Molly Young will be on leave for the next few months. In her absence, colleagues from Bookpoint will pick up the referral torch and appear in your inbox two Saturdays.
Dear readers,
I hate demon doll. I don’t mean they’re afraid of me; I mean, at this point, the assumed creepyness of the dolls is more of a cheap ludicrous, more like scary clowns or pantomimes, a sign of laziness, relic than an origin. real fear. (Yes, I’m strangely passionate about the subject; I’d literally watch any movie or show related to this cliché so I could speak about it. “M3GAN.”) Look: I understand that this idea is very powerful; a totem in human form with ancient connections, ritual significance, echoes of the dead, and more than a little hint of the strange. “Children’s play” is scary — for the first time. But this is to protect the doll: an important tool for children to develop self-control, empathy, and to understand how scary playing God really is.
—Sadie Stein
When Notting Hill released this anthology, three different people sent it to me, which should have made me rethink my life choices and made me feel seen instead. It’s a wonderful summary — Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 essay on puppet theater is well worth the entry ticket — gathering the famous (Freud on unheimlich; Baudelaire on toy philosophy and Rilke). about wax dolls) and little gems anthology by Elizabeth Bishop, Bruno Schulz and Marina Warner. It will educate you; it will change the way you think about yourself in relation to the world. In short, it restores doll life as a legitimate field of study.
Read if you like: Adam Phillips, German romanticism, dollhouse museums – especially the old ones run on tight budgets.
Available from: Notting Hill version
I have so many fond memories of doll-centered children’s books like by Tasha Tudor “Christmas of the Dolls” and Rumer Godden’s A work about a slightly sinister dollhouseand recently my son fell in love “What is given from the heart.” But you know what’s scary? Dare Wright’s 1957 Classic “Lonely doll.” Even I will not pretend that it is not filled with sadism and projection; Dolls are also complex. “The Lonely Doll,” however, there is nothing in Jean Nathan’s almost extraordinary grieving biography of Wright. A wonderfully talented woman trapped in eternal girlhood, Dare styled her doll to look like herself and named the doll after her controlling mother. This is a beautifully told story about agency, about weirdness and yes, about deep loneliness.
Read if you like: Fairy Tales Douglas Sirk, VC Andrews, Hans Christian Andersen, “Music for Lovers,” 1954.
Available from: Where are the best books for sale?
Why do not you…
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Read a seasonal poem? It’s January now; in New York, the first place in our memory where we don’t have any real snow to talk about — just a lot of what Frederick Seidel calls “a winter sky that’s completely repressed.”
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Would you please give your bedmate when you are reading at night? I picked up an old fashioned reading lamp recently (good if you want to keep your phone out of the bedroom) and found myself going down a bit of a rabbit hole. Did you know they were around for more than 70 years? And used to be contained in exquisite book-shaped boxes?
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