Addison Del Mastro, assistant editor: I’m reading Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, one of a handful of must-read books on the history of suburbia. It’s much denser and less entertaining than James Howard Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere, and it is more of a scholarly study than a jeremiad or work of social criticism. It is, however, chock full of details that are probably forgotten outside of the urban studies field. For example, in a detailed study of the most and least desirable neighborhoods in cities around the globe, America is almost unique in consistently favoring neighborhoods outside of city centers. While today suburban sprawl is a global phenomenon, there is something quintessentially American about suburbia.

So far I’ve covered the chapters that discuss the first modern suburban neighborhoods and the early development of mass transit, processes that were unfolding well before the beginning of the 20th century. Before Brooklyn was part of New York City, it was an independent city and a bedroom community for Manhattan (as were many neighborhoods in the undeveloped farmland that at one time was Upper Manhattan). Many of the first suburbs have become incorporated or swallowed up into their adjacent cities; the distinctive pattern of suburban sprawl would come later, with the rise of the automobile.

This initial wave of suburban development was motivated mostly by a desire to get away from the general noise, pollution, and congestion of cities, at a time when public health was still developing and when heavy and dirty industries were still based in city cores. It was not, notably, driven very much by racism or racial conflict, which, like suburban sprawl, would appear in later waves.

This all illuminates a piece of suburban history that is often omitted from popular discussion. Suburbia did not begin with the post-war housing boom, or with the FHA during the Depression, or even with the appearance of the automobile. And it was not, initially, driven primarily by racism. This is just the first few chapters. Crabgrass Frontier is an excellent book, and anyone interested in urbanism and the built environment should be familiar with it.

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Scott Beauchamp, contributor: I found French 19^th-century author Marcel Schwob via Jorge Luis Borges who, along with Reyes, Ocampo, and Fritz Mauthner, was a major influence on the Argentine genius. In a short essay towards the back of Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, his translator Chris Clarke traces the lineage as something like “Plutarch, Schwob, Borges, Bolaño”. I suppose the literary lineages don’t matter as much to the casual online passerby except as a sort of explanation of how I found myself holding the edges of my skirt up and wading through the muck of what can be safely, if not a little misleadingly, considered a 90’s (that’s 1890’s, folks) decadent par excellence: boredom with contemporary American literature.

And so in escaping the spiritual straightjacket of ubiquitous “art is politics by another means” B-list psychological faux-realism, I found myself in the world of Schwob. It’s a strange and off-putting world, to be sure, but it’s also one rich and differentiated enough to distract from the banalities of mind-flattening social media squabbles. Schwob is described on the dust jacket of Imaginary Lives as being “a scholar of startling breadth…as well versed in the street slang of medieval thieves as in the poetry of Walt Whitman.” This vast range of knowledge is put to good use in Imaginary Lives, a sort of fictional biographical collection which both lampoons and pays homage to Plutarch, Vasari, etc. These twenty-two sketches of fictional (or quasi-fictional, in some cases) figures champion “the specificity of the individual over the generality of history, and the memorable detail of a vice over the forgettable banality of a virtue.” That might sound repellent, but it’s actually quite funny. And, based on the tone of Schwob’s own introduction to the volume, probably more than a little ironic. Eschewing guiding philosophical precepts is itself a first principle, after all.

The chapters are taut and coiled with poetic energy. The characters themselves glow on the page, furiously rendered in opposition against their better-known historical counterparts. There’s Clodia, the shockingly licentious matron instead of Catullus. The humble Crates instead of Diogenes. The “would-be romantic pirate” Major Stede Bonnet in place of the infamous Blackbeard. And, my personal favorite, the “angry” poet Cecco Angiolieri against Dante, who eventually finds a kind of spiritual redemption alongside a cobbler who once lodged him:

“He rushed over to the shop of the merchant who sold holy candles and bought a large altar candle. The cobbler lit it with unction. Both of them cried and recited their Hail Marys. Until very late that night, the peaceful voice of the cobbler could be heard, singing praise, delighted with the new candle, drying the tears of his friend.”

Never have the losers of history been rendered with such care and wit.