What's on Matt Gasda's Bedside Table?

First in a new series from the Mars Review of Books

In a new series, the Mars Review of Books is asking its writers to share what’s on their bedside tables. For our inaugural post, we’re featuring Matt Gasda’s stack of current reads. Below, the downtown playwright and Mars Review contributor tells us what’s piquing his interest lately, and why. (The playwright also famously uses a flip phone, hence the photo quality.)

The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Generally, I like to read to keep myself from falling asleep in various senses, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and so this little selection serves that end.

I Want to Keep Smashing Myself Until I Am Whole, Elias Canetti

Poetry, novel, history, aphorism, philosophy—heavily skewed towards paranoia, eschatology, and religious guilt.

The Pursuit of Millennium, Norman Cohn

Maybe I'm just in a mood.

A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat, Arthur Rimbaud

One of my general concerns: how does one become or stay an individual in a new age of algorithmic massification

The Age of Religious Wars, 1559-1689, Richard S. Dunn

And—is modernity post-religious or hyper-religious?

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Read Gasda’s MRB Issue 2 review of Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona.

You can find Gasda’s Substack here, and his workshops at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research—where print copies of MRB Issue 3 are on sale—here.