The Years

'My aim for Mother Reader has been to bring together examples of the best writing on motherhood of the last sixty years, writing that tells firsthand of the mother's experience.

Many of the writings in Mother Reader comment on and interpolate one another, in citations, in footnotes, in direct homage. As I was assembling this collection one text would lead to one another, treasure-hunt fashion, the clue provided by an acknowledgement or bibliography. And just as often the writing circles back.

In Mother Reader chapters are excerpted from autobiographies, memoirs, and novels; entries are lifted from diaries; essays and stories are culled from collections, anthologies, and periodicals. My project has been to assemble a compendium or sampler of these ''kindred spirit'' works on motherhood, so that readers, and especially mothers with limited time on their hands, can access in one volume the best literature on the subject and know where turn to continue reading." [Moyra Davey in the introduction]

Writings by Margaret Atwood, Susan Bee, Rosellen Brown, Myrel Chernick, Lydia Davis, Buchi Emeta, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Hutson, Mary Kelly, Jane Lazarre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Ellen McMahon, Margaret Mead, Vivian Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostrker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Lynda Schor, Mira Schor, Dena Schottenkirk, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Smart, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Martha Wilson, Barbara Zucker.

Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.

A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life. — Annie Ernaux

What it takes to imagine social and physical freedom is what it meant to keep reading this incredible book. — Bhanu Kapil

Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.

Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator of French and has translated over a dozen novels, including works by Zahia Rahmani, Fatima Daas, Mohamed Leftah and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Lara was born in Tunisia, grew up in the United States and currently lives in southern France.

978-1-7395161-3-0
21.6 x 13.9 cm
112 pp, paperback
September 2024

Narrative/Prose issue, featuring a special section: I was writing, but it was drawing: a Renee Gladman mini-feature with work by Renee Gladman * Earl Jackson, Jr. * Bruna Mori * Alexis Almeida on Renee Gladman & Julie Carr * Lewis Freedman & Vanessa Thill on Renee Gladman & Mirtha Dermisache. as well as work by Isabel Waidner * sissi tax (translated by Joel Scott & Charlotte Theißen) * Susan Hefuna * Mira Mattar * Lital Khaikin * Maryam Madjidi (translated by Ruth Diver) * Omer Wasim & Saira Sheikh * Ilse Aichinger (translated by Christian Hawkey & Uljana Wolf) * Bronka Nowicka (translated by Katarzyna Szuster) * Maude Pilon (translated by Simon Brown) * Mehmet Dere * Syd Staiti * Jena Osman * Germán Sierra * Natani Notah * Julia Bloch on Bernadette Mayer * Robert Glück on Clarice Lispector * Rob Halpern on Bruce Boone & Dennis Cooper *Dylan Byron on/after Bruce Boone * Linda Bakke on Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today * Anna Fidler * Corey Zielinski on Bob Glück & Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-97 * Jackie Kirby on From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice * David W. Pritchard on Kevin Killian * Dale Enggass on Simone White * Allison Cardon on Anne Boyer * Robert Balun on Leslie Kaplan * Marco Antonio Huerta on Omar Pimienta * Allison Grimaldi Donahue on Josué Guébo * Sara Florian on Lasana Sekou * Louis Bury on Allison Cobb * Hugo Gibson on Annie Ernaux.

If winning can only occur in a competition between equal opponents, someone who isn’t equal will need to adopt a different strategy and let go of the promise, or the curse, of victory. Anna Zett takes up the challenge in this collection of personal science fiction, registering the traces systems of power leave in the body, in its locomotory, nervous and digestive systems. Zett’s voice appears in several textual guises, addressing authority, resistance, trauma and the physicality of language. Dedicated to the feminist revolution, the post-socialist subject of Artificial Gut Feeling questions logocentric and capitalist beliefs about the economy of meaning. This book gathers together fists, guts and brains to gain a deeper understanding of the non-verbal roots of dialogue.

"This being is able to transform movement into speech. It winds itself about inside me like a thick snake and I have to use all my strength to let it spin and do what it does. When I wilfully try to stop it, it begins to whisper words to me and that is even more unpleasant. If I were to associate this gut feeling with an emotion, I would say disgust. But this disgust is not directly linked to your name."—Anna Zett

Faced with photos of a once-tumultuous New York art world, the narrator's mind in this scathing, darkly funny novel begins to erupt. Memories jostle for center stage, just as those that they are about always did. These brilliant but broken survivors of the '80s and '90s have now reached the brink of middle age and are facing the challenge of continuing to feel authentic. Luminous with imagery, cackling with bitter humor, and with a new foreword by the author, this roman a cle spares no one.

First published in 2003, Gary Indiana's turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene.  

During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends, many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds, who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell.  

Arguably Indiana's most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.

In a tonal mash-up of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, confessional poetry, and fortune telling, Self-Romancing draws you into the amorous and obsessive inner life of an unnamed romantic. Relatable and snarky, heartfelt and horny, L Scully fortifies irony with vulnerability, bringing readers into a narrative as intimate as slumber parties and ordinary as Trader Joe’s. Bursting with the giddy charm of the everyday, Self-Romancing plays with form, turning a book into a crush, a crank call, a manifesto. 

A disaffected young woman seeking self-estrangement and withdrawal from the world decides to quit her day job as a bookseller to live out, or live in, an experiment: to become a full-time narrator. She moves through sentences, afternoons, a rented apartment, an artist’s studio, a party, the post office with the flowering focus of a realist novel, transposing physical and social life to the space of fiction. As she chronicles the process of becoming a subject in writing, the narrator confronts her fantasy of uninterrupted interiority—and its limits.

What is “fiction” and how does one “enter” into it? Composed in the tense of Literature, Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Time of the Novel is a book about detours, psychic swerves, and surprising encounters with the Real as it converges with the written.

Do you feel it? I'm holding your hand. Come with me. Look! There's a mirror, many mirrors! They are watching us, but we don't have to care. This night belongs to us. This infinity. Come! ... World! Just watch us...as we prowl the arcades of fallen memory...