Luke Sebastian Scalone

Mabanckou, Alain. Dealing with the Dead. Translated by Helen Stevenson. New York: The New Press, 2025.

I picked this up for a friend’s sake: my fiancée’s best friend is from Pointe-Noire, and I wanted his city as literature renders it. Mabanckou gives a whole society narrated by the dead—a diaspora executive outrun by politics, black magic reaching ministerial level, an evangelical turned black nationalist—and takes no hostages critiquing it, sparing only the grandmother. Better read slowly than straight through, if a book this rooted in the French of Pointe-Noire can be translated at all.

Schmidt, Craig. The Trouble with Good Advice Is It Usually Interferes with My Plans. Middleville, MI: C. Schmidt, 2005.

Short weekly advice my friend Craig wrote for his middle-school students, self-published and recognizably still him twenty-one years on. What makes it good good advice is that it never instructs: each piece tells the story that shows why, so the lesson is lived, not handed down.

Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style. 3.2 ed. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks, 2008.

A book about typographic design that is itself beautifully made: archival paper soft in the hand, the page cut near the golden section. Bringhurst is bracingly opinionated—Times New Roman and most of the nineteenth century dismissed—and his appendices outshine the closing parade of favored fonts. Read slowly, kept for reference; what it left was a sharper eye and the reminder that good typography is invisible yet shapes everything we read.