How to See in the Dark
by Kathe Koja
It takes a little more than 30 minutes—I just learned this on a moonlight nature walk—30 minutes for the human eye to adjust to the deep ambient darkness that exists beyond city lights, and be able, or start to be able, to distinguish shapes, judge peripheral objects, recognize certain colors, find your way. Without that adjustment we blunder, fall, get turned around, we need to wait for the dark to open our eyes.
Performative, collaborative, immersive: SKIN hits all those marks, marks I didn’t know were there when I first wrote it, when I first began to understand what it might be like to work within a group of passionate people wanting more than anything—or almost anything, their creative and emotional mileage does vary—to make what they see in their minds and feel in their bodies become real: real enough to engage, to terrify, to galvanize an audience, people who came to see something they had never seen before.
In our weekend reading: thoughts on books by Kathe Koja and Emily Witt, November debuts, and more.
What does your October reading list look like? Ours, it’s safe to say, covers a lot of ground. If you’re looking to see NYC through new eyes or revisit the work of an iconic filmmaker, we have you covered; if you’d prefer a trip into space or a jaunt into history, we have those angles covered as well. Read on for some literary recommendations to ease you into fall.
In our afternoon reading: pondering Eugene Lim’s bibliography, revisiting Tom Wolfe, and more.
Apocalypse! There are lots of possible scenarios—the “Don’t Look Up” one, where a massive comet strikes the earth like a fist; Ragnarök, where the gods die too (sorry, Loki); the slow iron decadence of Kali Yuga; the Christian Rapture, with its “See you in hell, from heaven!” schadenfreude—but they all pretty much agree that A Big Thing is going to happen, and then you’ll see: we’ll all see. And our own unsettled moment of climate catastrophe and virus and political convulsion invites the constant rolling question, Is this it? is this it? Is this the end of the world?
In our afternoon reading: thoughts on Malika Moustadraf’s short stories, Kathe Koja in conversation with John Skipp, and more.
Make It Real
by Kathe Koja
Hey, boy, welcome to reality – David Bowie
When you write a book about reality, when I wrote this one, you need to consider what reality is, really. Is it tangible, physical? a rapturous hug from the one you love, a tasty cocktail sipped in the sun, a broken thumb, a lit cigarette, a stubborn headache, the view from a balcony? Or is it a metaphysical construct, an art school joke, a philosophical itch, a lone proverbial tree forever falling, falling? Is it emotional vertigo? Is it vertigo? What if reality defines itself? How would we know?