Winter Reading List
Kaitlyn Greenidge on mothers and daughters, Blake Scott Ball on Charlie Brown, Ann L. Buttenwieser on swimming in NYC, and more
December 16, 2021
As the days grow shorter, is there any better companion than a faithful book? In the following excerpts, Public Seminar samples some of our favorite releases from the past year.
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The Work of a Fiction Writer
“The time I saw Mama raise a man from the dead, it was close to dusk. Mama and her nurse, Lenore, were in her office—Mama with her little greasy glasses on the tip of her nose, balancing the books, and Lenore banking the fire.” In this excerpt from Kaitlyn Greenidge’s second novel, Libertie (Algonquin Books, 2021), a Brooklyn doctor receives a patient in a coffin on the eve of the Civil War.
In a conversation that spans ghost stories, mothers and daughters, and the problem with the word problematic, Kaitlyn Greenidge chats with Mira Jacob about the writing process behind her new book. “Libertie and her mother are the one percent of the one percent. They are free Black women who are living just before the Civil War. They’re college educated, they are extremely, extremely privileged in their extremely, extremely narrow experience. But the work of a fiction writer is to take narrow experiences and explore the emotional vastness that’s within them.”
Life of a Cartoon
“On New Year’s Eve 1965 Charlie Brown, the star of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, decided to change: he would be decisive, clear-cut, and well-grounded. Ever the realist and always happy to burst Charlie Brown’s bubble, Lucy van Pelt would not let the boy deceive himself. ‘Forget it,’ she blurted. ‘You’ll always be wishy-washy.’” In Charlie Brown’s America (Oxford University Press, 2021), Blake Scott Ball examines the politics of Peanuts.
New York City Swim
In The Floating Pool Lady (Cornell University Press, 2021) Ann L. Buttenwieser attempts to bring river bathing back to the New York City waterfront. “The 1972 Clean Water Act inspired hope that New York’s rivers could one day be clean enough for swimming. Shelley Seccombe’s photographs from the decade show a young man performing a backflip from a bulkhead into the Hudson. This risky jump was worth taking.”
Professional Parenting
“Babies are notoriously sensual beings, both dependent and hedonistic. Their helplessness and drive for pleasure represent an existential threat to the Puritanism of American elites. It is not surprising, then, that managing the development of children into successful adults dominates the ethos of PMC parenting.” In an excerpt from Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), Catherine Liu examines the intrauterine Mozart streams and anguished perfectionism of upper-middle-class childcare.
Give a Book, Not a Gift Basket
Claire Potter shares her reading highlights from the past year, from Mary Trump’s depiction of Ivanka’s regifting habits to a biography of Audre Lorde that reveals a world of feminist poetry and Black activism.
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