Ellen Hampton's 3 favorite reads in 2023

The Marriage Portrait is a fabulous exercise in the imaginary, in what could have been, in language that matches the ornateness of the gowns and at the same time the brutality of the manner.

Maggie O’Farrell takes a sliver of a glimpse of a character, a young girl in a poem and in a portrait, and weaves a rich and vivid tapestry of the brief life and marriage of Lucrezia dé Medici (1545-1561), the interplay of her powerful family, the court, her role as a tool of diplomacy and the hard edge of her husband’s character.

No spoilers here, but history just might have gotten her demise a bit wrong.

Deborah Levy weighs in with autobiography, but not the self-important or self-tortured brand, no, Things I Don’t Want to Know reads like a collection of anecdotes you might hear from a close friend over the course of decades that add up to a sense of why they are the way they are.

She shaves it down to essential experiences that may have shaped her (I don’t presume!) and in so doing, reveals the writerly eye she has had since she was a child. I greatly admired the skill with which she recounted childhood episodes from the eyes of the child, rather than the explanation of the adult. Most of us lose that voice; Levy has not.

When Tyler Stovall published Paris Noir three decades ago, he was primarily looking at the experience of postwar (WWI and WWII) African-Americans who chose to emigrate to France to escape the racial bias and oppression of mid-20th century America.

To read his account today is to measure the distance traveled, both by France and by the United States, and the depth of their social transformation. In any case, Stovall recounts the adventures (and misadventures) of Black Americans in Paris in succinct, strong, and active prose, the stories are based on thorough research and the characters are endlessly fascinating.