Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts

by Claire Donato

The first major book from a longtime legend in underground literature; known by citation and word of mouth, but only now emerging with a work that will earn a broad audience.

“ Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is why I want to read. There are few books at all that expand the exploration of family, outsider sex, animal love, therapy and surreal vision and even fewer writers who do it as well as Claire Donato. My mind and heart are thankfully changed forever.”
—JAMIE STEWART of Xiu Xiu and author of Anything That Moves

“ Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts moves and feels like a novel of ideas, yes, but also a lookbook of Rorshachs; a concept cookbook for famished phantoms; a fragmentary tour de force a la Duras. On every page, it lines the mind with vibrant space, as extraordinary in its candor about desire, artifice, and intimacy as it is with wordplay, wit, and social theory. “Death is a mirror of time, and life is not as heavy as it seems,” Donato writes, beckoning us forward through the void of realism as might an imaginary friend we thought we’d lost—or should I say ‘guardian angel’?”
—BLAKE BUTLER, author

"In Claire Donato's fiction, I am both looking in and being looked at. The depths of desire are on display, laying bare the complexity and the ugliness that often comes with it."
—MOLLY SODA, artist

"Claire Donato's prose is at once playful and masterful, charming and haunting—I loved these short stories with huge imaginations."
—CHELSEA HODSON, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else

"Love is a source of radical questioning whose only enemy is indifference. Claire Donato’s fever dream of a novel goes toe to toe with today’s anomie, stretching our only resource left, language, so we can navigate a 21st century landscape of violently changing relationships, with one another, with the natural world, and with our bodies."
—JAMIESON WEBSTER, psychoanalyst and author

In the disquieting stories of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts , a fractaled Claire Donato contemplates grief and disgust in heterosexuality, deconstructing the romance myth and the illicit fantasies which reflect our haunted selves. These fictions are populated with Lynchian characters, draped in memory and the subconscious mind, who imagine their way out of the painful limits of their a turtle retreats into its shell and becomes a real girl. A porn addict turns into a baby boy in the arms of his barren cyber-girlfriend. And a digitally-marred depressive joins forces with the ghost of Simone Weil to kill a chicken.

Donato’s fictions are precise and cutting, seamlessly integrating a vast knowledge of art through sharp criticism and a history of cult Donnie Darko , Wings of Desire , Daisies , and Twin Peaks and artists including Clarice Lispector, M.F.K. Fisher, Sibylle Baier, and The Velvet Underground.

Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts concludes with "Gravity and Grace, the Chicken and the Egg, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian", a novella-in-vignettes that frames cooking as an entrypoint to light, awareness, and connection. With associative lyricism and a preternatural ability to gaze into the void with tenderness, Donato relays an indescribably strange perception of our world, in which maniacal grief turns to a gleeful protest before becoming, against all odds, a love letter to what remains.

Cover
Jimmy DeSana
Contact Paper , 1980
Vintage C-print
© the Jimmy DeSana Trust
Courtesy of the Jimmy DeSana Trust and P·P·O·W, New York

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature

250 pages, Paperback

Published November 7, 2023

About the author

Claire Donato is most recently the author of Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (2023), a collection of short fictions. Her previous titles include Burial (2013), a fiction novella, and The Second Body (2016), a full-length collection of poems. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, and recent writing has appeared in Parapraxis, Forever, The End, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, The Chicago Review, BOMB, Blue Arrangements, and GoldFlakePaint. She also contributed an introduction to The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer. In addition to writing books, Claire makes music, illustrates, and has a 35mm photography practice. Currently, she works as Assistant Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, where she received the 2020-2021 Distinguished Teacher Award, and is a candidate at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat Woebegone.

Reviews

[Jose Carpio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intricate, tender, brimming with ideas, full of grief; the most stimulating book I've read all year

[Cleo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Suffers from “too clever for its own good” at points, but has some moments

[Liv Archer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something about the style was addictive

[Christine Hopkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

"In the end, the egg---like love---cannot possibly exist. But, like love, it does, possessing nothing."

3.25 deep thoughts in the kitchen stars

Donato is heavily influenced by some of the best lit fic writers. Some of her thoughts really worked for me while others felt a little too forced. Overall I very much enjoyed the concept of the book and her writing style. I will certainly pick up whatever she writes next!

[Fiona W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh Claire! You are a kindred spirit genius! I only skimmed a couple paragraphs when u were too smart for me…
More ought to be written on the value of detailed food descriptions in literature.

[Veronica Mauldin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Screaming, crying, throwing up!! I love Donato’s work. I will be reading this one again and again.

[tima · Rating 4 out of 5]

'In other words, if I remain inattentive to my desire- if I avoid it in lieu of watching it, let it grow legs, let it learn to walk on its own, and notice how it walks, where it goes, why it wobbles there, and follow it without judgement or the pretense of an anxious helicopter- will it transmute into breath that knows more than I, and will in turn come to understand its spores as valentines written to me, granted I am terrified of them, granted they know more than I know?’

[Chilli McLellan · Rating 5 out of 5]

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

[Chanel Chapters]

2.5
Fictional mini essays about random crap.
I liked the mixed media in it but I just didn’t get it.

Random sentence:
“ there are bones around which I desire to wrap these words, as if language is a bandage.”

[Tara Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could say so much about this but instead I’m just going to pull one of my favourite quotes:

“olive oil (still a virgin)”

[sasha pohorelov · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5
insanely cool writing.
too cool for me to actually enjoy it, i fear

[Diego Zayas · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.”

Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is an intimate and engrossing collection of prose and poetry. At times humorous, shocking, dream-like and surreal; pulsating with love, curiosity and reflection. By chance, I had just finished Near to the Wild Heart and Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, a writer who is not only summoned by name, but whose presence and influence are felt throughout. This is a gift, and it sets the tone for the explorations that follow. Donato weaves inspiration from many facets of the world and human creation, musing philosophically and existentially upon experiences and language; upon sex, family, love, death, sadness, connection—and hunger.

[Michael O’Brien · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Started strong and thought it was going to be an easy 5 star read, but the second half really lost me.

[Cléo · Rating 5 out of 5]

we stan Claire in this house!!! so great and inspiring and funny and true

[Kalea CY · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has plenty of good feelings, whether it’s the cult, cultural references of Sibylle Baier, Daisies or Simone Weil, or the passages of recipe-adjacent writing, Claire Donato is able to move through daily life and interior spaces in a sort of alien way. Would recommend if you like ghosts, recipes, 00s blog era writing, gratuitously descriptive food related language, emoticons and criterion movies.

5/5 I don’t remember what I rated it but I’m editing stuff rn

[v · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75/5
felt like a bizarre dream i would have when i grapple with sleep and sleep takes too long to win.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just don’t know what she was trying to say

[Ruby Scupp · Rating 1 out of 5]

- As she takes the last sip [amen], there is a period of inertia.

- Excluding love, the list of her desires is as follows: fog, the ocean, a laptop computer, a vegetable garden, a brood of backyard chickens, a bonsai tree, bunk beds, a bicycle, to communicate with clarity and intention, to be scratched on a bench in a cemetery, to better understand the incongruences between people that punctuate everyday life, and a hug. [This does not make an honorable exception of love.] If she waits long enough, these desires float away into the imagination that fills the void, where she could go on breaking yolks - attaching her desires to concepts and objects - thereby murdering them

- This is her worst fault ... to speculate the future as it haunts the present

- Alongside it, she desires to sleep as dust, to erect a door inside her mind that opens toward a body of water whose waves ebb and flow in a state of temporary calm: a cloud of tiredness, an ethereal tiredness, a peaceful lacuna that holds her together and binds here with another in waking life and in sleep, then.

- In the ocean - your sole interlocutor - you stand. You seethe. You punch its waves. Its temperature is hot, and the conversation taking place between you is a fistfight with hands.

- This is her worst quality: to imagine fury contains an object when it is, in fact, a sensation that attaches itself to something.

- We are not free from suffering, but we are moving toward light. In an unexpected swerve away from the macabre, I am thinking now about moving toward light not only as an ethical responsibility to oneself, but to others, and to sustainable reserves of love and anger - which is to say, the world.

- My disclosures do not mean I lack boundaries. Quite the opposite. They are declarations indicating how my boundaries are so set they are, in fact, open - so radically open: open to the world and to possibility, to self-exploration and a deeper sense of the abyss.

- I feel your memory, which is not only a keen recollection, but also a mirror ... You articulate the world in a precise synthesis of image and affect, yielding a lyricism so deeply articulated that I cannot help but remember you past as if I exist inside it.

- I feel a lack. Lacan says the lack always relates to desire. One lack takes up another lack - the real, earlier lack, and the two lacks become desire. I am thinking now of how to articulate emotion as it occurs in the transference. Sometimes I think of the word ambivalence, but I keep returning to love. Is is possible we free ourselves from one another?

[Paul Coway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally bowled over by this. Read a review of Donato's work recently that compared her to Lispector (thanks, Mack!) but think this wades into some uncharted territory. She is of French origin, which makes sense considering the hints of Duras and Sarraute in this one. But also, couldn't help but recall reading THE GUEST by Emma Cline (my anti-beach read, haha) since they share an innate mysteriousness and compulsive readability. Love the ASCII art included within— I thought that was great! And thought the reflections on the ACT UP movement were powerful. Not everyday you write those two sentences about the same book, but I don't really think this is an everyday kind of read. It's more suited for the night, which is when I read it mostly. Thank you Archway for the ARC!

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. A collection of stories and a novella. Most of the stories follow similar patterns-- some intense self-exploration, some psychoanalysis, some men and drinks, maybe. I should be ashamed to admit this in 2024, but I've never read autofiction, and maybe this is that? But for me, while the probe of the self was sincere, the language itself was rarely engaging.

The novella, framed in some ways about making instagrammable food during the pandemic, was better, if more repetitive. It used that repetition to at least feel like it was digging deeper, and the added style of writing recipes/ food writing elevated some of what was there, though it didn't, for me, go anyplace particularly revealing.

[blake douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

got this from bookshop's holiday sale. am a huge fan of xiu xiu and jamie stewart and couldn't not order a copy when i saw he blurbed. and i do gotta say -- there's some level where this feels like the xiu xiu of books. totally debased sometimes, but with a real musicality and heart underlying it, and always willing to experiment and take risks. donnie darko really stood out to me. would suggest this if you're looking for something contemporary, out there, but also deeply human. i'd go for this

[Irah S · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars
I absolutely adore the writing style, but my enthusiasm for the book has dwindled - it takes a lot of concentration to muddle your way through the beautifully strung together words, and realize that they mean very little. They have a lovely rhythm to them and gives excellent shape to the narrator's personality but (and maybe it just that it's beyond my understanding) the stories do not have anything but a sense of whimsy and eccentric chatter holding them together

[Max Wilhelm · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to opportunity to meet Claire at the Roxy Cinema in NY. She signed my book (just picked it up at Strand) and we chatted about photography for a few minutes before the screening. I really didn’t know what I was in for with this book. Her voice within is so unique - I truly don’t know who or what else to compare it too. Very readable very cool, want to hear more

[Anna Page · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.68 stars, actually. i will say a few things about this:
1) reading this was like my watching i saw the tv glow- mostly enjoyable but utterly confusing. maybe like that movie, i didn’t get it because it wasn’t meant for me
2) this book was like my adjacency to poly queers- close but no cigar
3) people are really enamored by sex and writing about it

[Sydnee · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 — started off very strong. i loved the very first vignette, however, not sure if i enjoyed the second that followed. i thought “colour green” was beautiful—one of my favorite pieces of writing. and i do actually love the sibylle baier album she mentions. however, what follows doesn’t exactly grip my attention. was really hoping to like this but maybe i’ll try it again another time.

[Isabella Armus · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me actual eons to finish this — not reflecting on quality, just my levels of illiteracy in the heat. I appreciate the spareness, the observant note-like quality of some of these. Others, I’m not sure about. Potentially too skeletal, but whatever. If I could publish my notes, I also would.

[Ava · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve never read Donato’s before but I fell in love with her writing style and found a dream world inside it. Although I had to read some excerpts more than once, I didn’t mind. It was thought-provoking and beautifully written

[Lucas Randell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you.

[Danté E. Corrales · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't really have many words for this one. I was just bored reading it. Powering through hoping one of the stories will click with me. Unfortunately, none of them did

[Olivia Decker · Rating 1 out of 5]

dnf…”i think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much”