale of courage, country, loyalty, and love. Available in a Spanish edition here.

THE UGLY VEGETABLES written and illustrated by Grace Lin

In this charming story about celebrating differences a Chinese-American girl wishes for a garden of bright flowers instead of one full of bumpy, ugly, vegetables. The neighbors’ gardens look so much prettier and so much more inviting to the young gardener than the garden of “black-purple-green vines, fuzzy wrinkled leaves, prickly stems, and a few little yellow flowers” that she and her mother grow. Nevertheless, mother assures her that “these are better than flowers.” Come harvest time, everyone agrees as those ugly Chinese vegetables become the tastiest, most aromatic soup they have ever known. As the neighborhood comes together to share flowers and ugly vegetable soup, the young gardener learns that regardless of appearances, everything has its own beauty and purpose. THE UGLY VEGETABLES springs forth with the bright and cheerful colors of blooming flowers and lumpy vegetables. Grace Lin’s playful illustrations pour forth with abundant treasures. Complete with a guide to the Chinese pronunciation of the vegetables and the recipe for ugly vegetable soup! Try it…you’ll love it, too!

WATERCRESS by Andrea Wang; Illustrated by Jason Chin

Driving through Ohio in an old Pontiac, a young girl’s parents stop suddenly when they spot watercress growing wild in a ditch by the side of the road. Grabbing an old paper bag and some rusty scissors, the whole family wades into the muck to collect as much of the muddy, snail covered watercress as they can. At first, she’s embarrassed. Why can’t her family get food from the grocery store? But when her mother shares a story of her family’s time in China, the girl learns to appreciate the fresh food they foraged. Together, they make a new memory of watercress.

The book is illustrated by award winning author and artist Jason Chin, in an entirely new style, inspired by Chinese painting techniques. An author’s note in the back shares Andrea’s childhood experience with her parents.

LAXMI’S MOOCH by Shelly Anand, Illustrated by Nabi H. Ali

A joyful, body-positive picture book about a young Indian American girl’s journey to accept her body hair and celebrate her heritage after being teased about her mustache.

WHEN YOU TRAP A TIGER by Tae Keller

WINNER OF THE 2021 NEWBERY MEDAL

WINNER OF THE ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN AWARD FOR CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

When Lily and her family move in with her sick grandmother, a magical tiger straight out of her halmoni’s Korean folktales arrives, prompting Lily to unravel a secret family history. Long, long ago, Halmoni stole something from the tigers. Now they want it back. And when one of the tigers approaches Lily with a deal—return what her grandmother stole in exchange for Halmoni’s health—Lily is tempted to agree. But deals with tigers are never what they seem! With the help of her sister and her new friend Ricky, Lily must find her voice…and the courage to face a tiger.

DANBI LEADS THE SCHOOL PARADE by Anna Kim

An Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Honor Book

Danbi is thrilled to start her new school in America. But a bit nervous too, for when she walks into the classroom, everything goes quiet. Everyone stares. Danbi wants to join in the dances and the games, but she doesn’t know the rules and just can’t get anything right. Luckily, she isn’t one to give up. With a spark of imagination, she makes up a new game and leads her classmates on a parade to remember! Danbi Leads the School Parade introduces readers to an irresistible new character. In this first story, she learns to navigate her two cultures and realizes that when you open your world to others, their world opens up to you.

FATIMA’S GREAT OUTDOORS by Ambreen Tariq; Illustrated by Stevie Lewis

An immigrant family embarks on their first camping trip in the Midwest in this lively picture book by Ambreen Tariq, outdoors activist and founder of @BrownPeopleCamping. This picture book debut, with cheerful illustrations by Stevie Lewis, is a rollicking family adventure, a love letter to the outdoors, and a reminder that public land belongs to all of us.

THE DOWNSTAIRS GIRL by Stacey Lee

By day, seventeen-year-old Jo Kuan works as a lady’s maid for the cruel daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta. But by night, Jo moonlights as the pseudonymous author of a newspaper advice column for the genteel Southern lady, “Dear Miss Sweetie.” When her column becomes wildly popular, she uses the power of the pen to address some of society’s ills, but she’s not prepared for the backlash that follows when her column challenges fixed ideas about race and gender. With prose that is witty, insightful, and at times heartbreaking, Stacey Lee masterfully crafts an extraordinary social drama set in the New South.

FRANKLY IN LOVE by David Yoon

An Asian Pacific American Librarians Association Honor Book

Frank Li has two names. There’s Frank Li, his American name. Then there’s Sung-Min Li, his Korean name. No one uses his Korean name, not even his parents. Frank barely speaks any Korean. He was born and raised in Southern California. Even so, his parents still expect him to end up with a nice Korean girl—which is a problem, since Frank is finally dating the girl of his dreams: Brit Means. Brit, who is funny and nerdy just like him. Brit, who makes him laugh like no one else. Brit…who is white. Desperate to be with Brit without his parents finding out, Frank turns to family friend Joy Song, who is in a similar bind. Together, they come up with a plan to help each other and keep their parents off their backs. Frank thinks he’s found the solution to all his problems, but when life throws him a curveball, he’s left wondering whether he ever really knew anything about love—or himself—at all.

Friday Reads: Asian American Rom Coms

In the mood for some light-hearted, yet big-hearted escape this weekend? We are playing matchmaker! Look no further than these super popular new and bestselling Asian American romantic comedies for adult and young adult readers: 

DIAL A FOR AUNTIES by Jesse Q. Sutanto

A hilariously quirky novel that is equal parts murder mystery, rom-com, and a celebration of mothers and daughters as well as a deep dive into Chinese-Indonesian culture set in Southern California, by debut author Jesse Q Sutanto.

CRAZY RICH ASIANS by Kevin Kwan

The basis for the hit movie!

When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to be the country’s most eligible bachelor. On Nick’s arm, Rachel may as well have a target on her back the second she steps off the plane, and soon, her relaxed vacation turns into an obstacle course of old money, new money, nosy relatives, and scheming social climbers. 

THE KISS QUOTIENT by Helen Hoang

Stella Lane thinks math is the only thing that unites the universe. She comes up with algorithms to predict customer purchases—a job that has given her more money than she knows what to do with, and much less experience in the dating department than the average thirty-year-old. It doesn’t help that Stella has Asperger’s and French kissing reminds her of a shark getting its teeth cleaned by pilot fish. Her conclusion: she needs lots of practice—with a professional. Which is why she hires escort Michael Phan. The Vietnamese and Swedish stunner can’t afford to turn down Stella’s offer, and agrees to help her check off all the boxes on her lesson plan—from foreplay to more-than-missionary position…

LAST TANG STANDING by Lauren Ho

At thirty-three, Andrea Tang is living the dream: She has a successful career as a lawyer, a posh condo, and a clutch of fun-loving friends who are always in the know about Singapore’s hottest clubs. And if she’s about to become the lone unmarried member of her generation in the Tang clan—a disappointment her meddling Chinese-Malaysian family won’t let her forget—well, she doesn’t need a man to complete her. Yet when a chance encounter with charming, wealthy entrepreneur Eric Deng offers her a glimpse of an exciting, limitless future, Andrea decides to give Mr. Right-for-her-family a chance.

 THE DATING PLAN by Sara Desai

Daisy Patel is a software engineer in San Francisco who understands lists and logic better than bosses and boyfriends. Ever the obedient daughter, she always follows the rules, but the one thing she can’t give her family is the marriage they expect. With few options left to her, and desperate to escape a parade of unwanted suitors, she asks her childhood crush to be her decoy fiancé. Without rules, these fake fiancés might accidentally fall for each other in this romantic comedy by the author of The Marriage Game.

FOR YOUNG ADULTS

FRANKLY IN LOVE by David Yoon

An Asian Pacific American Librarians Association Honor Book

Two friends. One fake dating scheme. What could possibly go wrong?

Frank Li has two names. There’s Frank Li, his American name. Then there’s Sung-Min Li, his Korean name. No one uses his Korean name, not even his parents. Frank barely speaks any Korean. He was born and raised in Southern California. Even so, his parents still expect him to end up with a nice Korean girl—which is a problem, since Frank is finally dating the girl of his dreams: Brit Means. Brit, who is funny and nerdy just like him. Brit, who makes him laugh like no one else. Brit…who is white. In his moving debut novel, David Yoon takes on the question of who am I? —with a result that is humorous, heartfelt, and ultimately unforgettable.

FROM LITTLE TOKYO, WITH LOVE by Sarah Kuhn

Celebrated author Sarah Kuhn reinvents the modern fairy tale in this intensely personal yet hilarious novel of a girl whose search for a storybook ending takes her to unexpected places in both her beloved LA neighborhood and her own guarded heart.

A TASTE FOR LOVE by Jennifer Yen

 To her friends, high school senior Liza Yang is nearly perfect. But to her mom, Liza is anything but. Compared to her older sister Jeannie, Liza is stubborn, rebellious, and worst of all, determined to push back against all of Mrs. Yang’s traditional values, especially when it comes to dating. For fans of Jenny Han, Jane Austen, and The Great British Baking Show, A Taste for Love, is a delicious rom com about first love, familial expectations, and making the perfect bao.

National Poetry Month Celebrates 25 Years!

Happy National Poetry Month – the largest literary celebration in the world! 2021 marks 25 years since the Academy of American Poets launched National Poetry Month in April, 1996. The choice of April was inspired by the first line of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”: “April is the cruellest month…”

Ushering in a new appreciation for the power of poetry is Amanda Gorman and her inaugural poem THE HILL WE CLIMB. Clearly, there’s no wasteland when it comes to poetry at Penguin Random House. Whether your proclivities are for free, blank or rhyming verse, lyrical poetry, prose poems, sonnets, elegies, odes… We’ve got it all! Here are just some of the astounding poets, a range of brilliant voices, we’ve published in the past year:

THE HILL WE CLIMB: AN INAUGURAL POEM FOR THE COUNTRY by Amanda Gorman; Foreword by Oprah Winfrey

Amanda Gorman’s powerful and historic poem “The Hill We Climb,” read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, is now available as a collectible gift edition.

INDEX OF WOMEN by Amy Gerstler

From a “maestra of invention” (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood.  Women’s voices, from childhood to old age, dominate this new collection of rants, dramatic monologues, confessions and laments. A young girl muses on virginity. An aging opera singer rages against the fact that she must quit drinking. A woman in a supermarket addresses a head of lettuce. The tooth fairy finally speaks out. Both comic and prayer-like, these poems wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and what it is to be human.

GOD I FEEL MODERN TONIGHT: POEMS FROM A GAL ABOUT TOWN by Catherine Cohen

In these short, captivating lyrics, Catherine Cohen, the one-woman stand-up chanteuse who electrified the downtown NYC comedy scene in her white go-go boots, details her life on the prowl with her beaded bag; she ponders guys who call you “dude” after sex, true love during the pandemic, and English-major dreams. “I wish I were smart instead of on my phone,” Cat Cohen confides. A Dorothy Parker for our time, a Starbucks philosopher with no primary-care doctor, she’s a welcome new breed of everywoman—a larger-than-life best friend, who will say all the outrageous things we think but never say out loud ourselves.

FINNA: POEMS by Nate Marshall

Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope:

AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF NAMES: POEMS by Michael Torres, Raquel Salas Rivera

An astonishing debut collection looking back on a community of Mexican American boys as they grapple with assimilation versus the impulse to create a world of their own. When Torres returns to his hometown to find the layers of spray-painted evidence he and his boyhood friends left behind to prove their existence have been washed away by well-meaning municipal workers, he wonders how to collect a list of names that could match the eloquent truths those bubbled letters once secured.

LEAN AGAINST THIS LATE HOUR by Garous Abdolmalekian, Idra Novey, Ahmad Nadalizade…

The first selection of poems by renowned Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian to appear in English, this collection is a mesmerizing, disorienting descent into the trauma of loss and its aftermath. In spare lines, Abdolmalekian conjures surreal, cinematic images that pan wide as deftly as they narrow into intimate focus. Time is a thread come unspooled: pain arrives before the wound, and the dead wait for sunrise.

OWED by Joshua Bennett

Bennett’s new collection, Owed, is a book with celebration at its center. Its primary concern is how we might mend the relationship between ourselves and the people, spaces, and objects we have been taught to think of as insignificant, as fundamentally unworthy of study, reflection, attention, or care. Spanning the spectrum of genre and form—from elegy and ode to origin myth—these poems elaborate an aesthetics of repair.

LITTLE BIG BULLY by Heid E. Erdrich

Little Big Bully begins with a question asked of a collective and troubled we – how did we come to this? In answer, this book offers personal myth, American and Native American contexts, and allegories driven by women’s resistance to narcissists, stalkers, and harassers. These poems are immediate, personal, political, cultural, even futuristic object lessons. Here, survivors shout back at useless cautionary tales with their own courage and visions of future worlds made well.

THE NIGHTFIELDS by Joanna Klink

A new collection from a poet whose books “are an amazing experience: harrowing, ravishing, essential, unstoppable” (Louise Glück)

ASYLUM: A PERSONAL, HISTORICAL, NATURAL INQUIRY IN 103 LYRIC SECTIONS by Jill Bialosky

Taken together, these piercing pieces—about the poet’s nascent calling as a writer; her sister’s suicide and its still unfolding aftermath; the horror unleashed by World War II; the life cycle of the monarch butterfly; and the woods where she seeks asylum—form a moving story, powerfully braiding despair, survival, and hope.

BLACK GIRL, CALL HOME by Jasmine Mans

This coming-of-age collection from spoken word poet Jasmine Mans presents unforgettable poetry about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America—and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman.

COLLECTED POEMS by Sonia Sanchez

A literary event! Spanning four decades, here is a representative collection of the life work of the much-honored poet and a founder of the Black Arts movement. As Maya Angelou so aptly put it: “Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.”

For more on these and other acclaimed poetry titles visit: National Poetry Month

Want a poem to arrive each day in your inbox for the month of April? Sign up for 

Knopf’s Poem-a-Day and be amazed! And visit The Academy of American Poets

Dantiel W. Moniz is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminars, and a Tin House Scholarship. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Paris Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, the Yale Review, Joyland, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. Milk Blood Heat is her first book. She lives in Northeast Florida.

Dantiel W. Moniz is in conversation with C Pam Zhang to celebrate her new novel Milk Blood Heat (published by Grove Atlantic) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Thursday, February 4th

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Where are you writing to us from?

Jacksonville, FL

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

Roller skating; re-watching atmospheric TV Series like Mad Men and Sharp Objects; my husband (IRL) and friends (virtually).

What are 3 books you always recommend to people?

I don’t have a specific three, it’s always changing. Right now: We the Animals by Justin Torres, Luster by Raven Leilani, and Severance by Ling Ma.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

In general: Janet Fitch, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Sally Mann. For this collection: Antonya Nelson, Jeffrey Eugenides, Julie Orringer, Amy Bloom.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

In the delightful volume Think, Write, Speak, editors Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy gather previously uncollected prose and interviews of the great Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977). In one of his early pieces, dated 1921, he offered an assessment of the work of Rupert Brooke, the handsome young English poet who, like Nabokov himself, studied at Cambridge, and died on a ship in the Aegean Sea, headed for the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. In the passage below, Nabokov considers two of the war sonnets in a group entitled “Nineteen Fourteen,” composed while Brooke was stationed in Belgium with the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Nabokov’s reading of Brooke, written only six years after the poet’s death, admires what is best in him—“his passionate service to pure beauty”—and, where he isn’t at his best, reminds the reader that Brooke “did not quite have time to sift all his riches, did not quite have time in his life to fuse all the world’s colors into a single color.”

from Think, Write, Speak

The fourteenth year of our century inspired Brooke to write five colorful sonnets, lit up, as if from within, by a wonderful humility: These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,  Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth. The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,  And sunset, and the colours of the earth. These had seen movement, and heard music; known  Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended; Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone; Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended. There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,  Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,  A width, a shining peace, under the night. Here’s another sonnet from the same series. Its rough copy is on display beneath glass in the British Museum, between a Dickens manuscript and Captain Scott’s diary: If I should die, think only this of me:  That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air,  Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away,  A pulse in the eternal mind, no less    Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;  And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,    In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. In these examples I wanted to show the diversity of those colored panes of glass through which, flitting from one to another, Brooke gazes into the distance, trying to discern the features of approaching death. It seems to me he is so persistently troubled not so much by the thought of what he will find there, as by the thought of what he will leave behind here. He loves the earth passionately. For him, earthly life is like first love, and even though he senses that other love affairs will follow, nothing for him will be able to replace the splashes of sun, the howls of the wind, the pricking of the rain, the glittering majesty and glittering agony of that first love—not the cold kisses of the heavenly stars, or the sadistic caresses of snoutless death, or the serenades of angels, or spectral beauties wandering over Lethe.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Think, Write, Speak by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy.

Browse other books by Vladimir Nabokov.

Learn more about Rupert Brooke at the Poetry Foundation.

Peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

The Nobel Prize–winning poet Eugenio Montale entered the Italian poetry scene with trumpets blaring, “the golden horns of sunlight” pelting their songs. These “golden horns” are lemons, the subject of one of the first poems of Montale’s first book, in which he announces his intention to speak in a humble language of humble things (including the lemon trees of his native Liguria): “Listen to me, the poets laureate / move only among plants / with rare names: boxwood, privet and acanthus. / But I like roads that lead to grassy / ditches where boys / scoop up a few starved / eels out of half-dry puddles.” So begins the first section of Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), published in 1925, here in a translation by Jonathan Galassi. In a later section, which shares the book’s title, Montale addresses yet another plant known for its vibrant yellowness.

from “Cuttlefish Bones”

Bring me the sunflower, let me plant it in my field parched by the salt sea wind, and let it show the blue reflecting sky the yearning of its yellow face all day. Dark things tend to brightness, bodies die out in a flood of colors, colors in music. So disappearing is the destiny of destinies. Bring me the plant that leads the way to where blond transparencies rise, and life as essence turns to haze; bring me the sunflower crazed with light.    translated by Jonathan Galassi

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Montale: Poems, selected, with translation and notes, by Jonathan Galassi, in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series.

Learn more about Eugenio Montale and Jonathan Galassi.

Browse other titles in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series.

eruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

Tin soldiers are mostly a thing of the past, but in this poem, the memory of them—or referred memory, as the speaker considers the men she knows who deployed them in their boyhood games—reminds us of what is forever.

Little Men

Two men I’ve loved loved little men when they were little children— tin soldiers they could push around the carpet in their little fists. They could play all antagonists, make sound effects for every sound, but were peremptory and unfair as those Olympian puppeteer gods in the Iliad. All alone each boy beat the odds and won. And stunned the enemy the next day from some new flank, and changed which war it was, and pretended uniforms were colors other than they were. And rarely put the toys away because war is eternal. (Myself, I’d had a paper doll I dressed, and dressed, and dressed to kill.) Of these two boys who ordered all the playroom into battle, one grew up to be a novelist. Reader, I married him; we lost. The other rose in rank to Colonel, draft-numbered for a distant war nobody wanted anymore, and nobody is more pacifist. We read the daily news in bed, updates to the casualty list that verifies more little men have won, and winning’s what to have. And me? Which side should I be on? Hope too is eternal. I’m on his side, beside my love: the story rests here with my head against the drumbeat in his chest.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about The Surveyors by Mary Jo Salter

Browse other books by Mary Jo Salter

Share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series

From the heart of a young Langston Hughes.

Poem

The night is beautiful. So the faces of my people. The stars are beautiful, So the eyes of my people. Beautiful, also, is the sun. Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes

Browse other books by Langston Hughes

Share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series

In these excerpts from the pages of Robin Robertson’s prize-winning The Long Take, soon to be published in paperback, we see New York City in 1946 through the eyes of Walker, a Nova Scotian D-Day veteran just landing on our shores. The book goes on to tell his story, as he makes his way west to become a journalist in Los Angeles, in the heyday of film noir.

from The Long Take

And there it was: the swell and glitter of it like a standing wave – the fabled, smoking ruin, the new towers rising through the blue, the ranked array of ivory and gold, the glint, the glamour of buried light as the world turned round it very slowly this autumn morning, all amazed. And it stayed there, watching, as they made toward it, the truck-driver and the young man, under pylons, wires, utility poles, past warehouses, container parks, deserted lots, between the long oily marshes, landfill sites and swamps, before slipping down under the Hudson, and coming up on the other side to find a black wetness of streets trashed and empty and the city gone. ‘Try the docks. They can always use men.’ * At night, the river rolls and turns like oil under the bridges, in through the slips. He walked for hours – following the glow in the sky uptown he’d been told was the lights of Times Square – his shadow moving with him below the street-lamps: dense, tight, very black and sharp, foreshortened, but already starting to lengthen as he goes, attenuating to a weak stain. Then back in under another streetlight, shadow darkening again, clean and hard. Who he really is, or was, lies somewhere in between. * In the last splinter of sunlight allowed between the skyscrapers an old lady is sitting with a book, moving her chair every quarter of an hour a little farther down the alleyway.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Learn more about Robin Robertson

Share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series

Reliving an American teenager’s NBA dreams, in a poem from Amit Majmudar’s forthcoming collection What He Did in Solitary.

Basketball

Rubber gooseflesh seamed with black grooves fingertip-deep: Growing up, this was the texture and shape of my world. My brown boy’s hand would never grow big enough to grip one upside down. Even now it’s magic to see one stuck to a level palm, tucked there like a yo-yo grabbed on the windup. Jordan in my daydreams, I stuck out my bright tongue on my way to heaven, but the one I loved most was Scottie Pippen, his greatness devoted to the one greatness greater than his, mastery accepting the diminutive. I found the old basketball while cleaning out the garage for my parents on the eve of the sale. My thumbs dented it into a beggar’s bowl. I slid home the needle’s rescue IV, pumped my boyhood up again, chest compressions on a friend found down. The surface felt too smooth— a decade of dribbling, three more of dust— but my fingers could reread its epic poem in Braille recounting mythical Bulls that could fly through the air, giants with their tongues out who jumped to pluck the sun’s ripe orange from the sky and dunked it in the sea every game night, swinging weightlessly from the hoop of the horizon.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about What He Did in Solitary by Amit Majmudar

Browse other books by Amit Majmudar

Peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series

In her forthcoming book Asylum, what Bialosky calls “A personal, historical, natural inquiry in 103 lyric sections,” we move with the poet through seasons of loss, grief, and renewal, as she reflects on the narrative of 20th- and 21st-century devastations, observes the cycles of nature, and charts the journey of a self who must balance despair and hope.

LXXII.

The monarchs are born. They are smaller this year. One is feasting on the zinnias in my pot on the deck. Its wings open & close as if sucking in the nectar. We chased monarchs when my son was small. Once we caught one, we watched it flutter in the net (so fragile we could have crushed it) & flung it back into the wild too beautiful— with its tapestry of black & orange, regal, named after the Prince of Orange in Holland— to prison in a jar.

LXXXIII.

The Yoga teacher says we are all unique, like snowflakes, each its own composition of frozen water, complex bodies made up of elements necessary for sustaining life: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine & magnesium. If we focus on our breath, our control shifts from the brain stem to the cerebral cortex & the mind quiets. Eyes closed, resting on our backs, out of generosity, kindness, our teacher sometimes places her two hands beside the back of our head & elongates the neck to give the body more room to heal what is broken.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Asylum by Jill Bialosky

Browse other books by Jill Bialosky

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Today we present a preview of a major new biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet, coming this fall. Through committed investigative scholarship, Heather Clark is able to offer the most extensively researched and nuanced view yet of a poet whose influence grows with each new generation of readers. Clark is the first biographer to draw upon all of Plath’s surviving letters, including fourteen newly discovered letters Plath sent to her psychiatrist in 1961-63, and to draw extensively on her unpublished diaries, calendars, and poetry manuscripts. She is also the first to have had full, unfettered access to Ted Hughes’s unpublished diaries and poetry manuscripts, allowing her to present a balanced and humane view of this remarkable creative marriage (and its unravelling) from both sides. She is able to present significant new findings about Plath’s whereabouts and her state of health on the weekend leading up to her death. With these and many other “firsts,” Clark’s approach to Plath is to chart the course of this brilliant poet’s development, highlighting her literary and intellectual growth rather than her undoing. Here, we offer a passage from Clark’s prologue to the biography, followed by lines from one of Plath’s celebrated “bee poems.”

from Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

The Oxford professor Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s biographer, has written, “Women writers whose lives involved abuse, mental-illness, self-harm, suicide, have often been treated, biographically, as victims or psychological case-histories first and as professional writers second.” This is especially true of Sylvia Plath, who has become cultural shorthand for female hysteria. When we see a female character reading The Bell Jar in a movie, we know she will make trouble. As the critic Maggie Nelson reminds us, “to be called the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing.” Nelson reminds us, too, that a woman who explores depression in her art isn’t perceived as “a shamanistic voyager to the dark side, but a ‘madwoman in the attic,’ an abject spectacle.” Perhaps this is why Woody Allen teased Diane Keaton for reading Plath’s seminal collection Ariel in Annie Hall. Or why, in the 1980s, a prominent reviewer cracked his favorite Plath joke as he reviewed Plath’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Collected Poems: “ ‘Why did SP cross the road?’ ‘To be struck by an oncoming vehicle.’ ” Male writers who kill themselves are rarely subject to such black humor: there are no dinner-party jokes about David Foster Wallace.

Since her suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become a paradoxical symbol of female power and helplessness whose life has been subsumed by her afterlife. Caught in the limbo between icon and cliché, she has been mythologized and pathologized in movies, television, and biographies as a high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death. These distortions gained momentum in the 1960s when Ariel was published. Most reviewers didn’t know what to make of the burning, pulsating metaphors in poems like “Lady Lazarus” or the chilly imagery of “Edge.” Time called the book a “jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape.” The Washington Post dubbed Plath a “snake lady of misery” in an article entitled “The Cult of Plath.” Robert Lowell, in his introduction to Ariel, characterized Plath as Medea, hurtling toward her own destruction.

Recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of Plath as a master of performance and irony. Yet the critical work done on Plath has not sufficiently altered her popular, clichéd image as the Marilyn Monroe of the literati. Melodramatic portraits of Plath as a crazed poetic priestess are still with us. Her most recent biographer called her “a sorceress who had the power to attract men with a flash of her intense eyes, a tortured soul whose only destiny was death by her own hand.” He wrote that she “aspired to transform herself into a psychotic deity.” These caricatures have calcified over time into the popular, reductive version of Sylvia Plath we all know: the suicidal writer of The Bell Jar whose cultish devotees are black-clad young women. (“Sylvia Plath: The Muse of Teen Angst,” reads the title of a 2003 article in Psychology Today.) Plath thought herself a different kind of “sorceress”: “I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect,” she wrote her friend Mel Woody in July 1954.

Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote of Sylvia Plath, “when the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there on the stage, sacrificed to her own plot.” Yet to suggest that Plath’s suicide was some sort of grand finale only perpetuates the Plath myth that simplifies our understanding of her work and her life. Sylvia Plath was one of the most highly educated women of her generation, an academic superstar and perennial prizewinner. Even after a suicide attempt and several months at McLean Hospital, she still managed to graduate from Smith College summa cum laude. She was accepted to graduate programs in English at Columbia, Oxford, and Radcliffe and won a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge, where she graduated with high honors. She was so brilliant that Smith asked her to return to teach in their English department without a PhD. Her mastery of English literature’s past and present intimidated her students and even her fellow poets. In Robert Lowell’s 1959 creative writing seminar, Plath’s peers remembered how easily she picked up on obscure literary allusions. “ ‘It reminds me of Empson,’ Sylvia would say … ‘It reminds me of Herbert.’ ‘Perhaps the early Marianne Moore?’ ” Later, Plath made small talk with T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender at London cocktail parties, where she was the model of wit and decorum.

Very few friends realized that she struggled with depression, which revealed itself episodically. In college, she aced her exams, drank in moderation, dressed sharply, and dated men from Yale and Amherst. She struck most as the proverbial golden girl. But when severe depression struck, she saw no way out. In 1953, a depressive episode led to botched electroshock therapy sessions at a notorious asylum. Plath told her friend Ellie Friedman that she had been led to the shock room and “electrocuted.” “She told me that it was like being murdered, it was the most horrific thing in the world for her. She said, ‘If this should ever happen to me again, I will kill myself.’ ” Plath attempted suicide rather than endure further tortures.

In 1963, the stressors were different. A looming divorce, single motherhood, loneliness, illness, and a brutally cold winter fueled the final depression that would take her life. Plath had been a victim of psychiatric mismanagement and negligence at age twenty, and she was terrified of depression’s “cures,” as she wrote in her last letter to her psychiatrist—shock treatment, insulin injections, institutionalization, “a mental hospital, lobotomies.” It is no accident that Plath killed herself on the day she was supposed to enter a British psychiatric ward.

Sylvia Plath did not think of herself as a depressive. She considered herself strong, passionate, intelligent, determined, and brave, like a character in a D. H. Lawrence novel. She was tough-minded and filled her journal with exhortations to work harder—evidence, others have said, of her pathological, neurotic perfectionism. Another interpretation is that she was—like many male writers—simply ambitious, eager to make her mark on the world. She knew that depression was her greatest adversary, the one thing that could hold her back. She distrusted psychiatry—especially male psychiatrists—and tried to understand her own depression intellectually through the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Erich Fromm, and others. Self-medication, for Plath, meant analyzing the idea of a schizoid self in her honors thesis on The Brothers Karamazov.

Bitter experience taught her how to accommodate depression—exploit it, even—in her art. “There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive, or recreate it,” she wrote in her journal. The remark sounds trite, but her writing on depression was profound. Her own immigrant family background and experience at McLean gave her insight into the lives of the outcast. Plath would fill her late work, sometimes controversially, with the disenfranchised—women, the mentally ill, refugees, political dissidents, Jews, prisoners, divorcées, mothers. As she matured, she became more determined to speak out on their behalf. In The Bell Jar, one of the greatest protest novels of the twentieth century, she probed the link between insanity and repression. Like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the novel exposed a repressive Cold War America that could drive even the “best minds” of a generation crazy. Are you really sick, Plath asks, or has your society made you so? She never romanticized depression and death; she did not swoon into darkness. Rather, she delineated the cold, blank atmospherics of depression, without flinching. Plath’s ability to resurface after her depressive episodes gave her courage to explore, as Ted Hughes put it, “psychological depth, very lucidly focused and lit.” The themes of rebirth and renewal are as central to her poems as depression, rage, and destruction.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asked in his poem “Harlem.” Did it “crust and sugar over—/ like a syrupy sweet?” For most women of Plath’s generation, it did. But Plath was determined to follow her literary vocation. She dreaded the condescending label of “lady poet,” and she had no intention of remaining unmarried and childless like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. She wanted to be a wife, mother, and poet—a “triple-threat woman,” as she put it to a friend. These spheres hardly ever overlapped in the sexist era in which she was trapped, but for a time, she achieved all three goals.

They thought death was worth it, but I Have a self to recover, a queen. Is she dead, is she sleeping? Where has she been, With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?

Now she is flying More terrible than she ever was, red Scar in the sky, red comet Over the engine that killed her— The mausoleum, the wax house.

from “Stings” by Sylvia Plath

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark

Learn more about Heather Clark

Share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series

Thank you for reading and listening and watching—for being part of our community—throughout this month. With final good wishes for the health of all, here is Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), one of the presiding spirits of Knopf Poetry for his generosity on the page, his pursuit of beauty in its myriad forms, his boundless sense of adventure and of literature’s possibilities. May soft banks enfold you until we meet again over a poem.

River

Whole days would go by, and later their years, while I thought of nothing but its darkness drifting like a bridge against the sky. Day after day I dreamily sought its melancholy, its searchings, its soft banks enfolded me, and upon my lengthening neck its kiss was murmuring like a wound. My very life became the inhalation of its weedy ponderings and sometimes in the sunlight my eyes, walled in water, would glimpse the pathway to the great sea. For it was there I was being borne. Then for a moment my strengthening arms would cry out upon the leafy crest of the air like whitecaps, and lightning, swift as pain, would go through me on its way to the forest, and I’d sink back upon that brutal tenderness that bore me on, that held me like a slave in its liquid distances of eyes, and one day, though weeping for my caresses, would abandon me, moment of infinitely salty air! sun fluttering like a signal! upon the open flesh of the world.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara, edited by Mark Ford

Learn more about Frank O'Hara

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Let’s read.. and talk

This week Penguin Random House launched a new site, The Conversation, with its mission to “raise our collective consciousness about race and bias.” It got us thinking about the power of conversation to enhance empathy, especially now when we are all trying to connect in new and deeper ways. Thus, we’ve gathered conversational books by and about a broad spectrum of people and topics. 

THE TALK: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE, LOVE & TRUTH by Wade Hudson, Cheryl Willis Hudson

Thirty diverse, award-winning authors and illustrators invite you into their homes to witness the conversations they have with their children about race in America today in this powerful call-to-action that invites all families to be anti-racists and advocates for change.

The Talk is a stirring anthology and must-have resource published in partnership with Just Us Books, a Black-owned children’s publishing company that’s been in operation for over thirty years.

INCLUSIVE CONVERSATIONS: FOSTERING EQUITY, EMPATHY, AND BELONGING ACROSS DIFFERENCES by Mary-Frances Winters

Effective dialogue across different dimensions of diversity, such as race, gender, age, religion, or sexual orientation, fosters a sense of belonging and inclusion, which in turn leads to greater productivity, performance, and innovation. Recognizing our collective responsibility to earnestly address our differences and increase understanding and empathy will not only enhance organizational goals but will also lead to a healthier, kinder, and more compassionate world.

TONI MORRISON: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS Introduction by Nikki Giovanni

In this wide-ranging collection of thought-provoking interviews — including her first and last — Toni Morrison (whom President Barrack Obama called a “national treasure”) details not only her writing life, but also her other careers as a teacher, and as a publisher, as well as the gripping story of her family. In fact, Morrison reveals here that her Nobel Prize-winning novels, such as Beloved and Song of Solomon, were born out of her family’s stories — such as those of her great-grandmother, born a slave, or her father, escaping the lynch mobs of the South.

COMPASSIONATE CONVERSATIONS: HOW TO SPEAK AND LISTEN FROM THE HEART by Diane Musho Hamilton, Gabriel Menegale

The definitive guide to learning effective skills for engaging in open and honest conversations about divisive issues from three professional mediators. Addressing the long history of injury and pain for marginalized groups, each chapter contains practices and reflection questions to help readers feel more prepared to talk through polarizing issues, ultimately encouraging us to take risks, to understand and recognize our deep commonalities, to be willing to make mistakes, and to become more intimate with expressing our truths, as well as listening to those of others.

FRIDA KAHLO: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS by Frida Kahlo, Hayden Herrera

Frida Kahlo is now an icon. In the decades since her death, Kahlo has been celebrated as a proto-feminist, a misunderstood genius, and a leftist hero, but during her lifetime most knew her as…Diego Rivera’s wife. Featuring conversations with American scholar and Marxist, Bertram D. Wolfe, and art critic Raquel Tibol, this collection shows an artist undervalued, but also a woman in control of her image. From her timid beginnings after her first solo show, to a woman who confidently states that she is her only influence, the many faces of Kahlo presented here clearly show us the woman behind the “Fridamania” we know today.

GOOD TALK: A MEMOIR IN CONVERSATIONS by Mira Jacob

A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial family, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing.

Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob’s half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the country into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she’s gotten her own answers—her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and of course, love.

REVOLUTIONARY FEMINISMS: CONVERSATIONS ON COLLECTIVE ACTION AND RADICAL THOUGHT by Brenna Bhandar, Rafeef Ziadah

A unique book, tracing forty years of anti-racist feminist thought

The interviews include Avtar Brah, Gail Lewis and Vron Ware on Diaspora, Migration and Empire. Himani Bannerji, Gary Kinsman, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Silvia Federici on Colonialism, Capitalism, and Resistance. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon and Angela Y. Davis on Abolition Feminism.

BREAKING THE SILENCE HABIT: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATIONS IN THE #METOO WORKPLACE by Sarah Beaulieu, Len Schlesinger

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, employees and leaders are struggling with how to respond to the pervasiveness of sexual harassment. Most approaches simply emphasize knowing and complying with existing laws. But people need more than lists of dos and don’ts—they need to learn how to navigate this uncertain, emotionally charged terrain. Sarah Beaulieu provides a new skills-based approach to addressing sexual harassment prevention and response in the workplace, including using underdeveloped skills like empathy, situational awareness, boundary setting, and intervention.

WHEN MY TIME COMES: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT WHETHER THOSE WHO ARE DYING SHOULD HAVE THE RIGHT TO DETERMINE WHEN LIFE SHOULD END by Diane Rehm; Foreword by John Grisham

From Diane Rehm, renowned radio host—one of the most trusted voices in the nation—and best-selling author: a book of candor and compassion, addressing the urgent, hotly contested cause of the Right-to-Die movement, of which she is one of our most inspiring champions.  With a highly personal foreword by John Grisham, When My Time Comes is a response to many misconceptions and misrepresentations of end-of-life care; it is a call to action—and to conscience—and it is an attempt to heal and soothe our hearts, reminding us that death, too, is an integral part of life.

UNCENSORED: MY LIFE AND UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATIONS AT THE INTERSECTION OF BLACK AND WHITE AMERICA by Zachary R. Wood

Drawing upon his own powerful personal story, Zachary R. Wood shares his perspective on free speech, race, and dissenting opinions—in a world that sorely needs to learn to listen. As the former president of the student group “Uncomfortable Learning” at his alma mater, Williams College, Zachary Wood knows from experience about intellectual controversy. In Uncensored, he reveals for the first time how he grew up poor and black in Washington, DC, where the only way to survive was by resisting the urge to write people off because of their backgrounds and perspectives.

THE DIALOGUES: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE by Clifford V. Johnson; Foreword by Frank Wilczek

In The Dialogues, physicist Clifford Johnson invites us to eavesdrop on a series of nine conversations, in graphic-novel form—written and drawn by Johnson—about “the nature of the universe.” The conversations take place all over the world, in museums, on trains, in restaurants, in what may or may not be Freud’s favorite coffeehouse. The conversationalists are men, women, children, experts, and amateur science buffs. The topics of their conversations range from the science of cooking to the multiverse and string theory. Click here for the spanish edition

For more on these titles visit the collection conversations

International Day of Peace

Peace on Earth is what we are working toward. Today, September 21st, is the United Nations’ International Day of Peace: 

“Each year the International Day of Peace is observed around the world on 21 September. The UN General Assembly has declared this as a day devoted to strengthening the ideals of peace, through observing 24 hours of non-violence and cease-fire.This year, it has been clearer than ever that we are not each other’s enemies. Rather, our common enemy is a tireless virus that threatens our health, security and very way of life. COVID-19 has thrown our world into turmoil and forcibly reminded us that what happens in one part of the planet can impact people everywhere.”

International Day of Peace

Peace on Earth is what we are working toward. Today, September 21st, is the United Nations’ International Day of Peace: 

“Each year the International Day of Peace is observed around the world on 21 September. The UN General Assembly has declared this as a day devoted to strengthening the ideals of peace, through observing 24 hours of non-violence and cease-fire.This year, it has been clearer than ever that we are not each other’s enemies. Rather, our common enemy is a tireless virus that threatens our health, security and very way of life. COVID-19 has thrown our world into turmoil and forcibly reminded us that what happens in one part of the planet can impact people everywhere.”