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Happy first week of Dracula Daily for those who celebrate!
For the uninitiated, Dracula is an epistolary novel, told via letters, diaries, and telegrams that are all dated between May and November. Dracula Daily is a Substack which sends you an email with the content that occurs on each appropriate day. As a result, you read Dracula a little at a time over the course of six months, right in your email.
I love diaries. I love love stories. I love deep insightful searches of the soul and the meaning of life. I love New York City. This is all those things and more. And Oliver Sacks...sigh. Bill Hayes has created a beautiful memoir and a moving portrait of a city and one of the greatest thinkers of our time.
This is a sort of 'best of' collection from Kashua's decade plus of weekly columns for Israeli newspaper Haaretz: short, satirical pieces on life in Israel usually featuring Kashua and his family. Kashua comes off as a Kramer-esque neurotic bumbler with all the comic failures of a sitcom character. Some of his mishaps are his own fault, and some are due to existing in a world where someone else is writing the rules. Kashua's essays present his writerly daydreaming and hopes for his family, as well as the painful difficulties of life as an Arab living in Jerusalem, with miserable hilarity. You can dip in and read a few pages here or there or go straight through; the columns are presented in chronological order and make it easy to track the rise and fall of Kashua's optimism, which he reveals with disarming honesty. Recommended: Without Parents; The Court!; The Stories I Don't Dare Tell; Kashua's Complaint.
I'm a huge lover of graphic short stories as a genre (hello Jillian Tamaki and Michael DeForge), so I was excited to learn that Megan Kelso's latest would mark her return to this format. However, the five sections of Who Will Make the Pancakes? do not feel short to me--despite their brevity, each one builds a kind of intimacy that isn't usually easy to access. Kelso quietly ushers us into each of these delicate worlds and trusts us to be respectful listeners to the problems that unfold there, from the silence surrounding a predator in a community of teenage PNW climbers, to a new mother's recontextualizing of her own mother's experience of pregnancy, to a family whose domestic labor is peformed by entirely by cats. Each story glows.
