Rocco Gangle's 3 favorite reads in 2023

There’s nothing quite like discovering an author you’ve never heard of who makes you want to find everything you can by them, the kind of writer who feels like a secret you can’t keep to yourself.

After devouring the sprawling, beautiful, delicate, vulgar, and voluptuous masterpiece that is Prae, something compels me to stop total strangers in the street: “Have you read Szentkuthy? You must…”.

Before Tim Wilkinson’s recent translations, this early 20th-century Hungarian modernist has remained almost entirely unknown outside of esoteric literary circles.

This is literature as diatribe, as rhapsody, as a profoundly conscious immersion in the surreality of everyday life. In a later work, Szentkuthy aptly describes his literary style: “…not an apprehensive, exaggerated self-consciousness, but experiments of primal vitality, which are in a special biological relationship with form…”

Junji Ito is an undisputed master of Japanese horror manga.

This collection is the perfect introduction to Ito’s creepy, gruesome, and yet somehow always grin-inducing artistic and narrative style.

I had previously read several of Ito’s longer graphic novels, including Black Paradox, Uzumaki, Gyo, and Remina. All of these come highly recommended. But Shiver has convinced me that Ito is at his very best in the graphic short story format.

Like Poe, like Lovecraft, Ito shows us how horror lurks just the other side of the ordinary, spreads fast once it trickles in, and destroys us before we can catch our breath.

Although the firebrand American philosopher Richard Rorty passed away in 2007, this collection of late lectures only reached publication in 2021.

It provides a consummate presentation of Rorty’s late views on the relevance of the pragmatist tradition for contemporary philosophy. Most intriguingly, Rorty here reconfigures many of the core ideas of the pragmatist philosophers and his own theses about the death of representationalism in explicitly political terms: pragmatism is the best philosophy because it is the least authoritarian.

If a worryingly authoritarian moment is evident today on the global political stage, Rorty’s cheekily unconventional brilliance in articulating a thoroughgoing pragmatist philosophy as the refusal of authority as such — be it political, ethical, academic, or ontological — serves up a bracing shot of courageous thinking we can all use.