Peach Picks
IN PRINT: Alfred A. Knopf / 2017 / memoir South and West, the latest from Joan Didion, comprises excerpts from her previously unpublished notebooks. Written for the most part in the summer 1970, Didion traveled through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with her late husband John Gregory Dunne, and recorded conversations with people who all share a certain racist nostalgia for the past. “The Civil War was yesterday,” Didion writes, “but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.” What is remarkable about this slim volume is that Joan Didion somewhat clairvoyantly anticipated this preoccupation with race, class, and heritage rearing its ugly head in a future America. “I had only some dim and unformed sense,” she writes, “a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.” |
IN PRINT: Grove Press / 2017 / memoir You do not have to be a dog lover per se, or have a crush on literary icon Eileen Myles to appreciate Afterglow, which, yes, is technically a book about a dead pit bull named Rosie. Every chapter is a new experiment in genre, with unexpected shifts in narrative voice and layers of consciousness. The fifth chapter, for example, is a screenplay of a puppet talk show featuring Rosie as a guest, complete with perfectly bizarre camera directions; we turn to our studio audience and “behind them are hundreds and thousands of puppets going back endlessly into the horizon which becomes mountains and hills also covered with puppets, all the puppets in the world.” The 10th chapter, “My Father Came Again as a Dog,” reads like an early creation myth. Dog is God, everything started with watery chaos —that kind of thing. It’s funny but it’s never just a joke. Myles is sincerely evoking something spiritual here. Spiritual in the way that grief allows us to ascribe meaning to very ordinary things (like a plaid LL Bean dog bed). |
“Peach Picks” is a new column of literary news and recommendations written by the editors of Peach Mag, an online literary magazine based in Buffalo, New York. For inquiries, contact the editors at peachmgzn@gmail.com.