Quincy came to the Twin Cities sometime in the mid-1990s, and I got the chance to interview him. I haven’t forgotten how nervous I was to meet him. Terrified, to be exact. Quincy was in (and famously split from) Budd Schulberg’s Watts Writers Workshop (an incident I write a bit about in Social Poetics); he wrote that stupendous biography of Miles Davis; he was/is an absolutely incredible poet and reader of his poems. Jazz and politics interweave throughout the pages of this fantastic book, forming the choruses of his most appropriate title. Yet another gem in the CHP 1990s back list.

This work is as much of a tribute to romance (all varieties) as it is to books (all forms). It makes me want to write, to explore capacities, and, naturally, participate.

A love letter to the art of the essay through the act of essays themselves. Smart, generous, bursting with curiosity, How We Speak to One Another provides the kind of pleasure any great essay collection does, upsetting our ideas and challenging the way we organize our sense of the world. A testament to the importance of the essay and evidence they aren't going anywhere.

Smith’s language is a feast for the ears. She brings to life with such vividness the beauty of her family members.

There was a book that I loved when it came out in the early nineties, Greg Mulcahy’s Out of Work, which consists of stories about losing a job, stumbling to something else, and slowly beig ground down by life. I immediately loved Leichter’s Temporary because it takes that concept and updates it for the gig economy, with a kind of whacky humor and increasingly absurd jobs—a barnacle for instance. It’s wildly inventive and written in a tripping, grinning way that makes the satire all the more effective.

In House of Coates, Brad Zellar and Alec Soth have created a truly singular work of art. I really can’t describe the wonderful magic of this book—it’s best experienced by each individual reader. The writing stays with you long after it has been read and the photographs are beautiful and unsettling. House of Coates is a must-read.

With a nod to Marcel Mauss’s essay of the same name, Barbara Browning’s fantastic, sly, ‘inappropriately intimate’ autofictional novel is a beautifully wrapped gift of unending wrappings that touches on disclosures and doxing, performance and anonymity studies, our antisocial networks, the risks of eros and that of falling in love with strangers. I loved this book!