Emma’s bookshelf diary
Books about girls figuring out how to live, night logic, and enchanting bookstores
Foreword
Emma Cohen is the co-founder of Pack Animal, a quarterly salon and party for experimental writing in Toronto that has fast become one of the hottest literary events in Canada. I met Emma when I moved back to the city in 2022 and have had the pleasure of spending many evenings talking and conspiring with her around my dining table or at one of her favourite restaurants (she knows the best spots in the city).
Ahead of Pack Animal’s latest event—a book launch for Stevie Manning with a special guest reading by Eileen Myles (!)—I visited Emma at her new home that she shares with her partner Brad. Cocooned by plush vintage dining chairs and the smell of incense, she gave me a tour of her library and her life as a reader.
You can find more of Emma’s work as a writer in her own right here, follow her Substack
, and check out Pack Animal. I’ll be back with more instalments of the bookshelf diaries—monthly—until the end of the year!
On her reading journey
“In middle school, I was a big YA girl. I remember actually really vividly, in like, the sixth grade taking this book Fablehaven out from the classroom library, and I feel like that was my first time being like, ‘I love this.’ And then there was like this bookstore called Cottage Books that was near my grandmother's cottage that was this really charming, chaotic used bookstore. It just felt really magical. There’s essential oils and pots of tea everywhere and the guy who owned it had crazy white hair and huge, thick glasses, and he was really sweet. I actually got my copy of The Catcher in the Rye that I have still there on my 15th birthday.”
“But one of the books that really was formative to me is Mr. Fox by Helena Oyeyemi. My copy is absolutely destroyed, because I was obsessed with it. I had never heard of her before, but I just was really drawn to the cover of it, and I think I was probably like 15 or 16. It’s a novel that's about a novelist who kills off all of his female characters, and then one of his characters starts appearing to him, and is like, ‘that's fucked that you're doing that!’ And then that storyline is intermixed with all of these short stories where the character of Mr. Fox and his main character are appearing again and again in all these short stories set in all different time periods, and really formally different. Oyeyemi is just like a really magical writer to me. That was the first book I read where I was like, ‘whoa. I don't really understand what's like fully like happening, but I'm, like, so mystified by it.’ Then I made everyone in my life read it.”
“I think there's something really magical about not necessarily having a preconceived idea before you read something. This is also really funny, but my relationship with David Foster Wallace is kind of similar. I had never heard of him when I was like 17, and had no idea who he was and all of the cultural connotation around him. I found out who he was because my mom got me this used CD compilation of him reading a bunch of his essays, and then the summer after high school, I was driving around everywhere for the first time, and I was just listening to it, like, the whole summer. I was like, wow, his essays are so weird! I'd never heard anyone write like this before, and I had absolutely no idea who he was! I think there's something that is interesting about not knowing something, or like having the book come to you in some sort of synchronistic way that can be special.”
On a book that found her at the right time
“So probably my first experience of that was How Should a Person Be—as you know I’m a big Sheila Heti girl. I got it in the fall of the first year of university and I came to Toronto when Flying Books was still not a standalone store but in a boutique or something, and they only had 10 or so books at once and this was one of them. I hadn’t heard of Sheila Heti before, and hadn't read any auto-fiction before. This was just such a good book to read at the beginning of first year, because you're just like, ‘what does it mean to be young?’ Or literally, ‘how should a person be? I need to know!’ So that one definitely came at a good time.”
“I had this kind of experience with a sequence of three books I read last year. That started with Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazard: it’s almost like it's a kind of classical novel in that it has, like, a huge scope. I have her short stories that I read after I read that and became obsessed with her. In the introduction, the writer talks about how she writes figures that have ‘bruising interactions between characters who some are attuned to beauty, and some are not,’ or some like, care about beauty, and some don't. That so feels like something that I cared about in that book. They wrote about how her characters are ‘modern romantics who cleave to high seriousness and high feeling in a world hostile to their idealism.’ I've thought of that quote a lot; I have it written in my journal. That it feels so like the type of writing I think I'm really interested in. Then I read Cassandra at the Wedding right after, and then I was reading this Paris Review interview with Nancy Lehman and the interviewer was writing about how Lives of the Saints is similar to Transit of Venus and Cassandra at the Wedding. And so I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I just read those!’ When that stuff happens, it really, I don't know… I feel like it really feels like ‘Oh, this is the point of reading and writing life,’ to find these things all entwined.”
On being a reader and hosting Pack Animal
“We program writers that are in all different stages of their careers, and so because I'm a writer too and I haven't published a book, it's interesting to think of how many people there are that haven't published work in a book, but are on this precipice and thinking deeply about things in an early stage of their career. I think that's one thing that I think is fun about Pack Animal, is getting to engage with people who haven't published books.”
“It feels really gratifying also, I think, when we get to meet someone that we maybe hadn't heard of, like Stevie Manning, whose book we are launching in a few weeks, and we came to her work because of her submitting to Pack Animal, and we really loved it so much. And now we have this relationship. It’s an exciting way to find people whose work you would want to read if you did not know them personally, but then you're lucky to be programming them!”
On a special copy of a book
“I found this book Heroes of Greece and Troy on the side of the road, and then I opened it and saw the Ex Libris. And it's stamped from the Newfoundland Public Library in 1974 which is so cute as well. I opened it when I got home, and there were these two postcards, one that's from the National Portrait Gallery, and it says:
‘Just saw this and thought it was cool. Also, it's something from the National. Also, who really cares? I wish you could be here to see everything here again. You kind of belong here where the coffee shops and endless bookshops are, so if anything, you'll always have London to look forward to. Nothing is ever really bad when you can look forward to London.’
[At this point I screamed.]
And then this one also is a postcard from a Quaker building, and it says:
‘From Dan to Andy. Dear Andy, This will always remind me of our special time in Cambridge when we were wet and you had to pee. Luckily, there was a Quaker building ready to receive us, and this is from the Quaker building.’
So, yeah, kind of magical. And also now, my friend Sonja made me my own Ex Libris because of this one.”
On her favourite covers
“I just got these Paul Auster books, who I've never read before, but I was at this really amazing bookstore in Dundas and thought these were really cool additions. I was obsessed with the title of this—Moon Palace—and the cover design.”
“I really love this copy of Family Lexicon that I got in Rome. It's really fun. And it's like shimmery in the light, if you can see the pieces.”
“I love this copy of Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping that I got in Berlin. I hadn't really engaged with Derek Jerman ever before, but Ali Smith blurbs the back, and I love Ali Smith. And then after I bought it, I went to Charleston Festival, as you recommended, and saw Olivia Lang speak in conversation with Derek Jarman’s gardener.”
“I studied Paradise Lost this spring in a course with Orlando Reed, and then my partner Brad got me this for my birthday. I felt like I had such a profound experience in the class and this edition is so beautiful—it’s gold bound and has illustrations from this famous Victorian illustrator.”
On her all-time favourite books
“The Idiot, which I know you love as well. That book is almost to me a perfect novel. I just find it so entertaining and so expansive. Ultimately, I am just really drawn to novels that are young women figuring out how to live.”
“I think I kind of similarly to girl-figuring-out-how-to-live, I love the Deborah Levy trilogy—it’s woman-figuring-out-how-to-live! It was really cool to read about a woman who was 60 and like looking at her life in the future, and being like so desirous of something, because I feel like something that I hadn't seen so much of was women of that age dreaming and fantasizing and thinking about their futures. And she also writes in such a physical way that I really like, like what she eats and what she's wearing, and, just the very sensual details of her lifestyle.”
“Also Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link. The titular story is about a TV show that a group of teenagers watches called The Library and they never know when it's going to air, and there's this whole kind of world within the show that starts to blend with their life. I think that maybe she was my first foray into magical realism, which I was really obsessed with at the end of undergrad. There’s this like idea of daytime logic versus nighttime logic that she like subscribes to, and nighttime logic is considered different than like fantasy, but where things are happening that wouldn't happen in our world. I just really love her! And then I couldn't find a copy of this anywhere, so Emily gave me this book out of her collection, which is very nice.”
“Amina Cain, have you read her? So I really love the Dorothy Project that Danielle Dutton edits and Kane is a part of. But I specifically really love Cain; a book like Creature is kind of an evolution in reading for me from something like Magic for Beginners, because it has a similar a mysterious kind of quality to it. Her writing is like very spare, which I think is something that I used to not respond to, but everything feels so majestically intense. And then A Horse at Night: On Writing is her writing about her reading life. And it's just really spectacular.”