Computer Angels + Hungry Crones

More Reading from 2025

One of the funnest book parties I went to in 2025 was Aidan Arata’s shindig at Bar Henry, celebrating the release of her essay collection You Have a New Memory. I really love Aidan’s voice, her literary voice - dreamy, sharp and comfortable, vulnerable and friendly. I mean, any book where the author refers to both astrology and her anxiety so casually, as if she trusts that I, too, have a relationship with astrology and my own anxiety - I am wired to connect with such a book.

Also, Aidan’s book swag won an award in my heart - little socks with anti-slip globs on the soles like the kind my kid wears to his dance class; a little ‘computer angel’ lapel pin; strange mystical bumper stickers. At the party there were readings by Melissa Broder and Emma Specter and a cake with the book cover on it made by a cakemaking friend of the author’s parents, and there were astrology readings if you were lucky enough to snag one (I was not). Computer Angel attire was encouraged, which seemed to bring out a lot of small purses with pearl handles, and slip dresses. Maybe an actual tinsel halo on a wire. Anyway, it was a fun time and please, authors, in 2026 let us make a community resolution to outdo one another with our book parties, okay?????

I bought Violette LeDuc’s The Lady and the Little Fox Fur many years ago, when I saw it at Shakespeare + Co. in Paris. It is a very slim volume and there is no reason it should have taken me this long to read. For the record, both my sister and I took online DO YOU HAVE ADHD quizes this year and we both scored almost. Anyways, the cover of this book really irks me. The novella is specifically about a tragic elderly woman who is slowly starving to death from poverty, who anthropomorphizes her fox stole (among other things) and bonds with it deeply. The cover of my edition displays a happy little girl playing dress-up in a short fur coat. It feels like the final blow to both the doomed old woman, replaced in her own story by a child, and to Violette LeDuc herself. LeDuc wasn’t exactly this specific tragic older woman, but she probably was in her soul, and I can’t imagine she’d appreciate this youth-washing of her flagrantly OLD protagonist. Sigh. Anyway, it’s a brief, sad story of an old woman who is losing her mind from hunger - kind of like Knut Hamsum’s Hunger, for girls. A must for any lovers of LeDuc, of course.

I love reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. I love it’s history - so much Ginsberg and Bukowski and Braverman and Cervenka. On one recent visit my husband brought along his ghost hunting equipment - digital and analog - and yes, the joint is haunted, if you hadn’t noticed. I really love checking out the bookstore at Beyond Baroque because they always have some sort of used goodie I once had long ago and somehow lost. High Risk volumes, or other small press offerings. This year I spotted Sapphire’s American Dreams, which I hadn’t read since the 90s when everyone was reading it, especially those of us writing confessional poetry. It’s still shockingly bold all these years later, devastating, completely void of fucks. I remember how much I valued it in my 20s, and how grateful I was for publishers like High Risk, who I know I’ve hailed here before, but they really just drove home the fact that you can write about anything, with strength and boldness and without shame.

Speaking of boldly shameless writing, I finally finished McKenzie Wark’s Reverse Cowgirl; I’d put it down for a second some time ago, and then before I knew an egregious amount of time had elapsed and I grabbed it and gobbled up the rest. A trans memoir that’s also a drug memoir, travel memoir, thought memoir, fag memoir, a sex memoir; an auto-ethnography that snatches from theory and autofiction and whatever it wants. I remember it was Vera Blossom who told me to read it, and I can see Wark’s influence in How to Fuck Like a Girl, in the claiming of an entire trans life, pre-transition included, moments of trying and failing or exulting in being boy, even as the realization grows that it is perhaps not enough. Definitely one of my favorite memoirs, written in the sort of brainy detached tone of a writer with nearly all her planets in Virgo.

Okay, must cut this off to make air fryer latkes. I’ll let you know how they go.

Love, Michelle