In one of my favorite forewords to one of my all-time favorite unclassifiable books, the author complains that we’ve got too many books already, apologizes for adding one more to the pile, and wonders why even bother. Never mind that he’s writing the foreword in the 17th century. Never mind that the book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, is a freaking delight, and that the author, Robert Burton, built something practically new—a wildly erudite, wildly funny account of the history of various kinds of what we’d call depression these days—by weaving his lived experience with an astounding, capacious knowledge of everything written on the subject. Never mind all that: he’s half-joking, half-serious about there being too many books already, and he’s writing before Moby Dick or Ulysses or Twilight or the version/sequel/spinoff of Twilight from Edward’s POV.
It is possible, though who am I to say, that we may be at peak too-many-books now, in the 21st century, and so why add more?
Why, too, when arguably we have lots of people putting out great new books? And great old books? I discovered The Anatomy of Melancholy because the New York Review of Books reissued it, and that’s how I’ve been first exposed to many authors and texts I would have otherwise missed: weird cosmic horror from the 1940s and 1950s, proto-autofiction from Scandinavians, comic and deft writing from writers like Elaine Dundy and Eve Babitz, and generally awesome and unjustly neglected stuff from decades past. Plus, there’s all the incredible stuff that came out last week, plus whatever’s coming out in the fall—so many books waiting for us in our Goodreads TBR pile, or piled high on our nightstand, glowering because (let’s be honest) some of those books have been there for months.
Which is all to say: we have enough books, surely. But also, we don’t.
We don’t in the same way we don’t have enough flowers or birds or art or whatever, in that we never tire of the endless possibility and variation in beauty. But also: we’re in a moment in time where the publishing industry feels like it’s getting panicky, so some books that should be out in the world aren’t. These books are too weird or they’re just weird enough but not in a marketable way, or they’re not what people think readers want, though no one knows, not really, what readers are in the mood for.
Look: I’m a writer. I hang out with writers. We’re all grateful to see our books make it out into the world. We’re also baffled when they do, because we see so much good writing go unpublished. Some of that good writing is our own, sure, and we get to grouse about that. But a lot—a lot—of that good writing is the work we see from peers and acquaintances and good friends and also strangers: just amazing stories and novels that have inexplicably, criminally, not been released in book form.
When Jackleg Press asked me if I’d like to be one of their fiction editors, I said yes because I saw how I could add my own peculiar readerly enthusiasms into an already energetic conversation. Jennifer Harris is Jackleg’s chief editor, and the press has a longstanding tradition of publishing poetry collections. They were excited about trying out fiction. I said yes because I already knew, right from the start, the kinds of books I wanted out in the world that I had not seen enough of yet.
I love story collections, for one thing, and I’m always excited to pick them up, to read them, and I never quite can get enough of them. And—for me—the weirder and more formally innovative a story collection is, the better. And I already had at least two or three such collections in mind. What I had imagined was that I’d reach out to peers whose work I admired and I’d get them to send me manuscripts I had already read and could vouch for. I’d read a few of those already, from people I long admired. I’d read the whole thing with admiration and also with a sense of reverse envy, like that weird crude line-drawing of that face with a party hat in all those memes: I’m one of the few people who’s actually read this book. Nobody knows how awesome it is. No one knows it’s a book because it’s not a book. Yet. It doesn’t technically exist.
That was the plan, anyway.
What astonished me is how many amazing books I’ve discovered from writers I was in no way acquainted with—writers I immediately wanted everyone to know about. And most of these were remarkable writers of short fiction who had published widely in journals but did not have a collection yet. And it made sense, sure, for presses to be shy about story collections. The conventional wisdom is that they don’t sell (but it turns out they do, or that they can).
But also: I am wired for strange. I love things that are off-kilter, that come at you from the side. My own work can be horrific, it can be absurd, it can be funny. It’s often voice-driven. But that’s all a result of a copious appetite for all kinds of work—and yes, that includes 17th-century books about depression, but also anything urgent and current that is doing something with people and places and character that I have not seen before.
I had never quite seen, for example, an entire collection of stories built around books that don’t exist, as well as books that do, and also books that I’m still not sure about. Sure, there’s some Borges in that concept, but what Joachim Glage did in The Devil’s Library is very much its own thing: that’s the first book I acquired that is coming out of Jackleg.
The Devil’s Library is due out September 15. This is Glage’s debut, and it’s astonishing, not just for its playfulness and its sure-footedness and its general all-around erudite badassery—though that would be enough—but it’s also astonishing to me that the book was just sitting there, in a Submittable queue, alongside hundreds of other submissions. This is the kind of manuscript that has a clear glowing core to it. Sofia Samatar described it as “fiendishly entertaining” and there’s this undeniability to the love that Glage has for story, for libraries, for the ways in which authors grapple with the rift between the world and the word. It was a delight to edit. It was also, in the best way, like stepping into the book itself, with me and the author deliberating on possible Burtonian prefaces and afterwords (with me, a person who loves paratexts, somewhat surprised by insisting that the book did everything it needed to do with no further explanatory notes needed)—but also realizing that this was was one of the pleasures of editing which I had not quite faced as a writer: that I was now engaged in fixing in place the version of The Devil’s Library that people would get to read. There are other versions, of course, other variants, and they would properly belong inside a story, inside another version of the book, that we would never see. That’s one of the things I love about this book: how much it loves books, how much it reminds us that it’s OK to love and to read books.
I didn’t know Glage when I said yes to his book. I suppose I still don’t know him, even though we’ve corresponded frequently and even though, as with any writer I admire, I find myself having imaginary conversations with an imaginary version of the writer long after I’ve read the book. And in Glage’s case the conversations proliferate, because there are so many authors, real and imagined, in his stories.
I also didn’t know Gemini Wahhaj when I said yes to her book, Katy Family, a collection of stories about, among other things, the Bangladeshi diaspora in Houston. All I knew was that I had never come across a more likable, more dramatically varied, more closely observed people in a long, long while. The stories here are gorgeous, and they came out in journals as beloved and well-regarded as Granta and Pleiades and The Chicago Quarterly Review. Again, this was a collection that wasn’t just good, or great, or even excellent—Katy Family felt like a book that should have been out in the world already and it was a mystery to me why it wasn’t, and it was less of a mystery that shortly after we let Wahhaj know we were interested we found out that her novel would be coming out from 7.13 Books. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t even surprised by the timing, that different readers were astonished by the same writer at roughly the same time.
I love that I get to share these books with readers, and that I get to read these books in the first place. These collections deserve all the love because, as with so much carefully arranged short fiction, they’re such a perfect distillation of narrative energy. As a writer you need to do so much to get a story to fly off the page—every paragraph has weight, every word coils around itself until the whole narrative engine is humming.
I found that same energy in Kathryn Kruse’s To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying and Alone. Kruse’s work is formally super smart, and the stories take on loneliness and professions and medical matters with incredible precision. They’re phenomenal stories, unlike any I’ve ever come across, and they do so much to refresh these odd pockets of experience we have—there’s one story that spirals out of lost luggage in a way that reminds me of a lost book in a Glage story, and also of how Wahhaj navigates the dislocation of some of her delightful, recalcitrant characters. These are all amazing writers, and it is such a strange privilege to get to have a part in getting them out into the world, soon.
Like, super soon: Joachim Glage’s The Devil’s Library is out this month. Kathryn Kruse’s To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying and Alone and Gemini Wahhaj’s Katy Family are out in early 2025, and we’ve got some other amazing books out from Chloe Clark and Mike Chin shortly after.
I’m pretty sure Robert Burton would like them. I’m also pretty sure that—like Burton—we all find ourselves in the same situation, awash in potential things to read and frustrated sometimes by not having the exact thing we want to read right at hand. What’s exciting, for me at least, is realizing that I now play a part—a small one, for sure—in trying to get that one book, the right and exact book, into someone’s hands, hopefully yours.
FICTION
The Devil’s Library
Joachim Glace
Jackleg Press
September 16th, 2024
