"i am running into a new year..."
Our full collection of recommended reading from Cita Press, our contributors, & our friends
This month’s Bulletin comes courtesy of Cita Press contributors, colleagues/collaborators, readers, and friends! Here, in no particular order, is a list of books we read and loved in 2023. Thank you to everyone who shared a little bit of their brain with us this year!
At the end of this newsletter we also share some free reading resources related to Palestine-Israel. Those of us who are in a position to gather and celebrate as this year closes and a new one begins are also finding time to reflect, to learn, and to try make sense of the world, often in dialogue with people we love. We hope that your reading—the celebratory and the challenging—gives you sustenance as we head into 2024.
Our Favorite Reads of 2023
“Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? Simple: where you are. In four years I'll have reached you.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot
The Idiot by Elif Batuman follows a year of confusing self-discovery as Selin arrives at Harvard after high school. Obsessed with language and culture, and driven by a desire for knowledge and relationships, Selin reminds us of the funny, humiliating and beautiful wonders of youth. —Juliana Castro, Cita Press
As a lifelong swimmer myself, I knew I had to read Julie Otsuka's latest novel, The Swimmers, which is an intimate portrait of mothers and daughters, grief, and loss. The economical yet enchanting prose is so captivating I read it in one sitting. —Victoria Namkung, Cita Press contributor
You & a Bike & a Road is a comics journal chronicling Eleanor Davis’ bike journey across the U.S. during a moment of personal crisis. It’s an intimate, messy, spare and aching testimony to a the rites of passage we create for ourselves in adulthood. —Camila Kerwin, friend of Cita
The Unfortunates is an inventive, captivating debut by J.K. Chukwu. Framed as a thesis by college student Sahara— and interspersed with excerpts from an amazing archival zine by Sahara’s aunt— the novel is infused with sharp honesty, humor (often devastating, always effective), and, ultimately, hope. —Jessi Haley, Cita Press
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling is an amazing study of the rise of the professional middle class in postwar USA and the way that status anxiety ultimately divided this group of professionals from the rest of the middle and working classes. This influenced the rise of conservative politics during the same period and into the present day. —Gita Manaktala, Cita Press advisory board
We’ve all been exposed to a person, or to people, who change our lives forever. Excellent Women by Barbara Pym describes this chance meeting in such a delightful and interesting way. I’ve never been so enraptured by the mundane and tedious accounts of someone’s life. Pym’s prose is surprising and her humor is sneaky. This book should be read! —Starsha Gill, friend of Cita
“One wouldn't believe there could be so many people, and one must love them all.”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women
Reading A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin takes you longer than you’d think, mostly because of the recovery time needed after the gut-punch of each story. In these pages, you will first encounter ordinary people in everyday settings (a living room, a laundromat, a beach resort), and then watch them live out huge concepts, like finding beauty in the banal, or loneliness in a crowded room, or the comfortable melancholy that comes with inescapable tragedy. It’s the kind of precise, brutal and unflinching writing that leaves you softer, kinder and just better for having read it. “All pain is real.” I think about this book all the time. —Aloma Antao, Educopia Institute
Los abismos by Pilar Quintana is told from the perspective of a small girl named Claudia as she navigates her parents’ conflicts while growing up in Cali, Colombia. The portrait of generational violence that surrounds us through her eyes makes it a remarkable book to read. —Fabián Ríos, Cita Press contributor
The Wandering Mind by Jamie Kreiner shows us how medieval monks understood and struggled with distraction. It was very interesting to think of attention removed from our current use of devices and technology. —Lauren Dapena Fraiz, The Maintainers
Supersaurio by Meryem El Mehdati is an auto-fiction book about a young woman's internship in a corporate supermarket chain in the Canary Islands. It had been a while since I read a satirical book and I really enjoyed it- a witty and funny depiction on corporate power, racism, labor precarity and extractive tourism. —also from Lauren!
I read The Undercurrents at the beginning of 2023 and I didn’t shut up about it all year. It begins as an investigation into a water leak in author Kirsty Bell’s new apartment in Berlin, then spirals out into a history of her building, her neighborhood, and ultimately the city, “full of hesitant gaps, temporal jumps, and wild moments of greenery.” It’s a beautiful depiction of the palimpsestic history of a place, and it completely transformed how I think about the city where I live — though I don’t think you need to know Berlin to be able to enjoy and appreciate it. —Meg Miller, friend of Cita
Comfort Me with Apples by Catherynne M. Valente starts as a bit of a domestic mystery/thriller, and becomes something far more fascinating and haunting as it sprints to its conclusion. It's best to go into this ornately written tale knowing as little as possible about it. —Eric Martin, Educopia Institute
Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah reads like a hallucination filled with sequences of repetition and poetic experimentation. It includes many dreamlike characters: a woman working in an audio theatre, a German-language teacher, Buha the poet, Wolfi who writes detective fiction. They all travel through Seoul and through the book and shapeshift into each other. Loved it! —Janneke Adema, Cita Press advisory board
Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri — for the way she approaches the practice of translation as a reader, academic, and writer, making the reading experience one that feels both intimate and, for a translator like myself, instructional. —May Huang, friend of Cita
“Writing is a way to salvage life, to give it form and meaning. It exposes what we have hidden, unearths what we have neglected, misremembered, denied. It is a method of capturing, of pinning down, but it is also a form of truth, of liberation.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Translating Myself and Others
Finally, we’ll end with our latest title: An Immortal Book: Selected Writings by Sui Sin Far. With clarity, humor, and a way-ahead-of-her-time ethos, Sui Sin Far tackles subjects that remain urgently relevant to contemporary readers while also entertaining us with timeless tales of romance, smugglers, family dynamics and internal struggles. Read on our site for free or buy a print copy. —Cita Press
Reading on Palestine-Israel
War is always a feminist issue. War is always an information issue. These truths are particularly visible amid the current war in Gaza. Cita’s core guiding principles are decentralization, collective artistic production, and equitable access to knowledge. With this in mind, we have compiled a small selection of free resources that we hope will be useful for those seeking information, and for those turning to art as they navigate feelings of grief, fear, rage, and helplessness. We are grateful to the people, presses, and publications who have made this work available to everyone.
Voices on Palestine: A Guernica collection [free ebook from Guernica]
From Critical Inquiry: Israel/Palestine: A Critical Archive [free access through The University of Chicago Press: Journals] and Theory in Times of Bloodshed [CI blog series]
“Poems We Read in October” [collectively compiled, poets & contributors]
Palestine-Israel PDF Library [compiled by Scott Long]
