Off The Shelf: Idle Hands, Loneliness, and Culture
Books by James Salter, Olivia Laing, Darian Leader, and Michael Helm.
Explorations of whether loneliness is a social malice, or something prehistorically determined, even necessary.
Off the Shelf
Off the Shelf: Playing with Platonisms
Books by Don DeLillo, Peter Mendelsund, and Yuri Herrera.
It’s a good time for scouring any vestiges of Platonism from one’s head.
Off the Shelf: Antibodies, Thinking Bodies, Nobodies
Books by Eula Biss, Matthew B. Crawford, and Atticus Lish.
Vulnerability, confusion, and irrational fears.
Off the Shelf: Puzzles, Polemics, and Patterns
Books by Laura Kipnis, John Gray, and Jude Stewart.
From games and gaming to puzzles and crafting, our preferences and tastes during leisure time can prove indicators of other aspects of ourselves, individually and as a social body.
Off the Shelf: Lost and Found
Books by Dinaw Mengestu, André Alexis, and Rebecca Solnit.
Forget everything you know about novels of the immigrant experience.
Off the Shelf: Material Worth
Books by Mark Miodownik, Alexandra Horowitz, and Scott Horton.
I do love it when a book with the word “enthralling” on its back cover actually turns out to be enthralling.
Off the Shelf: The Real Lives of Imagined Others
Books by Leslie Jamison, Ben Lerner, and Jenny Offill.
There’s no end to the catalogue of ways humans suffer, and manage to inflict suffering: illness and injury, psychic suffering, material deprivation, heartache, loneliness, catastrophe, separation, history, bad luck.
Read Between the Lines
Five selections for the year.
There is always time to read—the challenge is deciding which story to immerse yourself in. We’ve narrowed down the dizzying number of options to five.
Off the Shelf: Mind Field
Books by Adam Phillips, Mireille Silcoff, and Eimear McBride.
Consider for a moment the possibility that our very selves—our centred, internal, ever-present cluster of backstories we identify with the letter I—comprise as much everything we haven’t done as everything we’ve done. Everyone we haven’t become as much as who it is we find we have. Can anything useful be gleaned from the premise?
