Catapult Staff Picks

TFW your colleagues have really good taste in books.

I’ve just started Harmless Like You, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s wonderful debut novel. I am pairing that with an ARC of the anthology Rowan edited, Go Home! (forthcoming March 2018), featuring a truly daunting all-star lineup of Asian diasporic writers. It’s a beautiful, necessary collection, and it is going to make so many people I know feel seen.

—Nicole Chung, Managing Editor, Web & Community

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I’m reading John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester. It has great understanding of, and affection for, a small town in Iowa. And it’s creepy, so a great book to read before bed.

—Megha Majumdar, Assistant Editor

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Master of None Season 2. I’ll take Aziz Ansari’s unapologetic sentimentality any day of the week.

Porochista’s essay on our site, which I found deeply moving and in which the following particularly resonated for me, especially post-election: “Learn to respect more than resent those parallel planes of living and the rendering of living.”

I’m also grateful that a children’s book written in 1967 still has the power to thrill young readers today. My one-year-old is obsessed with Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and it’s incredible to watch him engage with books and form early favorites of his own.

—Jennifer Abel Kovitz, Associate Publisher

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I’ve been reading Guy Davenport lately. I picked two up from the always-great Mother Foucault’s here in Portland—his celebrated stories in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon and his essay collection Every Force Evolves a Form. Both are excellent. In the latter I’m less seduced by Davenport’s irascibility than I am by his works of juxtaposition. With the former there’s not much to be said but that it’s a clear masterpiece I’ll be returning to for years. Plus it’s kind of horny.

Another party to which I’m a latecomer is Lingua Ignota. Here’s a bit. It’s music designed to destroy you, and absolutely as satisfying as that sounds.

—Dustin Kurtz, Social Media Editor

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Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami.

—Morgan Jerkins, Contributing Editor, Web

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I just finished Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. This book is full of sentences that have a way of burrowing into your brain, coming to mind without warning like a song stuck in your head. For example, on a rainy Saturday, I kept thinking of the line, “The kindness of damp afternoons, the solace of opening the door and finding everyone there.” It feels a little magical that this keeps happening, as the book is about memory—what we wish to remember and what we wish to forget. This is all just to say, Hardwick is really, really good at writing the type of sentences you want to embroider onto hundreds of throw pillows until you have more pillows than apartment and are drowning in a sea of perfect sentences.

Now I’m reading Modern Love by Constance DeJong—a delightfully self-reflexive, genre-defying book too squirmy for definition—which has recently been reissued by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse.

“I didn’t want the page to be the past, and the viewer to be the present,” DeJong says in an interview with Bomb. “I was interested in this area in which language could be embodied and seem to construct itself in real time. So your experience of the text—you being the audience—is in real time. It’s becoming, unfurling, unfolding, which makes it not a reading, but a performance.”

—Allie Wuest, Editorial Assistant, Web