Category: Rambling Reads

When Crystal B. Lake asked me to write something for The Ramblist, I thought I’d offer a list of books that take up the question of brownness, an idea I first encountered in Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk and have since followed across the writings of José Esteban Muñoz, Richard Rodriguez, Nitasha Tamar […]

Samanta Schweblin’s fiction unnerves me, and it will probably unnerve you too. It is unnerving because of how it confronts the stuff of everyday lives: how we use technology, the spaces that we live in, and the horror that lies beneath the everyday. Such horror thrives on secrets—the creeping revelation of the unseen or ineffable […]

When I first read The Wind in the Willows, the story felt remembered rather than received. I was twenty two. I hadn’t read the book as a child; I had only encountered it through Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disney World and as a cross-stitched quote on the wall of a beach house: “Believe me, […]

When crime disappears, what’s a crime novelist supposed to write about? This question weighed on the minds of crime writers Lee Child, Reggie Nadelson, and George Dawes Green during a 2009 discussion on WNYC, New York’s flagship public radio station. Invited to chat about “New York City Thrillers,” the three novelists found themselves instead musing […]

JMD: Your book explores “the ways that Black and Native death are intimately connected in the Western Hemisphere,” confronting “the ways that conquistador forms of discourse, like colonial and settler colonial studies, attempt to mediate discussions between Black and Native peoples, Black studies, and Native studies” (xiii). In order to show these interconnections, you foreground […]

JMD: I have been obsessed with counterfactuals and alternate histories for a long time now, and one of my key critical texts for thinking about those questions has been your superb 2007 Representations essay “Lives Unled in Realistic Fiction.” It would have been much easier for you, I’m certain, if rather than envisioning and composing […]

(Now That She’s Not an English Professor) I stopped working as an English professor last year. I didn’t get a tenure-track job after five years of trying, the small rich college I was teaching at wouldn’t renew my contract, I couldn’t take another year of increasingly precarious contingent work, and I quit. I still work […]

I started this essay very unlike a third-person narrator. I didn’t know what was about to happen and how everyone would feel about it. I was just settling into “pandemic normal”—figuring out “remote teaching,” substituting Netflix for social life—when “pandemic normal” decided it was already time for a reset. First came news from afar: My […]

Recently, the “comfort book,” while still squirreled away in the relative privacy of bedroom bookshelves, has felt more necessary than ever. And none, to my mind, provide more potent relief than James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small. Herriot’s memoir—a collection of stories about his time as a young vet in the Yorkshire Dales—has sold […]

Yes, I am home again, but home has changed. And I within this cultivated space That I have made my own, feel at a loss, Disoriented. —May Sarton, “Letters from Maine” I recently re-watched the 1990 classic, Home Alone, in which the large, affluent, Midwestern McCallister family heads to Paris for Christmas. On the morning […]

JMD: I love this book. I love it partly because I’ve been thinking about many of the same issues ever since I started teaching the Restoration and eighteenth-century drama lecture course at Columbia as a young assistant professor. I hadn’t studied it in graduate school; I was more focused on fiction and nonfiction prose, and […]

JMD: Crystal, you are one of the founding editors of The Rambling, and you were initially resistant to the idea that I would interview you about Artifacts in case it looked like nepotism. Fortunately, I persuaded you that it wouldn’t be inappropriate, and I’m going to prove that I’m not giving you preferential treatment by […]

As a culture, we can’t stop thinking about the 1980s New York art scene. New retrospectives keep popping up—at the Whitney (“Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s”), the Hirschorn (“Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s”), and the Museum of Modern Art (“Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983”). Television […]

I want to tell you everything about Joy Williams’s The Changeling, but I fear there’s nothing sensible that I can say. When the book was published in 1978, Anatole Broyard dismissed it as an “arbitrary muddle.” In 2015, however, the Times Magazine offered (in typical Times fashion) a glowing retrospective with a headline admiring “The Misanthropic […]

Enlightenment philosophers were fascinated by questions about where human language came from and how it developed. In wondering about the origins of language, they were asking some of the biggest questions that humans can ask: Is language a divine gift from God or a human creation? Is our language different from animal cries? Does human […]

When I was a teenager, it was still possible to encounter slighting references to people who read while moving their lips. I didn’t immediately understand why this kind of reading should be a sign of deficiency although I simultaneously tried to determine whether I committed this apparently graceless act that betrayed something less than real […]

As befits a subject that is at once fascinating and proscribed, eating other people is usually talked about out of the sides of our mouths, as if daintily eating ribs with a toothache. Besides the stories of crazy people turned cannibal––be it Hannibal Lector or Issei Sagawa––we tend to talk about cannibalism obliquely, metaphorically, encoded […]

JMD: First of all, let me thank you for writing this amazing book! I’ve always been extremely interested in the history of medicine, and your book hits a sweet spot for me in terms of its combination of acute attention to primary sources with smart big-picture thinking about forms of knowledge. I especially appreciated your […]

In the midst of a painful divorce and the reckoning that precipitated and pursued it, I’ve found myself desperate for stories that would fully immerse me in their worlds. If I came to Ghost Wall looking for a temporary escape from the pain of my present, I was surprised to find that Sarah Moss’s unsettling novel […]

Benjamin Kahan opens The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality with a list of all the things that, in 1902, the sexologist Iwan Bloch said could cause homosexuality: impotence, onanism, habitual alcohol consumption, opium indulgence, seduction, same-sex environments, warm climate, anal sex with women, wearing clothing of the opposite sex, looking […]

In July 2019, I will join the Department of Art History at UCLA as Assistant Professor in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art. With this appointment, I will return to academia from a very different path on which I embarked on July 31, 2017, when I began a 16-month stint as Community Development Director for the […]