In the sprawling, splashy “New Humans” exhibition inaugurating New York’s newly expanded New Museum (sound new enough for you?), a mechanical apparatus quietly whirrs. This tumbler, by the artist Steffani Jemison, is slowly but surely agitating and refining dredged debris: glass, coins, stone.
Having studied comparative literature as an undergraduate, Jemison often moves between writing and art in thoughtful if seemingly unlikely ways, as in her novella A Rock, A River, A Street (2021) and her solo show opening this month at Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany, which explores the “language of birds.”
Jemison’s spare works are underpinned by deep research, often into alternative literacies that have functioned as tools of resistance and that blur the boundaries between drawing and writing. She discussed several examples memorably in a 2019 essay for Artforum, where she writes, “I am looking for a route to drawing, and a route to writing, that does not pass through any masters at all.”
Intrigued by her unique lens on literature, I asked her to single out five books on her shelf: books she keeps coming back to, finds herself recommending often, and so on. She spoke about her choices below with a calm yet exacting clarity—a rare kind of clarity that manages to expand instead of foreclose. —Emily Watlington
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Counternarratives
by John Keene
The short stories in this collection fill historical gaps. Keene plays with historical language and documents and points of view; it’s super nerdy. The first story reminds me of the way Hernan Diaz plays with epic storytelling across generations in Trust. A few years after this book was published, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments came out; she uses the term “critical fabulation” to describe the process of imagining Black stories that never entered the archive. Her project is very aligned with what Keene was doing.
“Rivers” retells Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim—it predated Percival Everett’s novel. “Acrobatique” is a first-person fictional experiment in the voice of a well-known Black circus performer from the 19th century painted by Degas [named Miss La La, or Anna Olga Albertina Brown]. And “Blues” is written in the voice of Richard Bruce Nugent.
Keene is a poet writing fiction, so he enters that space with no baggage—he doesn’t hold himself to any conventions around what a short story should look like, and that leaves the question of what we really know about the past productively open. In my work, I think about the open-ended relationships between past and present. There can be a tendency to treat the contemporary as a predicate of history, but I don’t think of it that way.
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Black Aliveness
by Kevin Quashie
This is one of the books I recommend most frequently. A student recently told me she was interested in theoretical material around Black studies that does not refer primarily to enslavement. I thought that was such an interesting provocation—one that almost felt inconceivable to me based on my own training, which was shaped by the influence of writers like Toni Morrison, who wrestled deeply with American history. That request, though, sent me back to this book by Kevin Quashie.
Black Aliveness uses Black feminist poetics as a starting point for a theory of Black world-making grounded in the world-making that is already happening. It’s a beautiful, celebratory text. It’s accessible even though it’s scholarly, written in dialogue with Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and others, with lots of long quotations from beautiful poems. It can feel really affirming in moments of existential and political despair, because it insists that world-making doesn’t have to be confined to what we think of as “political.” One chapter is about the subjunctive tense—the present-speculative as an orientation toward the world that leaves space for articulating into being the relations, community, and aliveness that energizes us. My pessimist friends hate it.
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Essays One
by Lydia Davis
Few craft collections focus on the technical intricacies of writing at the level of language itself. Craft books tend to lean broad—focused on plot, on show-don’t-tell—but what’s amazing about Davis’s book is its attention to the process of revision, which feels especially generative given how tightly constructed her own writing is. She also offers a generous genealogy of her writing practice, and shares multiple drafts of the same text alongside close readings of some of her favorite authors. And it’s a genuinely pleasurable read; she writes beautifully about painting, too.
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Blacktop Wasteland
by S.A. Cosby
S.A. Cosby is a younger Black crime novelist whose work is sharp and funny. His books capture aspects of Black life in the South I’ve never encountered in any novel before: the world he describes is very working class. The book begins at a drag race, I never really see these referenced even though they’re very present in rural Southern life. It’s such a rich cultural context.
In an interview, Cosby once said that he writes his novels while watching TV at night! A friend responded that this was why his books aren’t literature, but I think it speaks to the amazing porousness of the writing process: you can just do it all the time and accept any and all input.
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Slow Mania
by Nazareth Hassan
I saw two of Hassan’s plays this past year. Bowl EP is a text built around a dialogue between two characters that explodes into another form: it’s narratively playful and experimental from beginning to end, with vignettes that feel almost song-like. Practice had an extended run at Playwrights Horizons and is a reflection on the process of artistic production itself. Both are among the Blackest things I saw this year, in an incredible way; they poke and provoke and open up the experience of being a Black artist. I both loved it all and found it complicated.
Slow Mania, published by Futurepoem, is a beautiful extension of that energy. The book includes both photographs and language, and some of my favorite parts capture something about the texture of living in Brooklyn right now. The space they create is very dreamy.
