The Maris Review, vol 46

Maris Kreizman

18 Mar 2025 — 5 min read

Why yes, I will take my victory lap for Chuck Schumer's book tour being postponed.

What I read this week

There was no way this book wouldn't feel prescient, but the fact that I chose to read it the week when ICE has fully begun to disappear people is eerie. Laila Lalami's latest novel takes place in the kind of dystopian near-future that feels like it's converging with our current timeline more and more every day. It's a terrible place to be, and yet reading The Dream Hotel felt cathartic? Maybe because the writing is so sharp and the pacing so fast that it took me out of the every day and made me put down my phone for a while.

The Dream Hotel is the story of Sara Hussein, a slightly overwhelmed archivist and mother of young twins who has been using a sleep-aid tracker. She skips over reading Dreamsaver's pesky terms and conditions, unknowingly signing away her dreams as data points mined by the company and used to feed a Risk Assessment Administration algorithm that's used to determine criminality. I love this metaphor, that algorithms, which are supposed to be so coldly objective in their scope and just based on the facts, are as unreliable as predictors of behavior as dreams. Upon returning to LAX from a business trip abroad, she is flagged at security as a potential criminal and taken to a place that is adamantly called a "retention center" and not a prison, at least by the private, for-profit company that runs it. We watch as her rights and her dignity and her personhood are stripped away in this place that is adamantly not a prison, so creepily and evocatively portrayed by Lalami (I can't wait until "Lalamian" becomes an adjective), but we also get to witness Sara's emerging sense of self as she conceives of new ideas of how justice works.

There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, foreword by Olga Ravn

Last night I moderated an excellent event at wonderful Greenlight Bookstore (congrats on your new union contract!) on Tove Ditlevsen's first poetry collection (a sampling of poems published throughout her life) translated from Danish to English. Most of us in America were introduced to Ditlevsen with FSG's publication of her Copenhagen Trilogy, a series of viscerally written memoirs about her harrowing journey from child of the working class to nationally renowned poet, ending abruptly when the author ended her life in 1976.

In a translators’ note at the end of the poetry collection translators Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell say Ditlevsen’s voice is “familiar to us from required primary school reading, from well-worn quotes in wedding speeches, from catchy ‘80s pop renditions, from recitations by all the many people who know her poems by heart.” It was humbling to talk about poetry that was new to all of us in front of some Danish people who knew Ditlevsen's voice like the back of their hand. If Ditlevsen achieved fame in Denmark because her work was so accessible (she wrote a lot in rhyming verse, among other things) then it was thrilling to sit with three incredibly smart women and deconstruct why and how her poetry works, how she creates tension between all of the different versions of herself.

** We all agreed that our favorite poem in the collection is "Divorce 2," but there are many great ones, and a few not-so-great ones. I leave it to you to discover your own favorites.

Happy pub day, Chuck Schumer???

I did not mean for my Lit Hub column last week to be quite so timely, I promise. I wrote a screed about politicians shilling their silly books when, you know, our way of life as we know it is being decimated by the Trump administration. Chuck Schumer's new book, out today, is particularly odious, given that he's talking about the scourge of antisemitism as if Palestinian activists weren't being disappeared by our government. Really feeling like "never again" has become "never again for us." It's so demoralizing.

But still. I didn't expect Schumer to shit the bed quite so horrifically the day after the piece came out. How many of us pleaded with him over voice mail (when we finally got through) to not placate the Republicans whose disastrous spending bill, if passed, would gut a variety of government agencies, among other things. But Schumer insisted that a government shutdown would be more disastrous than the passage of the spending bill and so voted with the Republicans. Look, I'm out of my depth here and I won't claim to know what's best, but I do know that Schumer ignored the American Federation of Government Employees whose members would be directly impacted by a government shutdown, who asked for senators to vote no on cloture. Now organizations like Indivisible are calling on Schumer to step down. Regular ass liberals are mad as hell and I'm here for it. We need fighters, not appeasers.

Oh how excited we all were to show up at points on Schumer's book tour to call him out for his lack of spine (that's a book pun), but now (smartly) his tour has been canceled. Our threats to bombard him everywhere he went, with protests outside ticketed events at synagogues and bookstores alike, worked. I imagine that, with buy-in from corrupt-ass PACs like AIPAC, the book will still hit the bestseller list. It stinks. But we'll take a very small victory.

So now it's time to set our sights on Gavin Newsom's memoir, which I imagine will be just about as welcome as his new podcast.

New releases, 3/18

Okay, but there are so many excellent new releases that are worthy of your time, so let's stop talking about Schumer (and say a prayer for his publicity team at Hachette). And here's where I remind you and myself that as bleak as things are right now, the good books keep coming, and that's not nothing.