"to pause so often"
Giada Scodellaro’s Some of Them Will Carry Me is 7 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches & 184 boiling pages
Welcome to Purse Book, a weekly newsletter about reading hot little books & being a gal on the go. If you haven’t already, you absolutely may:
Giada Scodellaro’s first book, Some of Them Will Carry Me, published this very day (!) October 11 begins in an extremely Purse Book milieu: on public transportation, being highly alive to this world. This first, immaculate story— “The Cord” — is so compact, so ferocious. It’s less than a page long. It resounds! It’s the ringing of the bell on the bus announcing the next stop, a short little noise, bringing consequences, a jerking pause, a dramatic departure.
Some of Them Will Carry Me contains thirty-five stories, none like the last. Many are short: gut punches and tilt-a-whirls and cold plunges. They are immersive, rapid experiences with an impact disproportionate to their length. “False Lashes” (my favorite, which is irrelevant and true) is a quick sex story about the unpeeling of the self. It’s just a couple pages where somehow the most casual thing that happens is someone straight up breaks a hand while fucking, which derails nothing.
One must recover from these! Catch one’s breath! It’s very exciting.
And there’s also a very sexy recipe, which is a story titled:
Giada, by the way, is repeatedly insistent about serving & eating the food immediately. She even says, about a spaghetti alle vongole, that you might as well trash it if it you’re not going to serve it right now, which is the urgency that howls throughout this whole collection and I loved it and completely agree: let’s devour it, right away, immediately, now now now.
+ wonderful news! Giada recommends a very favorite Purse Book of her own:
Renee Gladman's Morelia is a tiny book—43 pages, 6.4 ounces—but in its brevity and compactness there is precision, movement, and a reconfiguration of language and of memory. It is a stunning work of deep interiority that is rooted in the body, in what is unrecoverable and what can remain of a thing or of a person, or of a sky covered in lace.