Recommended: Emily Witt, author of Health & Safety
by Kaitlyn Davies
·
Emily Witt is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of last's year's Health & Safety: A Breakdown.
Emily's writing first caught our attention when she published The Last Rave, an essay about raving, relationships, protest, and the end of the world as we know it. H&S delves similarly into New York's musical underground and political above-ground, in what Pitchfork has likened to "a comedown sunrise set after a night of feverish debauchery".
Emily has kindly selected a few titles for our shelves, picking up where her book leaves off— the dancefloor. Music to our ringing ears!
--
Der Klang Der Familie: Berlin, Techno, and the Fall of the Wall by Felix Denk and Sven von Thulen
"An oral history about the rise of Berlin techno and its links to Detroit."
The Works of Guillaume Dustan: Volume 1 by Guillaume Dustan
"A collection of three novellas set in Paris in the 1990s. My favorite is I'm Going Out Tonight, which is about a single night at a nightclub and everyone the narrator tries to pick up along the way."
You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue
A cool drug novel set in Tenochtitlan in 1519.
Wave of Blood by Ariana Reines
A memoir about being alive right now, looking at the news on your phone each day, and trying to live a moral life.
Democracy by Joan Didion
For Didion completists—I like the part where a character lists her happiest memories and one is just a time she had a meal by herself in a hotel room.