A 'completely hypnotic' book to spend the afternoon with
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Every week, The Thread checks in with booksellers around the country about their favorite books of the moment. This week, we spoke with Vanessa Martini, a bookseller at the legendary City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.
This summer was flooded with must-not-miss fiction, but bookseller Vanessa Martini wants to make sure one title doesn't get lost in the rush: Danzy Senna's "New People."
The book opens in 90s Brooklyn, and follows Maria and her fiancee Khalil. She's a grad student, he's in the early tech boom. As the book declares, the couple are "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom."
Maria, though, finds herself drawn to a poet she meets out one night, and "proceeds to do a series of horrible choices. She makes the worst choices," Martini said.
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"As a reader, you are completely engulfed in what she's doing. You can't look away. It's like a train wreck, it's that feeling of secondhand embarrassment when you're watching a movie and a character does something so awful, and you're watching through your hands."
Senna's writing was what hooked Martini.
"I was sitting on the couch and then I emerged from the book and realized three hours had passed, and I was done with it. I had no idea what had happened to my life," she said.
"[Senna] is really amazing at a sentence level. She writes these clean, propulsive sentences that are almost like — I don't want to sound too woo-woo — but they're almost like a swimmer doing laps. Very slow, meditative laps."
"The sentences she writes are absolutely incredible, and paired with what she's talking about, it makes this book completely hypnotic."