Books like Critical Assembly — picked by fans

I discovered Marianne Wiggins through this stellar novel, which was a National Book Award Finalist.

It’s an epic love story spanning many decades and two wars, and what I especially appreciated was Wiggins’ ability to weave in both the beauty and physics of light, the science of electricity and radiation.

These elements are present when the story begins, and when the story leaves Oak Ridge, where the uranium was enriched, the atomic bomb and fallout continue to follow the couple’s son, aptly named Lightfoot. I felt like I became Lightfoot, navigating my own views and understanding of the atomic age and its moral complexities.

A spare love story is the vehicle for Eleanor, the main character, to grow emotionally and artistically in her adopted desert landscape.

Through an artist’s eyes and the writer’s beautiful prose, I viewed the dry mesas and encountered the mystery of Leo Kavan, who collapses on Eleanor’s property after escaping the confines of “The Hill,” code name for Los Alamos.

I wrote to Gallagher to find out if Leo was based on Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who conceived the idea of a chain reaction that leads to the invention of the atomic bomb. She replied, "Fiction is so strange, don’t you think? A character starts out based on Leo Szilard and ends up being entirely himself, Leo Kavan." So true.

I appreciate that no one gets off easily in this exquisite novel, appropriate when writing about such complex US history.

I was immediately pulled into this impressive, experimental novel of fragments, written in the collective “we.”

Nesbit chooses to write from the point of view of three wives confronting the complex terrain and atmosphere of Los Alamos. It’s a lyrical, impressionistic condensation of the history of “The Hill” and the clash of domesticity and science.

I love details, and this novel offers an abundance of flotsam and jetsam, revealing everyday life and the desert surroundings for fans who like to gobble up glimpses of the food, birds, flora, cosmetics, drinks, and so on, of this era and place.

The triumphs and horrors of the atom bombs’ power are told from the women’s distant points of view, but this is where the collective “we” becomes more powerful, as the reader, becoming “we,” is included in the wives’ mental and emotional processing of what their husbands built.

There is much I admire in Hall’s experimental novel revolving around the charismatic, enigmatic father of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer.

Even the book’s title, Trinity, named after the first atomic test that took place in Los Alamos, isn’t easy to pin down. Because Hall makes clear even Oppenheimer doesn’t appear to be fully cognizant of why he named the historic test “Trinity.” That ambiguity shadows all her characters, who are used as prisms in a kaleidoscopic attempt to focus on the many parts of Oppie. 

In my opinion, Hall succeeds in revealing something of his character and mindset that a well-researched biography can’t fully give us. I found Trinity to be a brilliant way to examine, from the human side, the many contradictions behind winning the race to the atomic bomb.

In this book-length poem, Ross Gay manages to “talk” to the reader intimately without once “mansplaning” the way that so much of the tradition of “nature writing” has, for centuries, done. With the refrains of “what am I seeing?” and “what am I practicing?” Gay creates what feels like a genuine conversation with the reader, allowing me to ask myself the same questions as I read, to form my own thoughts and feelings, rather than passively receiving his.

In what I find to be his best work yet, Gay offers a genuine invitation to the reader to join into the seeing and feeling and meaning-making, thus making the meaning-making infinitely more meaningful. Be Holding is like a personal letter taken from its envelope, but somehow intended for all of us. It is as intricate as it is accessible and clear.

Westlake, a poet of Native Hawaiian ancestry, incorporates influences from Chinese Taoist and Japanese haiku poetry, Dada concrete poetry, the writings of Kerouac and Bukowski, as well as local pidgin and Hawaiian literary traditions. Westlake’s editor and friend Richard Hamasaki writes that the early poems are “calm, contemplative, and serene, often playful, celebratory”—humans interacting with nature, from rain, moonlight, and mountains, to bugs, frogs, and dandelions: “Looks of disbelief: / I’m on my knees / Washing a rock.” The later poems are political: “Westlake blasts away at Waikiki’s rampant tourism and American materialism, which replaced the native culture in his native land. He wonders, “how we spose / feel Hawaiian anymoa / barefeet buying smokes / in da seven eleven stoa ...?”

I loved this book as soon as I started reading it. And yet, I came across it almost by accident at a talk given by Parker Palmer, who wrote the introduction. It is a meditation on leadership, blending reflections by many leaders on how poems they each choose speak to them.

I was fascinated by the depth of emotion and thinking and have returned to this book many times over the years for quotes. It is a hidden gem. 

This book is simply the first written story ever found—and it’s about friendship! It was pressed into clay in the city of Nineveh around four thousand years ago and was re-found in the nineteenth century. It tells the story of a friendship between two men, Gilgamesh, the lord of his city, and Enkidu, ‘a wild man’ from the forests. The story recounts their adventures, then Enkidu’s death, and Gilgamesh’s grief at losing his friend. I find it extraordinary that so many thousands of years ago, human beings were concerned with the nature and power of friendship—it shows that the bonds of friendship are fundamental to human beings. 

A full-length rewrite of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” that preserves only the first and last letter of each line, Shelf is a consummate work of potential literature—from the “why on earth would someone do that” all the way to the “wait, this is actually dope.” Without ever estranging himself from Whitman’s transcendentalist trumpeting, Quintavalle burrows deep into the poem’s form and instills a disenchanted eloquence all his own.

I truly never thought I’d laugh out loud at an erasure poem. Then Ink Earl came along. Holbrook starts with a hundred copies of the original fifties ad pitch for the Pink Pearl eraser—get it yet?—and hacks away different parts of each, yielding a series of meditations and diatribes and bouts of spirited near-nonsense. The poems are consistently clever delights, and the project’s conceptual wholeness is icing on the cake.