Rachel Cohen

Rachel Cohen’s acclaimed first book, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854–1967, was published this spring by Random House.

The Complete Works by Michel de Montaigne (Knopf, $30). Part of what I love about these essays is how difficult it is to understand how they were made. One way to describe reading them would be to say that it’s a little bit like staying in a very old, very wonderful house, built over a long period of time, and puzzling and marveling at the masonry.

Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers edited by Charles Simic and Mark Strand (out of print). In this anthology I first found Fernando Pessoa, whose poems and Book of Disquietude and invention of his own literary personalities are so exciting. And I read Constantine Cavafy and Vasko Popa, and Yannis Ritsos and Francis Ponge, and learned more of Italo Calvino and of Zbigniew Herbert, the great Polish writer, whose essays Still Life With a Bridle are also sadly out of print.

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Portrait of a Man Unknown by Nathalie Sarraute (George Brazillier, $10). This is a sort of a novel, in which a kind of detective investigates the relationship of a father and a daughter and finds his clues partly in paintings, and every time I read it I’m not sure I’m understanding it, and always in a way that feels like nearby there is something quite important.

The Ambassadors by Henry James (Penguin, $6). James said that no novel ever came to him with so little resistance. The whole book has a limpid quality, like swimming in an unusually clear pond.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, $17). Each of these characters, in brilliance and complexity, seems to me almost more than a person, as if he or she exists in five dimensions, and then among them there is such a ferocious tension and pitch and pace.

The Tales of Chekhov