What are the Critical Insight Fellows Currently Reading?
You’re invited to browse the Critical Insight Fellows’ reading list, a series on what us critics are currently reading, handpicked by us. This is a resource to share our love of art and literature that goes beyond what’s on Pittsburgh stages. The second and third spaces in which we work or go to recreationally connect with others. The fellows’ selections represent a variety of influences on consumption: book clubs, local reading series, and podcasts. What We’re Currently Reading, explores the who, what, where, and why of pursuing these choices once the title or author is recommended. Here are some questions posed to my fellow readers:
Where or how did you first hear about this piece of writing or bit of media?
What audience or type of reader would you recommend this to, and why?
As a critic, what’s your judgement of the title’s cover or design? Is it attractive, disinteresting, grotesque, intriguing, worth a second glance?
Perhaps our own recommendations and responses will be the prompts you’ve been looking for to add another book to your night stand, to-be-read pile, audio playlist, or digital library.
Read on to see what we’re consuming this month!
Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy by Ben Davis
Pria Dahiya is reading critic Ben Davis’s collection of entertaining and insightful essays making sense of our extreme present as an emerging "after-culture"—a culture whose forms and functions are being radically reshaped by cataclysmic events. “I’m a bit of a snob, so I’ll often judge a book by its publisher before I judge a book by its cover,” Dahiya told me, “and Haymarket Books, this book’s publisher has impressed me. They publish books centering ‘struggles for social and economic justice.’” The essays in the book hold out hope that reckoning with the new realities of art, technology, activism, and the media, can help us weather the super-storms of the future.
Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe
Elise Ryan is an admirer of Ama Codjoe and advocate of their poetry. As Ryan recalls, “Ama Codjoe, the book's author, was one of our featured writers and speakers at the Lit Youngstown Fall Literary Festival.” Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. Ryan gravitates to many of the poems, informing me that “they contemplate, respond to, and enact the Black female nude in art and in lived experience. The poems have tensile strength: they are delicate, contemplative, and self-sustaining while also being incredibly strong and resistant to force outside of their own.”
Killing It by Gaia Rajan
Lindsay Anne Herring first heard Pittsburgh-based poet Gaia Rajan live as part of "meTamophosis: A Queer & Trans Led Reading Series hosted at White Whale Bookstore. Herring remembers that, “it was absolutely stunning to hear Gaia read this piece of work— to listen to his experiences was a gift to everyone in the room.” Killing It is a razor-sharp interrogation of queer Asian American identity, intergenerational trauma, and the detritus of American achievement. Here, lineage is at once redemptive and violent.
North Woods by Daniel Mason
Emma Diehl’s selection, North Woods, is a work of historical fiction that tells the story of a yellow New England house through its inhabitants, human and otherwise, across centuries. Starting with a pair of young lovers who, casting off their Puritan yokes...absconded to...their private Arcadia. Diehl shared that, “though the cover is a nod towards the pastoral nature of the story, if I'm being honest, the design it not doing it for me! Had this not been a compulsory read for a book club, I'm not sure I'd give the design a second glance.”
The Managed Hand: Race, Gender, and the Body in Beauty Service Work by Miliann Kang
Mingsi Ma is intrigued by the question The Managed Hand poses: Why are most nail technicians Asian women? In The Managed Hand, Miliann Kang’s beautifully executed study of Korean-owned nail salons in New York City, Kang highlights the unequal power relations within them, but also situates these inherently “local” settings within a complex backdrop of global and structural forces (of migration, capitalist expansion, nationalism and market competition). When asked who she'd recommend it to, Ma answered, “to beauty lovers, as it will surely provide them with fresh perspectives whenever stepping into nail salons—a powerful glimpse into the lives and the physical and emotional labor of the nail technicians sitting in front of them.”
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
Alyssa Velazquez listens to The Folger Shakespeare Library’s podcast, Shakespeare Unlimited and it was through that platform that she said, “ I heard Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost, being interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.” Set in present day Palestine, actress Sonia Nasir is roped into playing the role of Gertrude in a West Bank production of Hamlet. After years away from her family’s homeland, this is Sonia’s first trip back since the second intifada and the deaths of their grandparents. Enter Ghost is a story of diaspora, displacement, and the connection to be found in family and shared resistance.
All picks and more are available for local purchase at White Whale Bookstore or City of Asylum!