Som-Mai Q. Nguyen

This is a very inexhaustive list, in no particular order, of some things I like a lot.

Essays

• “Trash Talk: On Translating Garbage” by Lina Mounzer
• “The Banality of Empathy” by Namwali Serpell
• “Dying on the Toilet” by Max Porter
• “Black Humor” by Paul Beatty
• “Like This Or Die” by Christian Lorentzen
• “Even if you beat me” by Sally Rooney
• “‘A book I can’t defend, a book I can’t renounce’: Reflections on a Book and a Decade of Whiteness” by Eula Biss (Notes from No Man’s Land)
• “This Brand is Late Capitalism” by Rachel Connelly
• “Playing” by Carolyn Ten Eyck
• “Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference” by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
• “Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life” by Elizabeth Wurtzel
• “This essay is just Harry Potter for people who think comparing things to Harry Potter is stupid” by Rosa Lyster
• “Information Overload” by Claire Bishop
• “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” by Zadie Smith
• “Immigrant Misappropriations: The Importance of Ichiro” by Jay Caspian Kang
• “What's With Modern Art?: Selected Short Reviews & Other Art Writings” by Frank O'Hara, ed. Bill Berkson
• "I Know What You Think of Me" by Tim Kreider
• “Welcome to Airspace” by Kyle Chayka
• “Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It” by Gregory Shill
• “How ‘Liberal’ Late-Night Talk Shows Became a Comedy Sinkhole” by Miles Klee
• “He Had His Reasons” by Colin Barrett
• “This Is Not the End of the World and You Are Not a Prepper” by Mark O'Connell
• “Raising a person in a culture full of types” by Dan Brooks
• “Fascism in Translation” by Yulia Komska
• “The Limits of the Viral Book Review” by Larissa Pham
• “The American (Sam)Bar Association” by Ritam Mehta
• “American Ghostwrister” by Sean Patrick Cooper
• “Semantic Drain and the Meaninglessness of Modern Work” by Oriana Schwindt
• “Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot: Against the Contemporary American Essay” by Jackson Arn

Books

• Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter
• A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam
• Milkman by Anna Burns
• Essayism by Brian Dillon
• Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine
• Attrib. & Other Stories by Eley Williams
• The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss
• Cinquemilla chilometri al secondo by Manuele Fior
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
• Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist
• The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Normal People by Sally Rooney
• Sabrina by Nick Drnaso
• Electric Arches by Eve Ewing
• Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
• New People by Danzy Senna

Poems

• “Confession” by Leila Chatti
• “In Defense of ‘Moist’” by Hanif Abdurraqib
• “Windchime” by Tony Hoagland
• “Snow” by Louis MacNiece
• “Object Permanence” by Nicole Sealey
• “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
• “The New York Times reports that 200 Iraqi civilians have been killed by U.S. military airstrikes” by Clint Smith III
• [Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape] by Rainer Maria Rilke
• “Eurydice” by Ocean Vuong
• “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams
• “Daedalus, After Icarus” by Saeed Jones
• “Alicante” by Jacques Prévert
• [If thou must love me] by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (and Jack Underwood’s response from Solo for Mascha Voice/Tenuous Rooms, “If you agree to love me it has to be solely”)
• “Dinosaurs in the Hood” by Danez Smith
• “The Gaffe” by C. K. Williams
• "Sound & Fury" by Claudia Rankine
• “The Opposites Game” by Brendan Constantine
• “Today I Bought a Book for You” by Clint Smith III (from Counting Descent)
• “Australia” by Ania Walwicz
• “(Hospital Vespers)” by The Weakerthans reads as an incredible sonnet
• “The Summer Day the Spike Went into My” by Kathryn Maris (from The House with Only an Attic and a Basement)

Short Fiction

• “Smote, or when I find I cannot kiss you in front of a print by Bridget Riley” by Eley Williams
• “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” by Nam Le
• “Prophets” by Brandon Taylor
• “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson
• “Blueprints for St. Louis” by Ben Marcus
• “Chemistry Read” by Lisa Owens
• “Notes from the Hospital” by Ben Marcus
• “The Baby” by Simon Rich
• “Omakase” by Weike Wang
• “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff
• “The Female Gays” by Ali Smith
• “The First Real Time” by John Patrick McHugh