Stephanie Kelley's Reading List

"Dubbed “the Jane Austen of sickos” for her caustic, darkly comic portrayals of the emotional brutality humans endure (and often inflict on one another), Mary Gaitskill rose to prominence again this year for her widely read #MeToo story “ This is Pleasure ”—recommended in book form by Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn in her yearly picks . After inhaling that and her acclaimed short story collection Bad Behavior , I tracked down the early novel Veronica on the recommendation of my friend Merve Emre and wasn’t disappointed. Set in the 1980s, it tells the story of the friendship between Alison, a former model now in her 40s, and Veronica, a professional proofreader desperately in love with a bisexual man, whose transmitted AIDS virus ultimately kills her. Gaitskill delights in peeling back the skins of her suffering, often nasty characters and showing you the vulnerable, frail human beings desperate for love underneath. There’s nothing quite like this book. There was a lot of fiction I loved this year, though, and maybe another title on my list might grab your attention. Vying for this spot are: A novelistic work of narrative nonfiction on desire and the failure of love for three real-life women; I reviewed it for Five Books here . An erotic and erudite (don’t often see those words together, do you?) campus novel that turns the professor-sleeping-with-his-student trope on its head by depicting a love affair between a female graduate student and her professor’s wife. This is where to start with Colette, though the late novel The Pure and Impur e is also great. Lush, desirous, beautiful, French. I lost myself in this. Another NYRB Classics I’d never heard of before picking up, this one captures the psychic disintegration of a married woman in sessions with her therapist. It’s the sentiment of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” in book form—in other words, sublime. A short novella that was out of print but has been reissued this year. An erotic thriller about a divorced NYU professor whose adventures in sex get tangled up with murderous violence. Weird, dark, sexy, disturbing. Recommend. Regardless of his politics, it’s impossible to deny the appeal of the boundless comic energy of Portnoy . The book is comprised of a young man’s monologue to his therapist. You might hate him, but you’ll love the book and be sad when it ends. A nimble domestic novel with achingly beautiful passages of prose, language distilled to its purest form. Themes include the bonds of family, the way music is embedded in all of us, the return of old flames, the visceral desire for love and belonging. Very short and can be read in an afternoon."

"A memoir of, as the title suggests, a life with Picasso, told in the most clear-eyed, emotionally sophisticated prose by Françoise Gilot, who met the artist when she was in her early twenties (he was 61). The book shows that far from a naïve, timid ingenue living in the shadow of an artist larger than life, Gilot’s tenacity and strong will was a match for Picasso’s—not to mention she was probably a good deal more mature and smarter (not to mention more benevolent) than him. A brilliant book not only on Picasso as a man and artist but also on his milieu, covering a lengthy period at the height of his fame. I’ll never forget Gilot’s story of what ended the friendship between Andre Gide and Picasso: Gide turned to Pablo and said, “There’s one thing about Françoise I like very much. She’s the kind of person who may always have remorse, but will never have regrets.” Pablo said, “I haven’t any idea what that means. I suppose Françoise has no acquaintance with regrets but she knows even less about remorse.” Gide said, “It’s easy to see there’s a dimension to her inner life which has escaped you.” A remarkably humane but damning diagnosis of a man and his faults, a testament to a great artist, an invaluable document providing a rare look behind the curtain at the fierce debates and relationships among artists in Picasso’s circle."

"Janet Malcolm is one of those writers I would follow anywhere, and this book is no exception. Topics discussed include the three sisters who together own the Argosy bookshop, a New York institution; the life and working habits of the eccentric pianist Yuja Wang; Tolstoy as a comedic writer; the fashion designer Eileen Fisher. But don’t be fooled if any seem boring. A longtime journalist for the New Yorker , Malcolm’s investigations tend to take apparently ordinary institutions or scenes and, through her unrivaled powers of curiosity, observation and description, reveal their extraordinary inner workings."

"Exhaustively researched yet philosophical and poetic in its delivery, How to Do Nothing will make you rethink your relationship to thought itself. Incorporating history, journalistic narrative, scientific studies, literature, philosophy and even the study of trees and birdwatching, Odell mounts a convincing defense of individual attention. Her observations are fresh and often surprising. She wisely points out that the boundless connectivity afforded by smartphones is no substitute for knowing your real-life neighbors (less and less a commonplace reality these days, in the age of social media); neighbors, not Facebook friends, are the networks that spring to action in the event of local emergencies and climate-related disasters. And against the grain of the average social science polemic decrying technology’s impact on our attention spans, How To Do Nothing argues that the designs modern media and technology have on our attention, while real and invasive, are ultimately shallow: it is much, much harder to penetrate and hijack levels of deep thought—the kind of reverent, insistent attention we pay to art and music. That’s the mode of devotion we should cultivate. This book changed my life, despite not a word of it being pedantic. I hope it will change yours, too."