[{"id":275740,"date":"2026-08-14T07:25:56","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T11:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275740"},"modified":"2026-08-14T07:25:56","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T11:25:56","slug":"miranda-july-jamel-brinkley-and-more-on-their-favorite-rereads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/miranda-july-jamel-brinkley-and-more-on-their-favorite-rereads\/","title":{"rendered":"Miranda July, Jamel Brinkley, and More on Their Favorite (Re)reads"},"content":{"rendered":"

This first appeared in Lit Hub\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Craft of Writing\u00a0newsletter\u2014sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ed Park<\/a><\/strong>
\nI am eternally dipping into the world of Charles Portis (especially\u00a0The Dog of the South<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0True Grit<\/em><\/a>), Nicholson Baker\u2019s\u00a0U and I<\/em><\/a>, Renata Adler\u2019s\u00a0Speedboat<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Memoirs of Lady Hyegy\u00f6ng<\/em><\/a>. Sebald, too\u2014mainly\u00a0The Rings of Saturn<\/em><\/a>. Lately I am losing myself again in the\u00a0Samguk Yusa<\/em><\/a>, a thirteenth-century collection of ancient Korean lore.<\/p>\n

I recently reread\u00a0The Catcher in the Rye<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Breakfast of Champions<\/em><\/a>. I didn\u2019t fully grasp the depths of sadness in both when I encountered them as a young reader.<\/p>\n

Amit Chadhuri<\/a><\/strong>
\nIn the last fifteen years, I have been rereading two books that I first read as a teenager in English translation and then forgot about: the\u00a0Bhagavad Gita<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Upanishads<\/em>. I read them not as religious texts but as the earliest examples of creative-critical writing in which thought and poetry come together, and as key works for modernism. I also go back sometimes to the Irish poet-critic Tom Paulin\u2019s collection of critical essays,\u00a0Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State<\/em>, for its extraordinarily shrewd and enlivening readings of poets like John Clare and Elizabeth Bishop.<\/p>\n

And I find myself returning to Paulin\u2019s translations\u2014more akin to Lowell\u2019s \u201cimitations\u201d than to conventional translations\u2014of mainly European poets in\u00a0The Road to Inver<\/em>, especially the poem \u201cBournemouth\u201d by Paul Verlaine, which, in Paulin\u2019s version, speaks to me on many levels. Tagore\u2019s songs\u2014so exquisite in the original Bengali\u2014I reread each time I sing them from the\u00a0Gitabitan<\/em>\u00a0or Collected Songs. Some of Woolf\u2019s essays in their entirety; paragraphs from Naipaul\u2019s\u00a0A House for Mr Biswas<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Enigma of Arrival\u2014<\/em>these reward repeated reading.<\/p>\n

Jamel Brinkley<\/a><\/strong>
\nCurrently, I\u2019m in the habit of rereading\u00a0The Transit of Venus<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Shirley Hazzard and\u00a0Angels<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Denis Johnson.\u00a0Transit<\/em>\u00a0has this tremendous scale and a startling capacity to shift between the intimate and the grand, as well as an intricate architecture.\u00a0Angels<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t feel architectural in nearly the same way, but the strange impulses and movements of the book are really appealing. Both books offer incredible prose. Generally, the fiction I find myself rereading includes Morrison\u2019s\u00a0Sula<\/em><\/a>, Edward P. Jones\u2019s two short story collections, and Marilynne Robinson\u2019s\u00a0Housekeeping<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kevin Kwan<\/a><\/strong>
\nEvelyn Waugh\u2019s novels are a perennial favorite of mine, especially\u00a0Brideshead Revisited<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Decline and Fall<\/em><\/a>. To me they just get deeper and funnier with each reading, and you really get to appreciate not only what a genius satirist he was, but also how beautiful his writing was and how he evoked a sense of place. I also love re-reading Dominick Dunne\u2019s books. I read\u00a0People Like Us<\/em><\/a>\u00a0when it was first released in the late 1980s, and his glamorous depictions of New York society was one of the things that lured me to move there myself.<\/p>\n

After a few years of Manhattan living and encountering the sort of people he wrote about, I came to appreciate what an astute observer of human nature he was, and rereading the book helped me see that whole crowd in a whole new light. I feel the same way about\u00a0An Inconvenient Woman<\/em><\/a>, which is Dunne\u2019s ode to Los Angeles. After living in LA for a while, I reread it and began to see the city on a whole other level. It revealed so much about the overlapping circles of influence and why this town operates in the unique way that it does. I recently read it again and learned yet another fascinating facet of Hollywood history\u2014this time about a notorious murder.<\/p>\n

Miranda July<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I read Alice Munro\u2019s stories again and again. When you get to the phrase \u201ctoo much joy\u201d in\u00a0All Fours<\/em><\/a>, know that this was my acknowledgment of her gift to me as a writer and to this book specifically. She died at a wonderfully old age on\u00a0 the day\u00a0All Fours<\/em><\/a>\u00a0came out, which of course means nothing, except that I cried in a cab in NY in a moment when I had expected to only feel wonderful. Which is very Munro.<\/p>\n

Kathryn Davis<\/a><\/strong>
\nMostly these days all I want to do is reread. I want to get a picture of who I am now as opposed to who I was when I first read\u2014for example\u2014Wuthering Heights<\/em><\/a>. It seems like romance was the only thing on my mind (would Cathy and Heathcliff ever \u201cget together?\u201d) back then, as opposed to being fascinated, more recently, with what Emily Bronte had to say about the deadly toll Romance takes on the human psyche.<\/p>\n

Anne Carson<\/a><\/strong>
\nHomer\u2019s\u00a0Iliad.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This first appeared in Lit Hub\u2019s\u00a0Craft of Writing\u00a0newsletter\u2014sign up here. Ed Park I am eternally dipping into the world of Charles Portis (especially\u00a0The Dog of the South\u00a0and\u00a0True Grit), Nicholson Baker\u2019s\u00a0U and I, Renata Adler\u2019s\u00a0Speedboat,\u00a0The\u00a0Memoirs of Lady Hyegy\u00f6ng. Sebald, too\u2014mainly\u00a0The Rings<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":275741,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6,43070],"tags":[111783,7693,37989,10353,26130,6618,3763,67126],"class_list":["post-275740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","tag-amit-chadhuri","tag-ed-park","tag-jamel-brinkley","tag-kathryn-davis","tag-kevin-kwan","tag-miranda-july","tag-rereading","tag-the-craft-of-writing","story-type-rereading","story-type-the-craft-of-writing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Jq","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-2026-08-13T171952.605.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275727,"date":"2026-08-14T06:30:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T10:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275727"},"modified":"2026-08-14T09:11:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T13:11:38","slug":"lit-hub-daily-august-14-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-august-14-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: August 14, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":" TODAY: In 1969, Leonard Woolf dies. <\/span>\n