A Year in Reading: Madeleine Schwartz

At the beginning of this year I started a new magazine, The Dial, which it turns out is a bit like hosting a continuous dinner party in your brain. Some of the best things that I read this year were pieces of writing we edited, translated, or excerpted: Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s poems of loss and longing, Lamia Ziadé’s illustrated memoir of the 2020 Beirut explosion, Fernanda Melchor’s crónicas, Charlotte Van den Broek’s elegant architecture criticism, fiction by Chloe Aridjis and Xu Zechen, and amazing journalism from Cambodia, Ukraine, Pakistan and elsewhere. It has been particularly wonderful to be publishing literature and reporting in translation and bilingually; I loved working with the translator Andrea Lingenfelter to publish poems by Wang Yin in English and Chinese, and with Jessica Sequeira to translate reporting from Spanish. On our About page, which we wrote before launching, my colleagues and I talked about the need “to write the present in order to create a future.” This is a goal I’ve turned to over since January.

Several months of riots in France, where I live, led me to read Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, her novel of the French Revolution. It’s a remarkable, gripping book; both for the research Mantel undertook and how lightly the book wears it. Mantel is most interested in revolution as relationships: how the group of friends who led the movement devolved from idealism to quite literal backstabbing. (It was not until reading the book that I realized that almost all French revolutionaries started out as magazine editors, a fact I don’t quite know what to do with.) Mantel belongs to the category of writers underserved by their fame. The Thomas Cromwell series occludes the range and brilliance of the rest of her work. I especially loved Beyond Black, a novel about magic and visions and hatred between women.

On a work trip to Vienna, I read Arthur Schnitzler’s Late Fame and a novella by Joseph Roth (the best Roth). A venture into the work of Iris Murdoch surprised me: the books read rather dated. I found Barbara Pym’s light and stylish novels ahead of her time. For an article on rats, I read a number of underground investigations, including Dans les Murs by Zineb Dryef, a talented Le Monde reporter with particularly grimy rodent neighbors.

The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality led me to reread A Portrait of a Lady; two investigations into how women’s limited economic power can lead to bad decisions. Rumors of prizes led me to read a famous Scandinavian, but the prose seemed humorless. Dial contributor Ida Lødemel Tvedt introduced me to a number of excellent writers, including Vigdis Hjorth, who manages to combine the spare sentences characteristic of Nordic prose with warm-blooded anger and wit.

Some newish books that I enjoyed were Joanna Biggs’s A Life of One’s Own, the underrated New York, My Village (perhaps the best satire of New York publishing since Wilfred Sheed’s Office Politics) and two books in which I had a small part: the German comic W The Whore and After Sex, a collection of writing on reproductive rights. Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama reminded me that the best reporting brings human stories to inhuman systems. I hope many will read it.