This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
“When I was nine or ten and lived in a dark fourth-floor apartment in a building that had seen better days, I fantasized mansions that were more suited to my romantic nature,” Linda Lewis wrote in The Atlantic in 1978.
Anglophone readers of Mieko Kanai’s whirling, urgent novel Mild Vertigo will face only one disappointment: There’s not yet much more where it came from. Kanai was born in Japan in 1947 and has written roughly 30 novels and story collections over the course of a career that has also included poetry, criticism, and essay writing, but so far only a fraction of her body of work has appeared in English.Mild Vertigo, translated by Polly Barton, should generate high demand for more.
During the spring of 2020, I found myself thinking a lot about the fact that I was living through a historic disaster. I read about past wars and crises, trying to calm myself with the knowledge that prior generations had been through worse. I can see now that I was distracting myself from my own day-to-day.
Arguably, no mode of writing has influenced the past decade of novels more than autofiction, a catchall term for books that call themselves fiction while claiming to be rooted, in some way, in their authors’ real lives. Amid this boom, critics and readers alike have shown a certain anxiety over how based in fact a novel can be—and how anyone might know, given that no autofiction writer purports to be telling the complete, unadulterated truth.
At the bookstore where I used to work, we shelved fiction in four separate categories. Crime novels shared a wall with speculative fiction; romance had a set of freestanding shelves. The rest of the fiction room was devoted to literary fiction, which, unlike the others, we never identified by genre name. The publishing industry tends to treat literary as a descriptor, a nod to a work’s artistic quality or aspirations.
GETTY / ARSH RAZIUDDIN / THE ATLANTICMy earliest memories are connected by a sense of fear without the threat of harm. I remember being frightened by news stories, dark basements, and even a painting by a family friend. I was an imaginative kid, and these memories are ones of invented dread: A tabloid photo of a burning building once shook me up for a week, though I had never even seen a fire. In part, these made-up fears were the result of a lucky, protected childhood.
(Yael Malka)In college, I took a three-semester class sequence on European intellectual history taught by a long-tenured professor, Mary Gluck, who lectured straight through each session, usually reserving the last five minutes for questions. To some, this model was a nightmare; I loved it.