The Coiled Serpent by Camilla Grudova
r/depressionmeals, my end-times obsession, and baby's first byline!
Hi y’all,
Happy (late) Halloween!
I wrote a review of Camilla Grudova’s latest short story collection, The Coiled Serpent, for The Southwest Review. It name checks the Lex Fridman Podcast, r/depressionmeals, GoodReads, and my fiancé, so you know it’s a banger. Plus, it’s my first ever byline, so you simply must read it! Big thank you to Jimmy for giving me this opportunity!
three books for the end of the world
I just finished Ice by Anna Kavan, which reminded me a bit of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler… because of the weirdo form, the spies, the relentless and impossible quest that forms a plotless-plot, and the gorgeous descriptions that can be exact and crystalline one second, and wildly abstract the next. And the singing lemurs! The two books aren’t really otherwise all that similar. Ice is really too bizarre and hallucinatory to be truly called a sci-fi, but I suppose it is one: it follows an unnamed narrator as he hunts for the “glass girl” through an apocalyptic world that’s quickly freezing over. Although it was beautiful, it was also quite repetitive, and I think Jonathan Lethem’s (excellent) foreword illuminated too much of the novel too soon (I would have liked to come to Ice a little less prepped with a biographical interpretation)—but I do think this is a book I will return to. I already feel myself turning over its images in my head.
Before that, I read White Noise, which I didn’t like all that much. I felt a little bad about disliking it, because so many people I respect—namely, Emma, Olek, and David Foster Wallace—love it. Plus, I enjoyed End Zone when I read it in college. But Jimmy told me that, southerners don’t like Don DeLillo because we find him too cold. This genuinely made me feel better, in part because I sometimes worry the north has rubbed off on me too much. That said, I did really like the descriptions of Jack’s academic robes, and Winnie, the running neuroscientist, and SIMUVAC. The middle section—in which the protagonist and his family have to evacuate their home because of a toxic chemical spill near their town, aka Airborne Toxic Event—was my favorite part of the novel, and kinda crazy to read while watching scenes from Hurricane Helene on TikTok. Given that my childhood was so shaped by what can arguably be called a man-made natural disaster (I was ten when Katrina hit my home, New Orleans), DeLillo’s scenes of evacuation, refuge, and return felt all too familiar.
And before that, I read Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, which was totally beautiful and genuinely stunning and also shaped by natural disaster. I think you’d like this one, Bizzy. You too, Mathilde. It follows a logger in Idaho at the turn of the century. It’s an end-times book too, in it’s own way, the end of a way of life and a certain myth of America. The last few pages are extraordinary.
As you can prolly gather, I’m really into apocalypse and climate disaster books right now. Real doom and gloom stuff. I find these books are soothing to my end-times-anxiety, in what I imagine is the same way that true crime podcasts soothe the existential dread of paranoid suburbanites.1 I was also reading a lot of books about fascism this summer, but those made me genuinely insane so I had to stop.
some cognitive dissonance about voting
Honestly, I’ve felt really demoralized about voting ever since 2021, when I voted for Eric Adams in the general mayoral election, which I only did because (1) I grew up as liberal in the south and therefore am low key “vote-blue-no-matter-who”-brained, given that I’m used to voting for lackluster, centrist Democrats because Louisiana Republicans like to run KKK grand wizards and psychopaths, and (2) I do sorta feel like it’s my civic duty to vote. You might say to yourself, wow, this bitch is naïve if she’s only just now getting demoralized about voting—and you’d have a point, even though I think my hope had more to do with my fundamentally optimistic view of humanity rather than faith in any particular candidate.
Anyway, I’m no longer “voting-blue-no-matter-who”—I would literally rather lay down in the middle of 5th Ave at 5pm on a Tuesday and let an SUV from New Jersey with fake dealer plates crush me than vote for that liar and coward Kathy Hochul, who single handedly defunded the MTA earlier this year (it turns out I am a single issue voter, and embarrassingly that issue is congestion pricing)—but I am voting for Kamala.
If you live in NYC and you want to stick it to Eric Adams (and you should), vote yes to Prop 1 and no to Props 2 to 6. I find that I generally vote for candidates that the Working Family Party endorses, and you can find that list here.
Civic duty, over and out.
as we said in 2016: “mood”
no, seriously, did you read my review of The Coiled Serpent?
Don’t try to pull one on me. Click the goddamn link.
Last night, I saw Anora with Emma, Adrianna, and George. Now I’m on an Amtrak to DC for the third time this month. The old man on my left got pissy when I asked him to wear headphones while he watched his TikToks. On my right, George is doing math. What a freak!
Alright, y’all. See you on the other side!
kisses, besos, toodle-loo,
Book Notes
If I were to self-pathologize, I’d say my end-times obsession is cuz I hit puberty while we were evacuated for Katrina. I really got one-two punched into womanhood.
I didn’t love white noise either - felt like I was missing something!
And thanks also for the rundown on your recent end of the world reads. "Ice" by Anna Kavan sounds really interesting, had not heard of that book before. If you haven't read Peter Heller's "The Dog Stars," I'd recommend checking it out — a quieter and more tender novel than most in that genre.