Paul Constant

Tag: books

  • Go Gentle on Me This Halloween, Please

    Go Gentle on Me This Halloween, Please

    Because it’s October, I’m on my annual hunt for some good horror movies and novels to scratch the seasonal itch. But because the world is such a horror show, I’m very particular about the kind of horror I’m looking for this year. I don’t want anything too gory, or too nihilistic.

    The horror movie It Ends was the perfect prescription for this particular Halloween ailment. It features barely any blood or jump scares at all. The horror is a more existential sort. It’s about a group of young friends in a car on a short trip who wind up on a kind of treadmill of a highway that stretches seemingly on forever into an unending wilderness. For spoilery reasons, they can’t stop driving, and for unexplained reasons they don’t need to worry about gas, food, or sleep.

    I’d be lying if I said It Ends ties its plot up into a neat little bow. But that’s not what I wanted from this movie. Instead, I got exactly what I was hoping for—an unsettling movie about interesting people stuck in a hell that they can’t understand. It’s a lot of fun, and the right kind of horrific.

    Mike Bockoven’s novel Come Knocking doesn’t have much in common with It Ends—it’s a more grounded, less existential kind of horror story—but I enjoyed it just the same. It’s told in the style of an oral history, with multiple narrators telling an unknown questioner about their experiences.

    And the premise is kind of genius. It’s about a wildly popular theatrical experience that takes place across hours and multiple floors of a building. People pay hundreds of dollars and wait for months to attend the show, which can be enjoyed in virtually any way possible—you can follow characters as they move through the different levels of the building, and each narrative tells its own story. We know at the beginning of the book that something bad happened at that play—people died—but we don’t know what exactly happened, or how, or why.

    I had a lot of fun imagining what it would be like to attend the play at the center of Come Knocking, and I was intrigued enough by the mystery to keep whipping through the book. Ultimately, I had a lot less fun with the last quarter of the book, and I also didn’t think that the disparate voices that make up the oral history were clearly distinguished from each other.

    But like It Ends, Come Knocking is a story in which the journey is more important than the destination. The description of the play’s elaborate hellish scenarios and deep lore is intriguing, and the meta-culture that develops around the play, with haters and lovers alike piling into subreddits to build up or tear down the experience was interesting and rang true. It felt honest enough to me that the horror was bearable, without being overbearing. And that’s about all the terror I can handle this year.

  • I Have No Ideas but I Must Write

    I Have No Ideas but I Must Write

    If you consider yourself to be a sci-fi fan and you haven’t read Harlan Ellison’s short story about an artificial intelligence at the end of human history, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” you should do everything in your power to amend that error. Not all of Ellison’s work is aging well, but this story is the rare sci-fi classic that feels more relevant here in the far-flung future than it did on its publication.(It’s also a noteworthy work because it has one of the best titles in the entire history of fiction.)

    There’s a fancy new edition of the story in a standalone volume with all the special-edition clichés—supplementary documentation, a look at the history of the story and its impacts over time, that kind of thing.

    Unfortunately, this new edition also includes a piece in which sci-fi author J. Michael Straczynski interviews an AI about “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and reverentially reports back the AI’s hackneyed observations. It’s the kind of flighty idea that might have been forgiven had it been published three years ago when LLMs first made a big splash, but at this late date, when authors and artists are actively protesting everything that AI stands for, it feels weirdly credulous and incurious. It’s a shame that the latest publication of Ellison’s classic story has the stink of Straczynski’s essay stuck to its shoe.

  • When the Gossip Behind the Book Is Juicier Than the Book Itself

    When the Gossip Behind the Book Is Juicier Than the Book Itself

    If you’ve been paying attention to literary news over the last few months, you know that Rachel Cusk’s new novel, The Life of M, is supposedly a roman á clef about Natalie Portman. Cusk was supposedly friends with Portman, and rumor has it that Portman was furious that Cusk mined anecdotes that were shared between friends for a book.

    Unfortunately, the backstory is the only noteworthy thing about the book. The Life of M feels like a novel-length version of a Deuxmoi blind item. The reader is left to wonder about the realities of all the anecdotes in the book—who is the dancer who insulted M’s dancing in the “ballet film,” for instance? It’s hard not to imagine Cusk chuckling and muttering “wouldn’t you like to know?”

    I hated this book. It made me feel complicit in something dirty, and it didn’t offer anything beyond its sleazy backstory. The experience of reading The Life of M makes me retroactively question my enjoyment of Cusk’s other books. Avoid this one at all costs.

  • Origin Story

    Origin Story

    I’m a ride-or-die reader of R.F. Kuang, which is to say I will read everything that she publishes just about as soon as it is available to read. She’s earned my fandom by being fearless in her career—she’s published a young adult fantasy series, a scathing publishing industry satire, an extended allegory about academia as hell, and a kind of anti-colonialist retort to Harry Potter. That’s some range! And each book is thoughtful and inviting in its own way.

    Kuang’s latest novel, Taipei Story, is yet another departure from the rest of her body of work. It has no fantasy tropes in it. It’s realism at its most pure. In fact, the reader gets the sense that the book is barely concealed memoir about Kuang’s time in a Chinese-language immersion program. (In the acknowledgements, Kuang thanks a professor who has the same name as a professor in the novel.)

    I imagine that this book will lose some of the people who gravitated to Kuang for her bold thesis statements about academia, language, and capitalism. This is a subtle portrait of someone taking an intensive course that is probably just a little bit over her head. Undoubtedly, some fans of Kuang’s fantasy work will be bored with the subtlety.

    But in many ways, Taipei Story is the purest distillation of Kuang’s many interests. People who have read her shelf’s worth of novels will find the source of themes and concerns that have vibrated through all of her work. And if the plot feels a little anticlimactic—it’s literally just tracing the experience of taking this class—that undramatized quality allows her the space to explore her interests more fully and thoughtfully than in any of her other works. I was mesmerized all the way through.

  • Her Own Worst Critic

    Her Own Worst Critic

    Taylor Tomlinson is my favorite working stand-up comedian. She’s a genuinely funny person who excels at crowdwork and spontaneous jokes, but the thing that really appeals to me is her writing. Her jokes are often exquisitely shaped and delivered, often with one word landing in just the right place to completely change the meaning of everything that came before.

    So I was excited to read Tomlinson’s new memoir-in-essays, Actually, Nevermind. If you enjoy her comedy, I recommend listening to the audiobook, which she reads herself. But if you’re not already a fan, there’s probably not a lot here that you can’t already find in one of her four Netflix specials.

    In general, I found the book to be kind of depressing because Tomlinson is incredibly hard on herself. She continually talks about how unattractive she is, she mocks her weight, and she throws off a few jokes that undermine her intelligence. They’re little asides—all unfounded, as far as I’m concerned—that suggest her internal critic has possessed uncontested control over Tomlinson’s self-image for probably her entire life. After a while, the negativity bummed me out.

    And a significant portion of the book is given over to Tomlinson’s story about what happened when she launched a late night game show following Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. It feels as though Tomlinson is doing damage control for a situation that didn’t need defending. She hosted two seasons of the show and then wanted to step down because it wasn’t working for her, but people in her orbit seem to have painted the whole experience as a betrayal of God, Colbert, and country that she must atone for.

    If you’re new to Tomlinson, I’d urge you to just watch her comedy specials rather than starting with this book. But if you’re a fan, why wouldn’t you want to spend a few hours with her in your earbuds? I’ll take all I can get.

  • If You’re a Book-Lover, There’s a Saturday Ferry Ride in Your Near Future

    If You’re a Book-Lover, There’s a Saturday Ferry Ride in Your Near Future

    This Saturday, September 26th, I’ll be interviewing Garth Stein and Miranda Mundt about their graphic novels at the Bainbridge Island Book Festival.

    Stein is the writer of Cloven, a series of graphic novels about a young Seattle boy who has the proportionate powers and abilities of a goat. The series, which is drawn by the fabulous Matthew Southworth, is doing something very interesting with Seattle as a setting—it’s holding a mirror up to the city and heightening our most difficult conflicts with the clever application of science fiction conceits.

    Mundt is the writer and artist of Muted, a polyamorous coming-of-age witch story that is, I think, just as relevant to comics fans now as the original Spider-Man comics were to kids in the 1960s. The comic was a smash sensation on Webtoons and is now collected into two beautiful volumes.

    This is going to be a fun conversation—I love bringing together a comics writer and someone who does the writing and art because they have such different ideas about the capabilities of the medium.

    Best of all, the Saturday programming at the Bainbridge Island Book Festival is entirely free. You should come and make a day of the festival—but be sure to join us at 1 pm at the Stan Pocock Legacy Rowing Center for what’s sure to be a fascinating conversation between these two comics creators.

  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Jackass

    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Jackass

    It’s not an original thought to point out that I was absolutely insufferable in my 20s. Most of us were—especially if we devoted our life to artistic pursuits. I look back on myself in those years with exasperation, annoyance, and more than a little disgust.

    I was also exasperated, annoyed, and more than a little disgusted with the protagonist of Zoe Dubno’s debut novel. Happiness & Love. That’s by design—she’s an aspiring writer in her 20s. And the book is very true to that experience. I

    t’s told in one breathless paragraph detailing a single dinner party, with our narrator returning to New York City after an extended European trip. Partially against her will, she is re-entering her social circle of aspiring artists and socialites. She is absolutely disgusted with all of them, and herself, but she doesn’t see any other way forward.

    With all the adjectives that I deployed in the first three paragraphs, it might surprise you to learn that I really enjoyed Happiness & Love. The main character is as identifiable as she is insufferable, and she at least has the good sense to know it.

    I recommend the audiobook version of the book, which is read by the author. I don’t dare to guess how much of the book is based on her own experiences, but the tone of her voice and the weariness she brings to the narration feels very authentic to the story.

    Maybe you’re reading all this and wondering “why the hell would I want to spend a bunch of time with an insufferable young artist?” That’s a fair question. But the odds are good that if you’re older than 30, you’ve already spent a decade with an insufferable young artist.

    Happiness & Love is a portrait of one such wretched soul who is on the cusp of becoming something new. In getting to know her, for maybe the first time in my life, I felt a little bit of grace for the absolute menace that I was back then. That’s no simple feat.

  • The Future Doesn’t Have to Suck

    The thing that drew me to M. Arusha Wehm’s novel The Department of What It (Really) Means to be Human was the promise on the dust jacket that the book was “a thoughtful, optimistic sci-fi novel set in a near-future Aotearoa New Zealand where an investigator navigates a newly post-capitalist world in their search for a missing artist.”

    It’s really that simple: All you have to do to get me to read your sci-fi novel is set it in a future that doesn’t suck. And I loved living in the world of this novel—Wehm has clearly thought about what a climate-friendly, post-capitalist society might look like, and they establish a very lived-in world for the characters to move around in. Even better, none of the ideas in the book are presented as outrageous or groundbreaking. The future just is the way it is. The casual, no-big-deal air around the setting is luxurious, like slipping into a warm bath.

    Unfortunately, the central mystery of the book didn’t really pull me through the story. Every time something happened to advance the plot, I found myself wanting to squint at something Wehm gestured toward in the background, instead. I’m glad I read it, but it’s very much a journey-not-the-destination kind of reading experience—and oh, what a journey! I wish I could live inside this novel.

  • Bicentennial Baby Blues

    I was born in 1976, so I obviously don’t recall America’s big bicentennial birthday bash. But the celebration of America’s 200th birthday was a big enough cultural event that artifacts from the bicentennial celebration were kicking around throughout my youth. I’d occasionally encounter the special 200th birthday quarters, which featured a minuteman playing a drum on the back, for instance. Jack Kirby wrote and drew a giant Captain America comic for the bicentennial that was one of my favorite comics growing up. And so on and so forth.

    When I was a kid, I did the math and determined that I’d be 50 years old when America celebrated its 250th birthday. Even though I couldn’t fathom being 50 years old at the time, I recall that I did wonder what America’s quarter-millennium celebrations might be like. I was envisioning a future full of robots and American flags on Mars and all the other sci-fi trappings we were promised back then.

    And now that I’m 50 and America’s 250th birthday is here, I imagine trying to explain to my four-year-old self that the celebration is shaping up to be a dud. The president, you see, is the worst person in the country, and he’s ancient and clearly losing his mind and he’s been making everything in the world about him for the last decade or so. The economy is so bad and America has been embarrassed so solidly on the global stage that even Republicans don’t seem to be in a mood to go full star-spangled bananas right now.

    All that is to say that the one and only thing I’ve done to acknowledge America’s big 2-5-0 is read Meg Elison’s brand-new sci-fi novel, Foundling Fathers. It’s a story about teenaged clones of America’s Founding Fathers figuring out that they’re not in the 18th century anymore.

    The book has a stellar first line:

    “It took Benjamin Franklin twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds to discover there was pornography on the internet.”

    That pretty much sets the tone: The clones of Adams and Washington and all the rest maintain their essential character traits, and they slowly begin to realize that the world around them isn’t as it seems. I don’t want to spoil anything, so that’s all the plot you’ll get out of me.

    Foundling Fathers is a short and funny book, and it doesn’t exhaustively explore its concept. Instead, it makes a point and then ends well before it wears out its welcome. It’s thoughtful enough and well-researched enough that it inspired me to consider the men who started the American experiment and what they might think of where we are now.

    I enjoyed it a great deal, and now I’m officially done thinking about America’s 250th birthday—except to hope that things might be better for kids born this year when, or if, the 300th birthday rolls around.

  • A Fifty Year Sentence

    By the time my next newsletter arrives in your inbox, I will be 50 years old. I know some people who hate aging and getting old, and that’s always felt so hopeless to me. You might as well try to win a fistfight with the ocean.

    In fact, I’ve always felt good about aging. When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be a grownup. When I was in my 20s, I wanted to be a stable adult. I loved being in my 30s and I loved my 40s even more. Obviously, at some point aging becomes a game of diminishing returns, but for now I’m enjoying myself. 

    I don’t like to make a thing about my birthday, but 50 feels like something that should be observed. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Breakfast of Champions as he was turning 50 as a way to ball up all the childish thoughts in his brain, throw them away, and start fresh. Based on his later work, that plan didn’t succeed—he was just as obsessed with sex and death and absurdity at age 51, 52, and so on. 

    But I think Vonnegut’s idea was a worthwhile one. All those memories you carry around with you for decades start to get heavy. I don’t have the time or the talent to write a Breakfast of Champions. I’d like to build a little balcony in my mind so that I can ball up all the elementary school embarrassments and ancient advertising jingles and throw them off it, into thin air. The past gets heavy after a while and I’ve got a craving for weightlessness.

    I’ve Been Writing

    For the Seattle Times, I wrote about Paper Pushers, a new zine pop-up store in the heart of downtown Seattle. It’s run by three young artists, and they have a lot of big plans for the space during the six months or so that it’s open. 

    I also wrote about 13 of the best paperback releases in the month of May. 

    I’ve Been Reading


    I enjoyed Seattle writer Olivia Waite’s second Dorothy Gentleman sci-fi mystery novella, Nobody’s Baby, more than I enjoyed the first installment in the series. While Murder By Memory had to establish the generational starship and its cast of characters, Nobody’s Baby could just dive right into the story. It’s a cracking good yarn about a baby who’s born on a starship where the entire population is on birth control to prevent overcrowding. And while there is a mystery at the heart of the story, it’s also interesting to explore the impacts of a child born in a purposefully child-free society. 

    Emily Jane’s Mr. Yay is an enjoyable novel about a hip-hop group that names themselves after a children’s entertainer who doesn’t seem to exist. It starts as an amusing novel about burnouts and transforms into a gentle sci-fi epic. 

    Automatic Noodle is Annalee Newitz’s entry into the cozy sci-fi category, a short novel about robots who open a noodle shop in a post-second-Civil-War future California. I liked the book but found myself wondering if it would have hit me even more if it were just a realistic novella about a group of friends opening a noodle shop. The sci-fi trappings were interesting, but I think I might have felt more emotionally connected to more finely wrought realistic characters. 

    Transcription is just such a hyper-realistic novel, and it really worked on me. Ben Lerner’s novella is about a journalist whose phone breaks hours before an important interview. It’s a meditation on technology and how it shapes us, and it’s a delightful quick audiobook experience—the book only runs four hours and it feels like a one-man monologue read by a charismatic actor. 

    Did you know Oprah is still picking book club titles? Bruce Holsinger’s novel Culpability has that O right on the front cover, and it’s the kind of contemporary novel that’s always appealed to the Oprah brand—a social novel that explores the impacts of a trend ripped from the headlines. In this case, the book is about artificial intelligence from AI friends to self-driving cars, and while the book opens with a bang, asking some of the most important questions of our time, it ultimately runs out of gas about halfway through and then just sputters to a stop. 

    How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?

    If I were forced to offer political advice to Donald Trump to help overcome his historically low approval ratings, my advice would be simple: shut the fuck up and disappear for a while. In a hyper-partisan environment like this one, any president’s polling numbers are likely to bounce back to something like 40 or 44 percent if they can just get the spotlight off them for long enough.

    But our president is a deeply broken person who compulsively dives for the spotlight. He literally can’t help himself. And so his approval ratings keep plummeting—as low as 30 percent on his economic performance, which is basically his floor. A full third of the American people wouldn’t hold a negative opinion of Donald Trump if he personally foreclosed on their homes.

    I don’t know where we go from here. The economy is likely only going to get worse. Ordinarily that would result in a massive swing in the midterm election, but the Supreme Court’s shameful decision to allow racist gerrymandering means that the midterms are probably not going to result in as significant a swing as they should. 

    It’s been over ten years since the media began its sick fascination with Donald Trump and I am so tired. I’m sick of hearing about him, I’m sick of living with the unending parade of shit that he’s foisting on us, and I’m sick of watching virtually every powerful institution bend to his will without putting up a fight. 

    The bad news is that we’re all stuck in a weird psychosexual relationship with a narcissist, and there’s no end in sight. The good news is that thanks to Trump’s abysmal polling,I know I’m not alone. There’s a little bit of comfort in that—knowing that across the country, hundreds of millions of Americans shake their heads and make a little tsk noise out of the corner of their mouths and mutter “that fuckin’ guy.” 

    More Americans now fear for the future of the economy than at any time in the history of polling. President Trump has responded by publicly fretting over the type of marble used on ballroom floors and the proper blue shade of a reflecting pool. He’s even more that fuckin’ guy than ever. 

    I have never in my life seen any public figure’s name come closer to transubstantiating into a curse word. I believe that with a little bit of effort and a whole lot of his trademark cluelessness, Donald Trump can permanently befoul his legacy and elevate himself into a generational laughing stock and object of scorn. If anyone can do it, Donald can.

    Thanks for reading! See you in a couple of weeks.