Happy new year, Shirley Jackson class, etc.

Dear friends,

Happy new year—and what a start it's gotten off to. As Peter Sagal said this week on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," one of my favorite guilty pleasures, "We really are looking forward to starting 2021 and putting behind us the terrible events of December 37, 2020." The tumult of this political moment notwithstanding, I do believe things will start looking up in 2021. At least, that's what I'm telling myself.

Things I'm looking forward to in the new year:
* My turn is a long way off, but people close to me are starting to get vaccinated, including my children's teachers.
* I'm teaching this class on Shirley Jackson "at" the 92nd St. Y. Of course, that means via Zoom, so it's open to anyone, anywhere. Over a period of four weeks, we'll be reading a bunch of her later short stories, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Registration is still open, but it begins on Tuesday, so don't dawdle.
* I've been a runner since high school, but during the quarantine period, for the first time ever, I started the habit of running early in the morning—all the better not to come into contact with anybody. I've been documenting my #sunriseruns on Instagram. (Also, always, cat pictures.) Here are two recent pics taken by the lake in Prospect Park:

On that note ... what are you looking forward to in 2021? Send me a tweet. Or even an email, although I'm down to inbox 30 and don't want to backslide.

Recently published: I've had only a handful of spiritual experiences in my life, and one of them happened while reading a poem by Paul Celan. I wrote about it in this review for The New Yorker of Pierre Joris's monumental new translation of Celan's early volumes. And for The Millions I wrote this piece about my "year in reading," which started off fairly haphazardly but finally began to coalesce around the subject of women in the Holocaust. For a long time, the experiences of male survivors such as Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi have been assumed to stand in for all survivors--but women's experiences in Nazi camps and during the war years more generally were often signally different from those of men. As is so often true, what we think of as the "typical" Holocaust story tends to be the story of a man.

Keep reading, my friends. It's finally 2021.

All best,
Ruth

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are considered, by some, to dream."—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House