Transit Summer Staff Picks

Ashley Nelson Levy, Publisher

When I first moved to New York City to try to become a writer, I considered a series of side jobs to help pay my way. During the search I came across a post on Craigslist for “foot worker” and, intrigued, I clicked. The ask was to show up at an undisclosed location in the Lower East Side for a fixed amount of hours per day and allow patrons to touch your feet. The pay was fantastic, enough so that I continued to think about it, about what I might be willing to give of my body in the name of pursuing my art. On top of the money, I’m sure some part of me also considered the potential for writing material.

I didn’t end up taking that job, but I thought of it on a trip to Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn last week when picking up Sophia Giovannitti’s Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex (Verso), packaged in a slim and seductive hardcover. Giovannitti, a writer and conceptual artist, examines the politics of the contemporary art world alongside her time as a sex worker in New York, a job she took as an artist attempting to make ends meet. What’s gripping about the narrative is the way Giovannitti shows us how much the two worlds have in common. We spend our lives being told that art and sex shouldn’t be commodified, she argues, and yet both industries are capitalism’s stress points, filled with stratified prices, exploitation, scams, and the ability to traffic in a particular feeling provoked in another person. It asks how we reckon with desire, beauty, and the stuff of our souls and our bodies when they become transactional. How it changes them, or us. “You are called to sacrifice yourself,” she writes, “or that which you hold dearest; you do things that were previously unimaginable to you; you are at different times exalted and exploited; and your ambitions, once ambient, crystallize viciously both in and out of reach. Getting what you want means giving something up.” In crisp, unflinching prose, the artist finds her own way to freedom from all of it.

Order Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex from Greenlight Bookstore.

Adam Z. Levy, Publisher

Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife begins as you’d imagine, with the recollection of a divorce: “My husband left me four years ago. Why—I don’t precisely understand, and never did. Nor, I suspect does he.” But the reasons aren’t entirely opaque: her husband leaves her because he’s less comfortable with her infidelities than she is with his. This is New York in the 1920s—a Jazz Age New York deliciously evoked—and the divorcée is Pat. Pat is not merely a divorcée but an “ex-wife,” a distinction her friend reserves for women for whom being left “explains everything else.” 

“Everyone kept saying to me, nowadays, ‘You’ll feel differently after your divorce,’ or ‘You’ll feel better after your divorce.’ Just as they say, ‘You’ll feel better after you have your tonsils out,’ or ‘after the baby is born’ or ‘after you eat.’ I wondered if doctors said to the very old, ‘You’ll feel better after you’re dead.’”

A bestseller when it was first published, anonymously, in 1929—and re-issued this year by McNally Editions—Ex-Wife is pure Hot Girl Summer canon, as fun and candid as you could hope for, following Pat from speakeasy to fling and back, at a time when Victorian morals and an attendant misogyny had to adapt to “the era of the one-night-stand.” Parrott’s depiction of a young woman hemmed in by and pushing back against these forces is not quite liberatory but something like it. 

Order Ex-Wife from House of Books.

Jarrod Annis, Sales and Marketing Manager

At its core, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (Dalkey Archive/Deep Vellum) is a picaresque road novel about Vera Cartwell’s cross-country bus trip to What Cheer, Iowa in search for her childhood nanny, the titular Miss MacIntosh—but that’s like saying In Search of Lost Time is about remembering a cookie. Yet, the book somehow defies any other description.

Marguerite Young’s writing is so sensuous and vivid that each paragraph is almost psychoactive, capable of inducing a meditative state—or a complete stupor. She was basically the Rothko of purple prose, writing in gorgeously dense layers of language that could make Proust blush, while the kaleidoscopic array of characters is beyond Dickensian. It’s a gloriously impenetrable book, but that’s part of what makes it great. You don’t read Miss MacIntosh, My Darling so much as you consult it periodically, if only to remind yourself of the sheer possibilities of language and storytelling. It’s like the richest dessert you can imagine—it might only be possible to eat one or two bites, but those bites are absolute bliss and perfection.

The fact that Miss MacIntosh, My Darling isn’t routinely ranked (or ranked at all) as one of, if not THE great American novel is a complete travesty. It’s a book of magnitude and craft that took 20 years to write, one of the longest novels ever written, and a prime example of a writer giving everything there is to give. I’m eagerly awaiting the new edition on the way from Dalkey Archive, in hopes Marguerite Young will finally ascend to her rightful place among literature’s true heavyweights.

Preorder Miss MacIntosh, My Darling from Community Bookstore.

Tricia Viveros, Publishing Assistant

“There are days when I am ashamed of the state of the Splendid. But the sight of the swamp helps me to forget about my failures. The Splendid has the advantage of being in a unique place. The swamp is misunderstood.”

Hôtel Splendid by Marie Redonnet (tr. Jordan Stump) tells the story of three sisters, Ada, Adel, and an unnamed narrator, as they navigate day-to-day life in a decaying, isolated hotel. Though closely bonded, the three couldn’t be more unalike: Ada, the eldest, is frail and sickly, inhabiting a state of unwavering discontent. Adel, an aspiring theater actress, dreams of stardom, charming the hotel guests with her whimsies in the meantime. But at the crux of this sisterhood, and at the heart of the inn’s operations, is our narrator, the even-keeled and pragmatic hotelkeeper, determined to protect her late grandmother’s legacy at all costs.

When I first started reading Hôtel Splendid, I couldn’t help but marvel at the topography of the swamplands, a landscape as enchanting to me as it is unfamiliar. Redonnet’s marshy backdrop is bleak and unforgiving, plaguing the hotel and its dwellers with pests, disease, and disrepair. The hotelkeeper writes of these events in placid but disjointed sentences that unfurl with disquieting ease. Her devotion to the hotel and her family, in spite of their apparent decline, feels almost neurotic. She displays traces of a volatility similar to the marshlands that raised her. But it’s likely due to this that she prevails. Marie Redonnet’s 1986 classic reveals a world that is as resplendent as it is disturbed, one where to succumb to impermanence proves more worthwhile than to resist.

Order Hôtel Splendid from Skylight Books.