from my email: Rhian Sasseen's lists
Culture Diary, April and May (Part One)Everything I read, watched, listened to, and glimpsed in the month of April.
It is absurd, of course—the myriad of ways in which, over the last few weeks, the Trump administration has lashed out against intellectual life in the United States through a variety of unprecedented measures. At the beginning of May, numerous arts organizations received notice that their NEA grants would be terminated in favor of projects that “reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.” In practice, many of the institutions, particularly those in the publishing world, were those that attempted to foster a spirit of internationalism and global literary community; four of the independent presses that lost funding— Open Letter, Deep Vellum, Two Lines, and Transit—focus primarily on works in translation. They also happen to be publishing some of the most exciting, cutting-edge works of contemporary fiction on the market today. And a similar xenophobia has been directed towards academia, with the administration’s targeting of international students. These are dispiriting times. Much of my mental space has been clogged by this glut of bad news; how can it not be? In April and in May, I often found myself anxious, staring at live updates from The Guardian or The New York Times. Some of these worries bled into my off-line life; a novel of mine is on submission to editors now, and I found myself anxious about that, too. But there were also good moments, books read and films watched and time spent in California and in New York. In particular, the May edition of the Wish You Were Here reading series I help run in Bushwick with the writer Kate Peters—this time featuring fiction by Alex Wolfe, Jenna Klorfein, Ismail Muhammad, and Rob Rubsam—offered an evening of emotional reprieve and good prose. (If you’re interested in hearing about future readings, let me know and we’ll add you to the email list.) But I also had some pieces of writing published. At The Atlantic, I wrote about the French writer Claire Baglin’s debut novel, On the Clock (translated by Jordan Stump), and how the working classes are portrayed in both American and French works of literature; I also wrote a fun round-up of books to read when you’re bored, featuring work by Peter Cornell, Bae Suah, and more. The summer issue of Kinfolk will feature an interview I did with Sheila Heti. And for The Baffler, I wrote about the French writer Mathias Énard’s new novel The Deserters (translated by Charlotte Mandel), and how it looks at historical events such as 9/11, the end of the twentieth century, and how time feels like it's repeating itself both in fiction and in real life. In April, I also published a short essay in this newsletter about the work of the Portuguese artist Helena Almeida, and the significance of the color blue.
This will be a two-part newsletter of all the books, movies, music, and works of visual art I spent time with in April and May. Today is April; expect the second part later this week. Books 1. Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, J. F. Martel (with an introduction by Donna Tartt) A new edition of this slim manifesto about the humanistic value of art written by the Canadian writer J. F. Martel was released by Basic Books in May 2024, and I had a digital galley bouncing around on my e-reader that I decided to read on a plane ride to San Francisco. It’s an engaging work that has been updated to include some considerations about generative artificial intelligence (“generative A.I. is entirely retrospective; it can only imitate what already exists, borrowing both form and content from human works.”) I do not, however, agree with some of Martel’s anxieties concerning the relationship between art and politics (he thinks art is or should be apolitical, though also simultaneously argues that the artist should be able to navigate their political landscape in their work). For more of my thoughts on the relationship between art and politics, you can read this piece I wrote for The Baffler in 2023. 2. Blowfish, Kyung-ran Jo (translated by Chi-Young Kim) This is a melancholy little novel forthcoming this summer from Astra, in which a sculptor and an architect dwell on (and, in the case of the sculptor, actively plan) their respective suicides. The title comes from the pufferfish, a delicacy that happens to contain a toxin that can be lethal in even small doses. Though the sculptor is a woman, and the architect is a man, when their paths finally cross, there isn’t really a flirtation between them; rather, this is a book about two lost souls trying to navigate how their internal selves are disconnected from their exterior surroundings and lives. On this note, I thought the fact that both of their careers deal with the aesthetics of objects in physical space was a nice detail linking them together. 3. Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, Yoko Towada (translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) A delightful essay collection about translation, travel, and the relationship between self and language. Towada famously writes in both Japanese (her native language) and German (which she learned as an adult) and is curious about what she calls “the space between languages.” “Maybe what I really want is not to be a writer of this or that language in particular,” she writes, “but to fall into the poetic ravine between them.” It’s out this week from New Directions. 4. How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art, Morgan Falconer Sometimes I just want to sink into an expansive work of non-fiction. How to Be Avant-Garde, which came out from W. W. Norton in February, is a good choice for this. It’s an idiosyncratic look at one of my personal favorite eras of art, the rise of Modernism at the turn of the century, and all its attendant avant-gardes. Falconer, an art critic and historian, structures the book around a peculiar rallying cry, that of the “death of art” as espoused by figures as varied as Andre Breton, Emmy Hennings, Hugo Ball, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Piet Mondrian; what they meant by this, he argues, was a dissolution of the line dividing art from “real life.” This is interesting, but for me, the best parts of the book occur when he forgets about his thesis and just narrates the lives and beliefs of his chosen writers, visual artists, and filmmakers; the pleasure and joy he gets from their work shines through. If you’ve been stuck in an artistic rut, it’s a good book to help you get motivated again, and I learned quite a bit about the everyday lives of the artists included—I had no idea, for instance, how many and what kinds of day jobs Marcel Duchamp held over his lifetime (a lot, and none that were particularly glamorous). 5. A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile, Aatish Taseer Blending memoir, journalism, and travelogue, Taseer writes movingly about questions of national identity, borders, exile, and what makes a citizen in this collection forthcoming from Catapult in July. “To lose one’s country,” he writes of the experience of being stripped of his Indian citizenship by the Modi government, “is to know an intimate shame, like being disowned by a parent, turned out of one’s home. Your country is so bound up with your sense of self that you do not realize what a ballast it has been until it is gone.” Two highlights for me included an essay on Morocco and the inexplicable experiences one can encounter while traveling, as well as an essay on oud and the history of perfume in the West and the East. 6. The Ways of Paradise, Peter Cornell (translated by Saskia Vogel) You can read my thoughts on this book-length essay, which Fitzcarraldo released in North America in March, at The Atlantic. 7. Lost Illusions, Honoré de Balzac (translated by Raymond N. MacKenzie) I read this on and off from January onwards, and I finally finished it in a tremendous, page-turning rush in April. As a city, the New York I live in, with its constant, often brutal, preoccupation with money, accumulation, and social maneuvering, feels closer in spirit to Balzac’s Paris than the freewheeling and borderline-bankrupt metropolis of the seventies and early eighties that people so often invoke when talking about New York. A must-read for every writer. 8. Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer: Essays, Wendell Berry I dropped my eight-year-old iPhone on the floor of my partner’s apartment in the middle of April, finally destroying—with a satisfying thunk against his bathroom’s tiles—a piece of technology I’ve found myself feeling increasingly ambivalent towards. Since then, I’ve switched to a much dumber phone and have been decreasing my screen time. I read this Wendell Berry book, based on a Harper’s essay of his from the 1980s, as background reading for a piece I’m working on about the experience, and I hated it—Berry’s solution to not buying a computer is to just have his wife type everything for him. 9. Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes (translated by Ann Goldstein) Why did it take me so long to read this? My friend Margarita has been after me to dive into Céspedes’s work for forever, and I found this novel—first published in Italian in 1952—hard to put down. Following Valeria, a 43-year-old wife and mother in postwar Rome, as she begins a secret diary and experiences a personal reawakening, its gender politics are surprisingly relevant in 2025 (her son’s arguments about working women feel like they could have come from the more unsavory corners of Twitter). 10. Face It: A Memoir, Debbie Harry By the time I finished this, I regretted picking it up. Prompted by a late-night viewing of the music video for “Rapture” on YouTube in preparation for a karaoke birthday party, I read this upon realizing I didn’t know much about Harry or the genesis of Blondie. When I reached the last page, I still didn’t know much. Harry comes across as wishy-washy and snide, her career an accident rather than something she actively worked towards (don’t get me started on her asides about Madonna). A huge disappointment. 11. Here Is New York, E. B. White Including this on my books read list feels a little like cheating since it’s just a stand-alone version of White’s famous essay for Horizon magazine about New York. But it’s a classic for a reason, and I hadn’t read it in years. 12. Ellis Island, Georges Perec (translated by Harry Matthews, with an afterword by Monica De La Torre) I spent a lot of time in April thinking about New York as both a concept and a place, prompted by a long walk from the top to the bottom of Manhattan I completed with my partner in March. This slim meditation on immigration and exile came out of a short film about Ellis Island that Perec worked on with the director Robert Bober in 1978. Highly recommend. Film 1. 32 Sounds, dir. by Sam Green (2022) This was my second time seeing this documentary. The first time, at Film Forum, audience members were given special headphones to accompany this deep-dive into the science and history of sound. Watching it at home, without the headphones, was admittedly less exciting, but I still enjoyed it. Two favorite parts: every interview with Annea Lockwood, the avant-garde composer who lit a piano on fire in the 1960s, and the term “room tone,” which refers to the sound of a room when no one inside of it is speaking. 2. Field Notes, dir. by Vashti Harrison (2014) An experimental documentary short about the ghost lore of Trinidad and Tobago. It’s not the kind of documentary that is going to give you a lot of history; it’s more experiential than that, focusing more on visual and aural fragments that lend a “haunted” feeling to the viewer. I loved it. Music and the performing arts 1. The Tension Tour, Kylie Minogue Armed with extremely cheap nosebleed tickets, I went to see Kylie Minogue live at Madison Square Garden with my friend Chris and his husband, and it was so much fun. I have a huge soft spot for a pop diva, and Minogue puts on a great show. It wasn’t a life-changing experience like when I saw the Queen of Pop herself at MSG in January 2025—Minogue has always skewed a little more commercial than Madonna, even when she’s having her “indie Kylie” moments—but I danced all night and couldn’t stop smiling. One caveat: I wish she had played more—anything!—from 1997’s Impossible Princess or 2003’s Body Language. 2. Owls at the U.C. Berkeley performing arts center Owls is a new string quartet featuring the unusual line-up of one violinist, one violist, and two cellists, rather than the traditional two violinists. This was a really wonderful concert, an unexpected and treasured moment on a Sunday afternoon featuring two original compositions—one inspired by the Noguchi Museum in Queens—by quartet member Paul Wiancko (who also plays with the Kronos Quartet), as well as work by the Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, the minimalist composer Terry Riley, and more. They basically just played their entire first album, which you can find on Spotify. 3. Blue Veil, Lucy Railton I spent an entire Saturday listening to this new album by the British cellist Lucy Railton on repeat as I wrote. There are moments in which her bow scrapes the strings so roughly that the noises emitted sound almost like a helicopter, provoking an ensuing feeling of dread; there are also sweeter and more meditative passages. I also recommend her 2020 album 5 S-Bahn, recorded in Berlin and featuring the sounds of the railway. Visual Arts Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art If you’re in the Bay Area between now and September, go see this show! It is a vast and detailed look at Asawa’s sixty-year-career, including her extraordinary abstract sculptures made from looped wire. The way she was able to bend the wire so that it almost looks like some kind of organic material—fur, say, or human hair—is mind-boggling. Also, I learned that her wedding ring was designed by Buckminster Fuller!
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