Oi! What are you reading this summer?
Friends and collaborators share what's on their bedside table at the moment.
We got a fresh coat of paint! Our new logo is designed by our Arts Tsar, Olivia Schwob, inspired by Egon Schiele’s poster for the 49th exhibition of the Vienna Secession. The interwar frenzy for woodcuts went hand in hand with a love for collaboration: Die Brücke went all in, too. And bohemia is back, baby!
Next, be sure to save the date for our celebration of The Auflauf’s first six months on 19 September. Lettrétage, 8pm, with readings from Hilda Hoy, Rob Madole, Kate McNaughton, Tobias Ryan, and Dženana Vucic.
Finally and Europeanly, we’re off in August. Before we go, we asked a few friends, colleagues, and collaborators about what books this summer has brought them:
Tom Bresemann (Lettrétage)
Summertime is poetrytime: I am currently reading (again) cute gedanken by Mara Genschel—Denglish poems that the author wrote with the help of the autocorrect function of her phone. I am also reading Restaurant & Orchestre Touché by Mathias Traxler, an inspiring collection of ‘Gedichte, Konzertstücke, Songs’. I am reading Errata, a collection of misprints turned into poetry by Norbert Lange. But also I am reading Georg Leß’ Schlachtgewicht 2. I am also reading Konstantin Ames’ sTIL.de(dir) Sämtliche Landschaften Welt. I am reading Felipe Saez Riquelme’s Objetos Publicos. And I am also reading Sam Albatros’ sissy. Jeezy Creezy, I hope this summer never ends!
Gurmeet Singh (writer & cultural worker)
I’m reading my beautiful friend Dženana Vucic’s poetry collection after war; it’s very moving and sometimes harrowing, and often reminds me of Charles Reznikoff’s work. I’m also reading Casanova’s memoirs, Story of My Life. The lazy way of describing him would be to call him a fuckboy (in a wig), but his writing is genuinely absorbing, and he’s a lot more intellectually serious than I initially imagined him to be.
Mathilde Montpetit (The Auflauf)
I just cracked open Yambo Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence [Bound to Violence], which caused a plagiarism scandal when it was first published in 1968—a to-do that inspired my favorite novel of the last few years, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men. But I also recently got the LRB editor John Lanchester’s debut novel, The Debt to Pleasure, from 1996. It’s American Psycho, if Patrick Bateman were a pompous Englishman who monologued about bouillabaisse instead of Huey Lewis and the News. He’s on a road trip through northern France, and Lanchester has a restaurant critic’s flair for food description but not BEE’s taste for gore. A perfect vacation book.
Tania Röttger (journalist & novelist)
I’m reading Virginia Woolf’s debut novel The Voyage Out. It follows an expanding group of people on their trip to a fictional place in South America (where Woolf never went). It is constructed more straightforwardly than her later works but still contains strangely beautiful sentences like this one about Mrs Ambrose, who walks through London to get to the boat, leaving her children with their grandparents for the several month long trip: ‘What with misery for her children, the poor, and the rain, her mind was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.’
Sophie Duvernoy (translator of Käsebier Takes Berlin & Effingers)
My corny book is Patti Smith’s Bread of Angels (not that corny, but before I was reading some Buddhist lectures by Pema Chödron).
Sanders Isaac Bernstein (The Auflauf)
Life has been chaotic this summer, so I’ve read less than I would like to admit and what I have read, I’ve read very slowly. Which is to say I’m reading Henry James’s The Ambassadors, a book that I bought on my final road trip from Los Angeles to New Jersey, as I was plotting to move to Berlin. Appropriately enough, it’s about Europe’s seduction, the story of the Woolett widower Strether’s attempt to bring back his fiancée’s son from Paris, only to find himself convinced by the young man’s choice to remain. It’s a novel of relatively small stakes and action, but it consists of fine differentiations as it parses minute questions of responsibility and convention among expats of the leisure class. I find not only the subject but also the pace comforting. Everyone will be, at the novel’s end, okay, I’m sure (even if I haven’t yet reached it). But, until then, as my eyes move over the page, time slows down, and I settle into James’s luxurious sentences. It feels a little bit like I’ve gone on vacation, the kind they’re said to have every August in Europe.
Samuel Clowes Huneke (scholar, author)
I’m currently reading Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience. I picked it up after listening to an interview with Emerald Fennell (for my sins, I loved her adaptation of Wuthering Heights), in which she recommended it as a work of genius. The novel’s first lines just sock you in the gut: ‘It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time.’
Ruthie Weissman (journalist, editor of HEIST)
I’d like to say I’ve found the hidden novel of the summer, but my real answer is that I’ve been alternating between microdosing World War II history and breezing through the series we’re reading in my ‘2000s chick lit turned movie adaptation’ book club. The former is The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan, who interviewed some 3,000 people to create a minute-by-minute (and somehow pretty humorous) chronological account of D-Day. The latter is the Princess Diaries series by Meg Cabot, which is fantastically serious literature, full of aughts pop culture references and punk Greenpeace teenagers and prom.
Alexander Wells (The Auflauf)
Summer is a season of glorious distraction. It’s hard to surrender to a single continuous narrative when there is music in the air, insects buzzing, sunscreen to reapply, and life partners who simply have to go out—now—for ice cream. So my holiday reading is always short-form. This year it is Elizabeth Hardwick’s Collected Essays, which thankfully also has the heft required for bug-killing. Hardwick is tremendous. She has, I think, the best style-to-narcissism ratio of any critic. And what style! Tender, eccentric, but somehow also disciplined, and sharp. My midsummer night’s dream: that one might return to one’s desk in September and discover one can suddenly write prose as good as hers. Why not? Perhaps all it takes is a proper bit of rest, some reading in the sun, this American great for inspiration, those circling wasps, and yes, of course!, a scoop of ice cream, quick let’s go now, before they close.
What should we be reading instead?
