The Books Briefing: Humor, Mined From the Absurd

“The BoJack showrunner’s debut short-story collection, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, channels much of the same caustic humor and heartrending dialogue as the Netflix series.”

📚 Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

The anguished comedy of Helen DeWitt

“She is especially fond of taking a weird, unlikely premise and then developing it rigorously, with the iron logic of a crazy person.”

📚 Some Trick, by Helen DeWitt

Such a Fun Age satirizes the white pursuit of wokeness

“The overarching joke of Such a Fun Age is that while the white characters fret over what black people think of them and their progressive values, the black characters are busy getting on with their lives and trying to keep up with one another.”

📚 Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid

‘You begin to breathe again’: Samuel Beckett’s humor as a coping mechanism

“Both [Paul] Auster and Beckett famously embrace the comic horror of being held helpless in absurd situations. For both writers, humor is a way out, a means to dignify and redeem what might otherwise be anguished, insufferable.”

📚 Report From the Interior, by Paul Auster

📚 Hand to Mouth, by Paul Auster

📚 Watt, by Samuel Beckett

Honest writing is funny writing

“I don’t think I’m ever ready to write about an experience or period of my life until I have distance from it—the kind of distance laughter signifies.”

📚 More Curious, by Sean Wilsey

📚 History of My Life, by Giacomo Casanova

About us: This week’s newsletter is written by Kate Cray. The book she’s currently reading is My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh.

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Kate Cray is an assistant editor at The Atlantic.