Catapult Staff Reads

I just started rereading Tim Lawrence’s biography of Arthur Russell, Hold On to Your Dreams, after watching a really great documentary about Arthur. He’s one of my favorite musicians, and Lawrence’s biography provides not only a nice amount of details about downtown New York in the ’70s and ’80s, but also a thorough and insightful analysis of Arthur’s life and music.

—Colin Drohan, Writing Programs Coordinator

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For the past few days I’ve wanted nothing but poetry, and specifically poetry that speaks to wildness and nature and the landscape between the Missouri and the Pacific. It’s as if clinging to words about where I feel most at ease would somehow quell the anxiety I feel about the world, about having consciously chosen to bring a human into this world right now, about not retreating to the high desert mountains where the balsalm root are currently blooming in order to homestead before the apocalypse.

One of my favorite poets, Canadian Robert Kroetsch, has a collection Seed Catalogue that I read aloud to myself over this week.

You can find the whole titular poem here.

—Jennifer Abel Kovitz, Associate Publisher

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I’m reading Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which I had to pick up after reading The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, an anthology that was brilliantly edited by Ms. Fowler. If you’re interested in reading her novel, I’d recommend going it blind—don’t even read the cover copy! Avoid spoilers to feel the full impact of the delicately paced first section of the novel.

—Casey Gonzalez, Creative Project Manager; Associate Editor, Black Balloon

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I just finished Tender Points (published by Timeless, Infinite Light). Amy Berkowitz investigates the intersection of chronic pain, invisible illness, trauma, and rape culture in this brilliant interrogation of who gets to speak and who gets to be heard. As if all of that wasn’t reason enough to pick it up, it’s also a gorgeously designed book.

I’ve also been dipping in and out of The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (Dorothy, a Publishing Project). These bizarre gems are perfect subway reading—an escape into surrealism when you’d rather ignore the fact that the man sitting next to you on your commute has decided to start clipping his fingernails.

—Allie Wuest, Editorial Assistant, Web

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I’m reading Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden in a 1994 edition published by Grove Press. Described by Susan Sontag in her foreword as “one of the masterpieces of 20th-century world literature,” it’s the brief and surreal account of a young man who travels to his birthplace to search out his father, supposedly named Pedro Paramo. The book is arranged in beautiful fragments, with scenes moving back and forth in time, and it records the narrator’s encounters with both the living and the dead.

—Jonathan Lee, Senior Editor

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Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes.

—Morgan Jerkins, In-house Contributing Editor, Web