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In the U.K., when people stop smoking, they say they “gave it up,” Melissa Febos notes in her new book, The Dry Season. In the U.S., by contrast, it’s more common to hear that they “quit.” She observes that giving something up has a different connotation; to do so is “to hand it over to some other, better keeper. To free one’s hands for other holdings.” The phrasing matters: Giving up feels gentler, and also perhaps more generative.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:
Fast times and mean girlsThe real message behind Les MisérablesHow one animal divided EuropeSeven books for people figuring out their next move
The Dry Season is a memoir about the year Febos spent voluntarily celibate, and this week, she wrote for The Atlantic about six books that celebrate refusal and abstinence. The titles she chose opened her eyes to “all the other kinds of reneging I’ve experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights,” she writes. In her own book, Febos uses a striking metaphor to explain why she took a break from sex, dating, and even flirtation. Whenever she had a partner, she writes, “it made sense to keep the channel of one’s heart narrowed the width of a single person, to peer through the keyhole at a single room rather than turn to face the world.” Febos realized that she wanted, instead, to widen her aperture, and found that removing something from her life opened her up to all the other things that had escaped her notice. In essence, her book argues, saying no to one thing allows you to say yes to something else.
At a talk with the essayist and fellow memoirist Leslie Jamison earlier this week in New York, Febos said that her book is really about finding God, but she told the world that it was about sex because, she joked, it made for better marketing. Her description of discovering the sublime in daily things—such as the “tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets,” as she writes in her recommendation list—moved me. It reminded me that spirituality can be less restrictive and more dynamic than I usually imagine it to be; that it can be found in smaller phenomena and stiller moments. My colleague Faith Hill, in her review of The Dry Season, came to much the same conclusion about the benefits of marshaling one’s attention: “Better to keep drawing it back, again and again, to the world around you: to the pinch in your shoe, to the buds in the trees, to the people—all the many, many people—who are right there beside you.” Febos’s book made me wonder what narrow portals I’m looking through in my life, and what I might see if I turn away from them.
Edward Hopper / Artothek / Bridgeman Images
What to Read When You’re Ready to Say No
By Melissa Febos
Purposeful refusal, far from depriving us, can make way for unexpected bounty.
What to Read
Untold Night and Day, by Bae Suah
The page-turning plot twists and thrills of a detective novel are often a very effective bulwark against boredom. The Korean writer Bae’s novel offers those genre pleasures and more: It is, as Bae’s longtime translator Deborah Smith explains in her note, a detective novel by way of a “poetic fever dream.” Set over the course of one very hot summer night in Seoul, the book follows a woman named Ayami as she attempts to find a missing friend. As she searches, she bumps into Wolfi, a detective novelist visiting from Germany, and enlists him in her quest. Events take on a surreal quality, heightened by both an intense heat wave and the possibility that Ayami and Wolfi may have stumbled into another dimension. Summer’s release from our usual timetables can quickly lead to seasonal doldrums. Untold Night and Day, set during the stretched hours of a sweaty, unceasing evening, shimmers at its edges, like midnight in July. — Rhian Sasseen
From our list: Five books that will redirect your attention
Out Next Week
📚 UnWorld, by Jayson Greene
📚 The Möbius Book, by Catherine Lacey
📚 The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Your Weekend Read
Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic*
What Trump Missed at the Kennedy Center
By Megan Garber
Little wonder that “Do You Hear the People Sing?” [from Les Misérables] has become a protest song the world over, its words invoked as pleas for freedom. Crowds in Hong Kong, fighting for democracy, have sung it. So have crowds in the United States, fighting for the rights of unions. The story’s tensions are the core tensions of politics too: the rights of the individual, colliding with the needs of the collective; the possibilities, and tragedies, that can come when human dignity is systematized. Les Mis, as a story, is pointedly specific—one country, one rebellion, one meaning of freedom. But Les Mis, as a broader phenomenon, is elastic. It is not one story but many, the product of endless interpretation and reiteration. With the novel, Hugo turned acts of history into a work of fiction. The musical turned the fiction into a show. And American politics, now, have turned the show into a piece of fan fic.
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