Phil Fayeton is an ordinary DC striver, employed as a middling lobbyist for an infrastructure commodity association, known by the unfortunate acronym AASS, and angling amongst his UVA network for more clout. Cassandra, the narrator, is a snooty former sorority sister to Phil’s wife Raleigh. As a political fundraiser a few notches up the social ladder, Phil recognizes she’s positioned to help him get a leg up with her clients—even if it means he’s got to change his party affiliation.

Cassandra also considers herself a seer, like the mythical princess priestess who shares her name. As luck will have it, Phil registers a rare, perfect 2019 March Madness bracket in a $1 billion contest sponsored by predictive search company Daedalus. Though she’s above filling out a bracket herself—basketball being a sweaty sport for the plebes and whatnot—the way she tells it she correctly predicted not only Phil’s statistically rare success but also that he’d be unprepared to handle the heat of the resulting wealth and attention. What she had not predicted was the close friendship she’d develop with Raleigh once the prize overshadowed the ordinary status gaps between herself and the couple in lesser standing…or had she?

Cassandra has channeled her powers into a side hustle writing fiction— how else might the incredible visions of a woman who speaks with clarity be believed? Though she tries to cut through Phil’s hubris to head off his most disastrous moments, she knows a good story of rise and fall when she (fore)sees it. These attempts are comedically half-hearted. I’m not sure she’s even fooled herself. Cassandra’s college prophecy that Raleigh could do better than Phil turns out to be true, and their friendship, capable of withstanding separation and loss, is the true heart of the story.

Medium Rare sets the Phaeton and Cassandra myths within a real-life basketball underdog tale and at a divisive turning point in American politics to explore how ambition and allegiances work alongside dumb luck, shaping the characters’ relationships, values, and fates. The high concept, the tragic-comic narrative arc, the humor based in wordplay and wry skewering of Washington’s social mores combined with intricate, intelligent prose place this novel squarely in the “upmarket fiction” category—where a narrator with Cassandra’s superiority complex rightfully belongs.

As in classical drama, the characters of Medium Rare at times feel more like mythical representations of cultural values than truly psychologically complex individuals. The novel’s chapters are structured around tournament games, and Cassandra’s bit—play-by-play commentary elevated to the level of divine struggle and destiny— wears thin at times. But A. Natasha Joukovsky clearly had a good time committing to her outlandish premise and this smart, snarky narrator. Medium Rare made for an enjoyable bathtub read that lifted me from a reading slump.

How it sounds

I passed the dessert table. I headed for the Fayetons.

Did I approach them out of some true feeling, some reconciliatory compassion for a largely private cruelty? A belated sense of “sisterhood,” perhaps? Or was it more maternal, some psychic response to my flaring instincts? Was it raw curiosity? The novelty of my very uncertainty?

Or, already, did I intuit it? Did I sense the outlines of the denouement even in the rising action, something no one else could see? A crystal basketball? Of my corresponding curse: There was not, would never be, any escape in status or power; no level of congressional, even executive, intimacy that could truly free me from incredibility. Did I, in not looking up but down, happen upon something amazing? I should have seen it sooner, after all those seminars in art history, enough in literature. About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters. In this tableau, hiding in plain sight, was the rarest of things: a great story.

Why now?

Arizona Wildcats fans will find their belief that this is our year stoked by this basketball comeback story. And given that predictive market gambling site Kalshi offered $1B this year to the first user to register a perfect bracket in the Men’s Tournament (no one is left standing), and the stir around the 14-year-old who until Friday held the only perfect bracket in any major contest, Joukovsky seems to channel some of Cassandra’s powers.

Skip it if…

You subscribe to the Joy Williams theory of contemporary literature.1 In our world, an anonymous Polymarket trader just cashed out over $1M with dozens of perfectly-timed five-figure bets on U.S. and Israeli military actions in Iran, following another anonymous user’s $400,000 profit on a bet that Nicolas Maduro would be ousted in January after placing the wager just hours before the operation became public. So the resolution in which an average social climber collects $1B on a pure dumb luck sports contest and then self-destructs seems too comforting and nostalgic to stand as a true work of art worthy of the Old Masters.

Flying close to the sun at Tucson Festival of Books

This year’s festival was a huge success— authors have written us thank you messages declaring it the most welcoming, community-spirited, and organized festival they’ve attended. And readers and booksellers and volunteers let us know they had a great weekend too. It was all so worth it, despite heat approaching 90°F on both days and my fried nervous system from learning more than I ever thought I wanted to know about event security in order to get behind some new procedures recommended by our hosts at the University of Arizona.

Many in the community assumed all the fuss was because of Salman Rushdie’s appearance and the war in Iran. But the truth is the heightened security protocols had been in the works for about six months before the event, before we’d even extended that invitation. At some other time I might share more thoughts about what it means that people are willing to tolerate the intrusiveness of a clear bag policy to keep not only sporting events and raves but now also book festivals and the symphony and JV soccer games and Pete the Cat, the Musical, viable. But for now I’ll just share a little anecdote from meeting Rushdie below the line.

If anyone knows about living with intrusive levels of security, and suffering its lapses, it’s Salman Rushdie. If the protocols the his publicity team and the University police department put in place for secure entry and exit are any indication, the man has had his share of behind the scenes tours of loading docks and service areas. We had a windowless room near the stage reserved for pre-signing and to use as a green room before his session. He may be one of the fastest signers on planet Earth, so there was a more downtime than expected. We chatted books and some of the authors in attendance for a few minutes. Outside, it was a beautiful morning. His wife, author Rachel Eliza Griffiths aka Lady Rushdie, was having none of this non-descript waiting room with nothing to do and no one interesting to see. She went to make a call or pace elsewhere, leaving me momentarily alone (if you don’t count three burly armed dudes minding business) with the legend.

Read more

For the past few years, books and I have been insufferable. We ignored texts. I underlined like I was leaving lipstick on a collar. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, why not? We did it so much that my husband worried out loud that I too might become crosseyed after a retired literary agent told us both about undergoing corrective vision therapy.

But right now? I’m in a reading slump. I could have faked it and sent you one of the monthly book cocktails you most likely subscribed to receive, on schedule. You might never have known the difference. But I would know.

The problem is: I’m committed longer term right now. I’m still reading as a judge for The Samuel Richardson Prize. I also signed up to read the Pulitzer finalists I skipped last year for a dinner party discussion about what the judges might have been thinking. I enthusiastically accepted these invitations. This is all my idea of a good time.

And yet. For the last couple of weeks, I pick up a book and think: Are we… fine? Is this just what commitment feels like? Maybe let’s watch an episode of Beast Games, then I’ll take a sleep gummy and curl up in a ball on my side of the bed.

The thing is, I know I can go through the motions and do a passable job without too much effort. I can feel a sagging middle the way a spouse can sense a mood shift from across the room. Know when the first chapter is overcompensating, when the ending is bluffing. Appreciate all the earnest effort to make it mean something anyway.

Novels and I have been together a long time. Which means I no longer mistake adrenaline for love.

But sure do I miss it right now.

It helps to remember that knowing how something works doesn’t have to make it boring. When the bar is higher, the payoff is better. Yes, I want the electricity. I want to gasp at a sentence and text someone about it in all caps. But maybe the real romance now is to show up anyway. Forgive myself for episodes of inattentiveness and try again. Read the pages, make the notes. Keep the faith.

I’m not bored. We’re married.

Chat with me…

• Tell me all about how you keep your relationship with reading fresh.

• Slump-proof reading? Please share!

• I’d love to read a sentence that lit you up lately.

• Doug if you are reading this, Happy Valentine’s Day. You set the bar so high. 😍

Tucson Festival of Books coming right up!

One month to go until the . My slump may also have something to do with all that’s on my mind and the extra time I’m putting in to keep up with all the amazing volunteers who work to make sure every detail of this superevent falls into place. I have had some work-related bookish fun lately, chatting with presenting authors , and .

Between the Lines by Tucson Festival of Books

TFOB w Susan Orlean

Listen now

2 months ago · 20 likes · 2 comments · Tucson Festival of Books and Susan Orlean

Plant Person

Live vid with Tucson Festival of Books ICYMI!

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video…

Listen now

3 months ago · 3 likes · Kelly Ramsey, Tucson Festival of Books, and River Selby (they/them)

I hope to pull together a few more of these Tiny Desk Concert-ish conversations before the festival— you can follow newsletter to catch them. Let me know if you’re coming to the festival and who you are excited to see!

Subscribe now

Cheers,

With this dispatch, I resume the monthly Shelf Talk series, in which I share thoughts on my pick for the most important or interesting new release in literary fiction in English during a given month. For January, I selected The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard (trans. Martin Aitken). It’s now February. My screen time has been out of control the past couple of weeks as I tried to keep up with the real-life dark night of the soul we’re experiencing in the U.S. Thanks for understanding.

January Shelf Talk: The School of Night

One part Tár, one part The Talented Mr. Ripley, one part Dream Story, The School of Night is a dramatic exploration of narcissism, artistic talent, and the blur between identity and desire, life and death. At turns suspenseful, eerie, and philosophical, it’s the fourth novel in Knausgaard’s latest Morning Star series to be translated into English. In the Bible, the morning star refers to both Lucifer and Jesus. Together, these horror-infused literary novels explore miraculous and occult events interrupting mundane present-day Norwegian lives after a mysterious new star appears in the sky.

How much is too much?

As you may know, Knausgaard is to a series as Costco is to a rotisserie chicken. His work is like crack—but also overexposed, and alarming in its excess. The six volumes of his autofiction My Struggle, originally published in Norway from 2009-2011 and in English 2012-2018, total over 3,600 pages. While the four volumes of The Seasons Quartet (2015-16) are shorter, each volume in his latest series (2020-the present), which so far includes 6 books in Norwegian with the latest published in October, tops 500 pages. This was my first time reading him.

What do you do with a writer you’ve resisted this long? At this scale of volume and hype, it felt impossible for me to start his global breakout My Struggle with curiosity, in the “what is this?” frame of mind that makes discovering a new writer so exciting. Instead, the question for me became: will I agree with the consensus? There’s something evangelical about Knausgaard fans that made me skeptical. But, as a self-contained backstory for a minor character in the Morning Star series, The School of Night offers a new entry point for the KOK curious.

Faustian Backstory

A riff on the familiar story of the Faustian bargain, with an explicit interest in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, The School of Night is told from the perspective of a highly famous, now-canceled photographer by the heavy-handed name of Kristian Hadeland (alias Pedersen). Framed by a note in which he reveals he plans to kill himself as soon as he writes down this story, the novel launches into Kristian’s remembrances of mid-1980s London. He has left his family’s farm in Norway for photography school. Alone in London, he becomes enmeshed with a strange couple of characters– Hans, a Dutch artist deeply educated in the occult, and Vivian, a talented theatre director staging a compelling contemporary version of Marlowe’s play. A series of turning points involving a sister, a dead cat, a grabby homeless man increasingly demonstrate the depth of young Kristian’s lack of empathy and the lengths to which he’ll behave unethically to advance his slow-developing talent. Hans helps extract Kristian from a bind that threatens to destroy his ambitions, then disappears without a word.

Two decades later, Kristian’s career has skyrocketed to match his wildest dreams. When he admits he no longer enjoys the trappings of fame, and dares to wish for an end to the expectations it has created, a downward spiral begins. While he schemes to throw his wife off the trail of an affair, a horrifying event occurs to ensure his wish comes true. Soon Hans’s eerie reappearance reveals to Kristian that the escape he envisioned for himself may not be as easy as he had planned.

How it sounds

Humans descended like snow through the ages. There were billions of us, we danced this way and that until our flight was abruptly over and we settled on the ground. What happened then? Billions more came falling, descending to smother us. I was one such snowflake, and I was still falling…so slow was our flight that our thoughts and the things we owned seemed important to us; but the hordes of people whose descent had just begun, and those whose descent would soon begin, the enormous blizzard of the as-yet unborn, all waiting to descend, would completely smother not only us, but every sign of our lives, which thereby would become less than meaningless, you become nothing, zilch, nada.

Why this book now?

It’s possible to read this book as a case study of the private moral temptations behind the public strategy of a fascist regime. In an interview with Jeremy Strong, who plays Roy Cohn (prosecutor of the Rosenbergs) in the Trump biopic The Apprentice, the discussion veers from Hitler’s bunker to Donald Trump. Knausgaard says: “that film [The Apprentice]—that portrait of the young Donald Trump—is very similar to the way I thought about Kristian Hadeland, really. It is ruthlessness. It’s no empathy. It is everything becoming suddenly possible. If you remove empathy, you have a certain freedom. You can lie and nothing matters anymore. And I think that was the space I wanted to explore—exactly that space, really.”

As a cautionary tale to be careful what you wish for, from the pen of one of the most hyped male novelists in the world, The School of Night might be reassuring to anyone frustrated that their art has been overlooked by the reigning media machine.

Skip it if…

Snappy dialogue is a must for you to enjoy a work of fiction—the talk is doing a lot of lifting in this one. Abuse of an animal corpse, misogynistic thoughts, or harm coming to a child are dealbreakers for you. It’s unsettling, so if you’re in the mood for a bedtime story, may I suggest instead that you listen to KOK read the very boring “Jack’s Garden” by V.S. Naipaul in his German-but-cute Norwegian accent.

So tell me..

• Knausgaard does existential dread very well. What’s the most unsettling book you’ve finished— and why did you keep reading?

• Kristian is really a horrible person, yet I couldn’t look away from his ascent. Who’s the most horrible character you’ve ever followed through his dark night of the soul?

• KOK readers: where would you advise a KOK-curious holdout to start?

  Because reading alone is overrated.

  Share

Cheers,

See also

AM: I knew I had to talk with you about this, Fisher, when I read Gioia’s claim, “You can tell how stagnant things have become from the lookalike covers. I walk into a bookstore and every title I see is like this.”

Setting aside the ugliness of some of these covers, and the fact that poking fun at the color blob cover is not new, Gioia uses a collage that includes only books by women and by people of color to illustrate his point. Do your bookstore shelves only contain books “like this” from Big Five publishers? What would you say to Gioia if he came into your store with this complaint?

Fisher: Our bookstore shelves didn’t even look like this three years ago, which is when almost all of these books were published. By and large the colorful blob cover is on the wane. So I don’t know where Ted is shopping or when he last walked into a physical bookshop, but even an airport book stand doesn’t look like this anymore. And even if these books were current and largely representative of what is on a display table, these books are actually really different from each other. They are not remotely homogenous, except in cover design. And their other similarity, as you so correctly point out: they are all books by women and women of color.

AM: I Google Image searched the collage and it seems like a lightly updated version of a cover image from a Print magazine piece circa 2021. Maybe Ted has a time machine? As pointed out in the comments on the piece, it’s a choice to feature only covers by authors who are not like you to open a discussion about how an entire industry has stagnated and lost its soul.

Fisher: Anyone could cherry pick twenty covers based on a particular design trend and point to it and say, look, creativity is dead, everything is the same.

But even if that were true, which I would argue it is most definitely not, it’s still a ridiculous thing to wring your hands over. Commerce pays for art. Even artists have to eat.

AM: I do love the classic painting cover trend. These covers are very fun.

Fisher: Me too! It’s probably one of my favorite cover design trends from the last ten years.

AM: So there’s such a thing as a trend and a trend can signal to the reader that a book might appeal to them, to help them choose from all the options to buy/read. And it can feel sort of soulless, as a reader or author, to think that you’ve been pigeonholed into a certain consumer demographic. But there’s nothing soulless about wanting to be read!

F: Exactly!

AM: It would be unserious to base an entire argument about the state of the industry on a book cover trend we don’t like, and Gioia doesn’t do that. He pins the death of the soul of publishing to the mergers and acquisitions that created the Big Five, claiming that “The old system offered more variety. It took greater risks. It didn’t rely so much on formulas. So it could surprise you… But during the 1990s, the midlist disappeared at major publishing houses.”

Given the exponential increase in the number of books published by traditional publishers in this century, and the huge catalogs both our organizations go through to select books to feature, plus the number of midlist authors on Substack comparing notes about Big Five advances, print runs and publicity commitments from their publishers: do you think it’s true that the midlist at major publishers has disappeared? Gioia doesn’t really get into any data about print runs or sales to demonstrate this.

Fisher: I looked up a few titles that came out last year from Penguin Random House, the largest of the big five publishers, since it is the big five at which Gioia directs his claim. I specifically looked at general fiction since that seemed to be where he was focused. I generally avoided genre fiction and looked for what someone might call a “midlist” male author. There are plenty of midlist writers of all genders, but the unspoken assertion in Gioia’s piece was that male midlist authors had disappeared. In addition, multiple other “woe to the state of publishing” articles have asserted that the literary male author has disappeared which is just…demonstrably false. Please, anyone thinking of writing these articles, talk to a bookseller. You might have to look a little bit harder than you used to just because of the sheer volume of options, but there are plenty of books for literally every single person and identity that you could think of in those stacks. And lots of them are written by midlist authors.

• Brat by Gabriel Smith, debut novel, 10K print run

• Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson, debut author, 10K print run

• This Great Hemisphere by Mateo Askaripour, second novel after the satirical novel Black Buck (a Read with Jenna pick), 25K print run

• The House on Buzzard’s Bay by Dwyer Murphy, established writer, 20K print run

• Lion Hearts by Dan Jones, another established author, 20K print run

• How to Leave the House by Nathan Newman, debut novel, 25K.

• Four Squares by Bobby Finger, an established writer, 35K

• The Imagined Life by Andrew Porter, an established writer, 20K

• Here’s a fun one: The Adversary by Michael Crummey, an established writer, 13K

• Pan by Michael Clune, 15K

• Disruptions by Stephen Millhauser, established writer and Pulitzer prize winner, 20K.

It took me about twenty minutes of browsing to find these titles. I thought it would take much longer because I didn’t realize I had unconsciously accepted the premise that the midlist didn’t exist.

AM: I can imagine though that he’d say he wasn’t focused on fiction, because his other major point comes from his own experience getting his start in publishing jazz criticism, initially being received by editors who believed in him and gave him a lot of leeway, and later having to jump through more hoops to supposedly prove he had something to say that would be popular before agreeing to a contract.

Fisher: Nonfiction criticism of the type Ted mentions seems to get lower print runs than fiction from what I see these days in the catalogs, so I do feel really confused about his point here. I think he seems most aggrieved by the fact that he couldn’t just submit a two-page proposal on good pal vibes and get a book deal. He says, “Publishers didn’t want midlist writers anymore, so I needed to convince them that I could sell 50,000 or 100,000 copies (or more).”

I don’t know if it’s true that publishers didn’t want midlist writers anymore–I think the evidence suggests that they didn’t see him, in particular, as a midlist writer anymore based on his sales track. Therefore they expected more from him: more than a two-page proposal and a handshake, more sales.

Subscribe now

AM: It’s probably true that it’s harder than ever to command a big advance if you want to publish a book that is not expected to sell many copies.

But to rise above the commercial aspects, it seems he wants to use these three examples to say something politically important. But he can’t bring himself to say it clearly. Take this: “The forces of conformity and centralization of power are stronger now than ever. Books have always been our safeguard in such troubled times. But when books are controlled and constrained by the entrenched system, they fail to provide us with meaningful alternatives.” But this allusion to “troubled times” and “meaningful alternatives” is so vague! The week before he posted this, a woman was shot in the street. But he’s not taking a stand against anything specific. His argument boils down to: publishing with a big house has become less fun and ego-boosting for one established non-fiction writer (male). And at the same time, it has supposedly become easier for the others (female, of color, queer) to become visible, with fiction that wouldn’t have gotten into print before that fateful day in the 1990s. This seems more like an entrenched system that has been overturned rather than further ingrained, to me.

Patrick Nathan just reposted a piece from 2022 that is much more clear about the problem with publishing blockbusters by questionable subjects like DeSantis or even the Obamas, and what it does to the culture to strangle aspirations toward literature. The stagnation comes not from a wider variety of authors, including women and people of color, getting fiction publishing deals. It comes from huge investments in books that amount to political campaigns of the lowest literary standards.

F: I agree. There do seem to be some questionable financial investments in celebrity and political books that just do not seem to pay off in sales. Could that money be spent better in other places? Almost certainly. I don’t think either of us is suggesting there are no problems within the publishing industry. But it’s not the problem Gioia identifies.

I think most people don’t realize just how many new books are actually published every year. For readers, the multitude of options can be great! Do you want a book by a celebrated Norwegian silver fox whose life is filled with shame and guilt? Read Knausgaard! Do you want a book where aliens have taken over the world and enslaved the human populace into a video game style reality show for their alien entertainment? Oh, and a talking cat? You’ve got Dungeon Crawler Carl. I could do this all day actually. There is an embarrassment of choice, from the very literary highbrow art to the silliest “lowbrow” repackaged fanfiction. I can see why that may feel overwhelming for a new author who just wants someone to choose their book from the sea of voices.

AM: I’m laughing because I am reading The School of Night right now. The silver fox part was significant to my interest. I am liking it more than I thought I would.

F: I am actually a huge fan of Knausgaard, even though I think he’s kind of a whiny dude. I love him anyway.

AM: It’s really good. I do feel a bit like, “Why did I not believe the hype before?” But there are so many great books published now. Not only are there more traditionally published books than ever, there are also more self-published books, especially when it comes to novels and memoirs. I keep thinking the reason it feels true to people that 21st century publishing is where the midlist has gone to die has more to do with distribution issues than with an unwillingness in the industry to publish anything other than formulaic blockbusters, as Gioia claims. Stores cannot possibly place all the titles face out, not every author can be invited to the thing, indie presses can’t always make the math work with Ingram. The extremely online media conglomerate mindset has become normalized, and people start to think if a book isn’t showing up everywhere, that means it’s nowhere.

F: I do sometimes wonder if the people writing these articles have stepped into a physical bookstore recently. People forget how quickly the algorithm silos what they see. It’s easy to believe you see the breadth of what’s out there while the internet only shows you a sliver.

A: But do you think he’s trying to make a nostalgic argument, that capital “L” literature is suffering because all these niche reader interests are competing for distribution and attention?

F: I do. His assertion is that risk-taking, authentic art is getting overlooked in favor of crass boring commerce. Maybe he hates those commercial upmarket women’s fiction book club books, but when those books succeed, they allow the publisher to take risks on weird books, and they do! Think about Rejection, by Tony Tulathimutte, a short book of cringe shock short stories. Short stories are typically not big sellers. It got shortlisted for the National Book Award, and Tulathimutte had a glowing profile write-up in the New York Times. It could have disappeared without making a critical splash at all, but the fact that Harper Collins was willing to publish it in the first place shows they are willing to take risks. I am also hard-pressed to think of a story collection that surprised me more.

I think it would be disingenuous of us to argue that there aren’t formulaic, badly written, or boring novels out on the shelves being pushed by publishers because they are part of the next big trend. But it’s hard for me to take seriously an argument that claims nothing is surprising anymore. I am surprised constantly! I read widely. I seek out new voices and new experiences. Sometimes I feel jaded too: I think I know what a book will be about and I ignore it, then a trusted friend tells me to take a chance and I am surprised to see how wrong I was, and how delighted I can be when I actually, you know, read the book.

AM: Seems lazy to complain there are no alternatives without engaging.

Fisher: I do agree with where Ted ends up in this article: we need to amplify more independent voices. I am a big champion of independent presses and the weird books they publish. I am a big believer in indie bookstores, obviously. And I am actually heartened by the breakout success of some indie/self-published authors.

AM: I don’t really see it as an either-or. There have always been formulaic or cringey books published for the masses. I was a teenager in the 90s, and I distinctly remember reading Clan of the Cave Bear and the Dragonriders of Pern series as some of the first books not written for children I had access to, outside of what was assigned in school. I don’t personally read dragon fantasy or prehistoric smut any more, but it certainly existed prior to some fateful New York martini lunch in 1997. And it seems ironic to me, that his argument in favor of indie voices… completely overlooks indie voices. When book coverage also goes down in traditional media, your local indie bookseller, the individual reader posting online, and other forms of idiosyncratic word of mouth become more powerful— for the additional midlist writers published by the Big Five as well as for more independently published voices.

F: YES!

I also think he’s blatantly wrong about all books from the Big Five looking and sounding the same. Every time I hear this complaint online I roll my eyes so far back I give myself a headache. GO INTO A PHYSICAL BOOKSTORE. It’s so incredibly easy to cherry pick books that sound alike. That’s what a trend is. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of wildly different books being published by both the big five and the indie presses.

AM: And it’s interesting how some of the smaller presses have started offering direct-to-reader subscriptions or individual orders as a way of contending with distribution challenges. If readers know where to browse, it’s easier than it has ever been to find surprising and unique literature and have it show up at your door.

F: You are absolutely right. I’m thinking of two surprising and risky reading experiences I’ve had recently. The first is Canon by Paige Lewis, which comes out from Penguin Random House this May. It’s billed as a nonbinary epic. Lewis is a poet, and it shows in the language in this novel. It opens with God, dressed in a tracksuit, visiting the main character, Yara, and saying, hey, go fight the leader of the bad guys. It only gets wackier from there. There’s a whale called Howbig, a prophet named Adrena, and so much beautiful language that I have sentences underlined on almost every page of my advanced reader’s copy. I guarantee people haven’t read anything quite like this before, and it was really a treat!

The other risky book I read recently is The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day, in which, bear with me because there’s some icky stuff coming, an aging French Bulldog named Gelsomina is infected with a parasite and it awakens a discomfiting sense of self awareness for her. The book navigates between all of the various consciousnesses (oof!) of the beings: the worms, Gelsomina herself, and her two humans. I was worried that being in the mind of a parasitic worm would freak me out but it’s actually quite beautiful somehow? I have no idea how Morgan Day pulled off this fever dream of a book. It is also filled with gorgeous sentences. It’s coming out from Astra House in March. What books have surprised you recently?

AM: That sounds horrifying. And definitely unique. I’ve been curious about the Lewis book.

I subscribe to Transit books. They’re the U.S. publisher for Jon Fosse, and they recently sent me Vaim, which begins his new trilogy. That book surprised me, namely because it started me thinking I might want to read these Norwegian guys after all, but that’s not the book I want to talk about. They’ve sent me several volumes from their narrative nonfiction Undelivered Lectures series. One, Alterations, by Cori Winrock is a long experimental essay begins with a collective of women who disassemble wedding gowns to make burial garments for infants. She pieces together stories of other white (and black) textiles— from space suits to Emily Dickinson’s famous dress— and texts (Gertrude Stein, Clarice Lispector, Goodnight Moon) into something that can wrap around her own grief over the death of one of her twin babies. The close observation and interpretation of the use of +plus signs in the moon landing photos and Dickinson’s poems, and then her incorporation of the + as a device to add layers of meaning into her own text surprised me. I just love the simple, artistic covers of this series and also how unique and experimental and niche they are.

F: We carry that undelivered lecture series at our store! Alterations sounds lovely and also sad. I love Transit–they published one of the most beautiful picture books I’ve ever seen last year: Astro by Manuel Marsol. I’ve been thinking of subscribing to the new publisher Hagfish. They have only put out two books so far, but I’m fascinated by their mission to focus on forgotten or underknown writers.

AM: In recent years, I was most surprised by Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, which was published by Picador, a literary imprint of Macmillan. The narrator, CM throws herself into documenting the life of her enigmatic suddenly deceased wife, an artist and trickster known as X who has changed her identity many times and alienated most everyone she has known. The widow channels her grief into a quest to learn where X was born, believed to be deep within the fascist theocracy of the Southern Territory, which in this alternate world split from the U.S. after World War II. It threads images and imagined quotes and anecdotes attributed to real cultural figures like Kathy Acker and Tom Waits and Connie Converse, through a fabric of nonfiction, until it’s nearly impossible to tell what’s real and what’s been remixed or invented. The whole time I was reading it, I felt surprised that someone could write/compile like this and publish the result as a novel. And it’s a gripping adventure, too; I read it in one weekend.

This book blew up and maybe that makes it seem now like what’s the big deal, to publish a book like this? But I think Lacey is an example of what Gioia wishes for, a literary writer who the publisher invested in over time, and who they let try something risky and made a bigger bet on it. And then her next book was more experimental and made a smaller splash, so it seems they’re still letting her try things.

F: One of my most well-read coworkers also loved that book! You’ve definitely made me want to pick it up.

AM: Thanks for chatting, Fisher. You’ve made me laugh and think and feel a little less annoyed by this “good old days” take.

Dear readers,

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes people hurt and kill one another, and all a community might sacrifice to create a feeling of safety while the root causes of violence go unaddressed.

I’ve been reading Paradise Lost at the rate of about 200 lines per week, following along with a slow read hosted by Carson of . And it’s reminding me that when we boil these contemporary incidents of violence and suffering down to their elements, they resemble stories from the Bible. Each killing dominating the feed is uniquely horrible in its specific details, but the structural components of violence—man and woman, power and subservience, rebellion and punishment, good and evil, light and dark—don’t seem to change much.

Here’s my current reading list of recent books that draw upon characters from religious stories to explore how communities grapple with the moral challenges of violence and its aftermath. Tonally, they run the gamut from dark humor to Southern gothic, from lushly filthy to quietly contemplative. Let one keep you company when you don’t feel ready to put on your shoes to face the world.

The Devil Three Times, Rickey Fayne (2025)

This is the kind of saga where the family tree at the front of the book earns its keep. Yetunde, possessed at will by the spirit of her dead sister, awakens in the belly of an enslaver’s ship. A man tempts her with an apple, which she spits back in his face. In the end, she makes a deal. Throughout eight generations the Devil will visit her descendants at their darkest hour, offering salvation and connecting past horrors to present challenges. Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

How it sounds:

Religion then, its Commandments, its restrictions on who he could and could not love and where and why and how, was nothing more to Franklin than slavery of another order. He couldn’t fathom why any slave, having already one master, romanticized an afterlife in which they served another. And so once he learned of the outcast who wanted nothing so much as to confound God’s order, he decided, even before meeting the Devil at the crossroads the third time he ran, to cast his lot with the fallen.

Stoneyard Devotional, Charlotte Wood (2025)

An unnamed narrator unsubscribes from her life, joining a contemplative order of nuns on the Australian plains where she grew up. Despite little religious feeling, she seeks an existence based on stillness as an escape from the unavoidable harm caused by life in the modern world. Instead, she finds herself subsisting on packaged foods, mounting increasingly aggressive resistance to a plague of mice, and confronting the nuns’ distress related to burying the bones of a murdered sister. She also must contend with Helen Parry, a former high school classmate turned celebrity nun, whose presence recalls both a community’s failings and the narrator’s personal guilt.

How it sounds:

The hammer blow when I learned, some years ago, that Carmel had left two children to come here. Two high school-aged children. Sissy told me this as we polished the hallway floor on our hands and knees one day. Sissy enjoyed that task: the symbolism of prostrating herself, rags in hand. She was breathless with admiration for Carmel, for the sacrifice she had made. But I felt myself rear upwards when she told me this, my body rejecting the entire notion of a parent voluntarily leaving her children. Sitting on my haunches, stunned, while Sissy shuffled backwards on her knees, scrub, scrub, scrub.

Two-Step Devil, Jamie Quatro (2024)

It’s 2014 and the Prophet, a 70-year-old visionary junkyard artist (real name: Winston), is dying of lung cancer. Before he dies, he wants to get a prophecy to the White House and he needs a messenger who might be taken more seriously. Enter Michael, age 14, who the Prophet spots in obvious distress. He decides to rescue her from her captors and in so doing, essentially kidnaps her and recruits her for the role of the “Big Fish” who will fulfill this mission. The two form an unusual bond under the watch of the Two-Step Devil, who dances in the shadows of their interactions. Told in four parts, one of them an imagined one-act play in which the devil finally gets his moment on stage, this novel is an experimental exploration of the real and the otherworldly, and the possibility of collaboration beyond the veil.

How it sounds:

Ghost Jesus is the one takes me by the hair and lifts me, the Prophet said, so I can watch myself like someone up on a stage. Ghost Jesus takes me all around the Earth…

The girl had turned her whole body to face him. Her expression was different. It was like he’d been seeing her through a husk and something he’d said had shucked it off.

That floating up and watching yourself, she said. I can do that, too.

Matrix, Lauren Groff (2021)

This novel imagines the life of 12th century poet Marie de France. At seventeen, she’s cast out of the royal court and sent to England to lead an abbey of starving nuns, ridden with a mysterious coughing sickness. The last in a long line of women crusaders, she first connives to persuade Eleanor to summon her back to court. But eventually Marie gives herself over to visions from the Virgin Mary and to protecting her sisters. They build an elaborate labyrinth around their home in an attempt to deter a steady stream of invaders, especially men. The earnest insistence that the world could be better than it is and the dogged grind required to bring about some kind of utopia, even if it cannot last, fuel this novel.

How it sounds:

And it is true, Marie continues, perhaps holy women cannot kill, but they can entrap. They can use greed and lust and sloth to drive evil sinners to their own ends.

And, Marie says, what is paramount is that they cannot let the labyrinth be breached. They cannot allow the story to be told in the larger world that it is even slightly pregnable, or else the whole point of all that work and ingenuity, that great flood of money, loses its—well, Marie says after a pause, it loses its effectiveness.

Wufhild laughs and says that their dear abbess almost said magic.

A Children’s Bible, Lydia Millet (2020)

A group of teens whose only common ground is that their parents attended college together before they were born are thrown together during a vacation at a lakehouse. Embarrassed by their debauched parents, they run away when a devastating series of storms hits. What starts as a generational comedy narrated by Eve grows darker as the chaos of a society unraveling begins to resemble the stories in the children’s Bible her younger brother rescued from the house.

How it sounds

We were strict with the parents: punitive measures were taken. Thievery, mockery, contamination of food and drink.

They didn’t notice. And we believed the punishments fit the crimes.

Although the worst of those crimes was hard to pin down and therefore hard to punish correctly—the very quality of their being. The essence of their personalities.

So tell me…

• Which books would you add to this list? Which piques your interest? If you’ve read any already, let us know if you’d recommend them in the comments.

• I’ve realized some people are listening to an AI voice read these letters. What a great idea. Also: Eeep! Should I read it instead?

Cheers,

Subscribe now

Last week, Jancee Dunn of the Well newsletter at The New York Times published a piece with seven questions recommended by expert academic psychologists for reflection, to shape your thinking about the year ahead. Because I mostly hate-read the “Old Gray Lady” these days, I snickered as I played that 2000s ice-breaker game in my mind, adding “in bed” after reading each one. So self-serious. And who was the intern/AI who wrote that cutesy headline?

But later I realized the questions had stayed with me, despite my initial prurient instinct to ridicule that earnest call for reflection-on-demand. When I replaced “in bed” with “while reading,” I found them a useful framework for thinking about my year in reading— and what reading experiences I most want to create for myself next year.

Here are the questions and my answers, if you’d like to try it for yourself. Whether you read one book or 100 in 2025, you can do this to seed good things in your reading year ahead.

When did you feel the most joyful and carefree (while reading)?

• Novels featuring bizarre romance, blending strangeness, passion, and sadness.

During a short vacation in the Flagstaff mountains last summer, I read three books from a list I’d made for June: Big Swiss, Sky Daddy, and The Safekeep. The first two are darkly comic, the last a suspenseful, twisted romance. All have in common female main characters acting on obsessive sexual desire in ways that fall far outside of acceptable behavior. On a flight to London later last summer, I devoured Rachel Ingall’s Mrs. Caliban. A satirical yet serious novella about a housewife who attempts to escape her unacceptable reality through a relationship with a 6-foot-7 amphibian, Mrs. Caliban is the book I read this year that I’ll always remember for the way I experienced it in my body, shaking with private laughter in my seat and wiping my tears discreetly before they dropped to my tray table at the end. It’s the pinnacle of bizarre romance.

But each of these thrilled me in their originality and daring. Sapphic or interspecies or objectophilic, these characters really just go for what they desire, rejecting any constraining norms. Their attendant suffering in the name of self-acceptance pounds romance into a new shape.

Looking back, I realize that in 2024 I had a similar experience reading All Fours on a trip to Lake Tahoe. Living in the consciousness that drives a book like this for awhile, as I think to myself “who could ever!” and judge yet at the same time understand it, shakes me loose from the obliteration of time in daily routines and productivity. It wakes up the carefree energy and the feeling that the only thing that really matters is to give way to the pull of the things you love. Add fresh air and that’s the stuff of a great vacation— and an interesting life.

For August 2026 I have planned a self-guided hiking Tour de Mont Blanc (inspired by ’s trip) and in the meantime I will be planning a reading list inspired by these books for the occasion. Please send your recommendations of well-written novels of weird obsessions and unacceptable courtship.

What seemed impossible (while reading)—but you did it anyway?

• Picking the “it” new release each month

In the second half of the year, I challenged myself to see if I could pick out the one book of new literary fiction each month that would be most worth the hype and write about it. Every Tuesday there are hundreds of titles published that could be considered literary, among the 5,000 or so new books published each week across all genres. I aimed to read my picks on or before their release date1 and to publish my piece as close to that date as I can to avoid being influenced by any other coverage or publicity beyond the marketing copy or the author’s own self-promotions.

Here’s how I did with the 2025 releases I featured as part of this monthly series, compared to the most prestigious end-of-year lists:

• June - Flashlight by Susan Choi (The New Yorker Essential Reads, National Book Award shortlist, PEN America’s Top 15 from all ‘Best of’ Lists)

• July - Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (National Book Critics Circle longlist) and Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Kirkus 100)

• August - If You’re Seeing This It’s Meant for You by Leigh Stein (no year end recognition but I picked this one not because I expected it would be critically acclaimed, but for a different “it girl” reason.)2

• September - Heart the Lover by Lily King (National Book Critics Circle longlist, PEN America’s Top 15).

• October - Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt (Publisher’s Weekly Top 10)

• November - The Pelican Child3 by Joy Williams (National Book Award longlist, Kirkus Best Short Fiction list, PEN America Jean Stein Award longlist)

• December - there were no new books I felt like reading/recommending.

Throughout the year, both before and after I started the series, I added other new titles that I had not yet read to each of my monthly lists as well. All told of the twenty 2025 releases I featured in my newsletter, seven of them appeared on the tippy top of the end of year lists. Two on the Book Critics Circle Award Longlist (I also reviewed Audition by Katie Kitamura), the two on the Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 list, four on the National Book Award lists (including the winner for Translated Literature: We Are Green and Trembling) or The New York Times Top 10 (Mother Mary Comes to Me). I included four of the books on PEN America’s synthesis of the 15 books most frequently appearing on the top end-of-year lists in my newsletter this year (including the aforementioned Sky Daddy). Others (Hotshot; Moderation) appeared among the longer less prestigious but still exclusive Kirkus 100.

What you don’t see here or in my newsletter are all the books I considered before deciding what to share. Of the 25 or so additional new releases I downloaded or purchased to consider for the newsletter this year that I decided not to feature, at least nine also turned up on those most prestigious end-of-year lists. This is not just some blog where I read whatever I want and tell you about all of it. I curate thoughtful, researched selections for you.4

And I think I did a pretty good job. As far as I can tell there’s only one new release I reviewed or recommended this year that had any kind of publicity push behind it that was not part of the end-of-year “best of” conversations. Of the remaining new releases I featured not counted yet, three were published by small independent presses. One of these is now getting some Substack buzz (Mike Powell’s New Paltz, New Paltz) mentioned recently as one of the The Paris Review contributors’ 2025 favorites and reviewed by Nicholas Clemente in . But I think I might have been one of the first on the platform to note it. Two others were self-published (Lamb by and Cubafruit by ).

Listen, I’m not claiming I identified the book from 2025 most likely to last as part of the American literary canon—that’s an entirely separate conversation. I have a hunch The Slip by Lucas Schaffer, winner of the Kirkus Prize, might be the one and I have not even read yet because I ran out of book buying budget and storage space for the year before I even heard of it. But if you want to be in the know throughout the year about the books everyone will be talking about at end of 2026, by way of independent reviews and recommendations5, I can offer you that as a subscriber.

Substack has enabled sponsorships and my 2026 fortune cookie says you will start to see a lot more sponsored posts from the big newsletters. Although I do plan to grow this newsletter this year, I remain committed to only independent, reader-supported book coverage in 2026. Thank you to my paid subscribers, especially those who are now renewing for their second or third year whose contributions remind me that I am offering authentic, valuable expertise and helping me to cover the costs of again reading twice as many new books as I will talk about here to curate these suggestions.

What gave you energy and what drained it (while reading)?

• Immersing myself simultaneously in the audio and print version of a classic.

Toggling between an audiobook and a hard copy of the classic Anna Karenina gave me energy to get back into a regular habit of long walks— and to take on a long classic after a year of preferring shorter, newer books.

I love to be read to, and I love to turn the pages and fold the corners where I find something I’d like to come back to, but these are very different ways of experiencing a text. A digressive classic like Anna Karenina rewards both approaches. In each format, I noticed things that otherwise might have escaped my attention. I skipped some chapters in the audio, but ended up reading every word of the print version of Rosamund Bartlett’s translation from the beginning because I became so interested in the language and text. And I walked an average of 1500 more steps per day this year than last.

I have an audio copy of The Decameron that I have not yet listened to that might be fun to approach this way next year. I also am planning to join this year’s slow read of Paradise Lost hosted by Carson at and I plan to try this both/and approach as a way to experience this classic for the first time.

• Drain: Reading inexpertly written books

Preliminary judging for the Samuel Richardson prize has been a “peculiar privilege” to borrow the phrasing of a more famous 2025 prize juror. The initial round required quite a bit of self-cajoling to get through. I am still not finished with this process, as the winner will be announced in 2026. I am optimistic after reading their reviews that the experience of reading the other jurors’ selected finalists will be more rewarding than screening the submissions was.

In the meantime, you will find me DNFing any other book I pick up with lackluster writing. And you may find me leaking energy in the comments of the next round of cynical laments by unpublished folks about “the industry.” My patience for bashing the agents, editors, publicists, etc. for pushing substandard and inexpert literature upon the masses has thinned. To lend any credibility in claiming they’ve supposedly screened out more innovative and worthy manuscripts based on identity characteristics or whatever other supposed shibboleth, I will need to see your own self-published writing and a cogent take on a contemporary book you do find worthy to show you read widely enough to support your claims.

But surely I’d be better off saving my energy and use it to double-fist another one of the classics they’re raving about instead.

What habit, if you did it more consistently, would have a positive effect (while reading)?

• Reading more older books I know almost nothing about

I’m currently reading The Golden Notebook, which is ’s pick for her January Irregular Book Club. When I bought my copy, I knew nothing about this book other than I recognized the title and author’s name and decided it was probably about time I read some Doris Lessing. Just as with new releases, I find it a fun challenge to read an older book without much context to see what I might make of it on my own. It’s so strange and fascinating and I am looking forward to making sense of it this weekend— and to making a point of picking up more unknown titles from before my time as they cross my path this year.

Also, this particular book reminds me that I have never shown you all my little notebooks. Would you like to see what I use these for?

What did you try to control that was outside your control (while reading)?

• Time and consciousness and really isn’t that the point??

This question invites an existential angst: we can only answer this by talking about limits of time or consciousness, yes? The reality that every book read displaces another book that could have been read in the time we will have, or replaces a different kind of connection or another chore/errand/task I could have accomplished during that time is both exhausting and an exhilarating.

Last year, I loved how captured this so much that when she put her work on the market this year, I had to bring it into my life.

But after all, that may be the point of reading— to cut through the parts of life that are repetitive and unremarkable and that obliterate time, crystallizing into memory or narrative moments that otherwise may have just disappeared in the living of them. Before, I had always resisted re-reading, as though adding new titles to the list of books I have read could ward off the elapse of time. I am always moving forward at an exhilarating pace! You’ll never catch me!

But last year when I found myself clenched with this particular angst about time, I chose to re-read to release the pressure of novelty. I hadn’t touched House of Mirth or Mrs Dalloway in more than two decades. They felt surprisingly new at this stage of life. I re-read a book I had hated in 1997, American Pastoral, and loved it. A book I’d loved around the same time, The Stone Diaries, held less interest than before and turned out to be not much like I’d remembered. Even so, I copied this passage into my notebook:

“It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts seize on the tongue, so that to say ‘Twelve years passed’ is to deny the fact of biographical logic. How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us?”

We’re helpless against time. It will be taken from us no matter what we do with it. I’ve found re-reading a way to soften into a non-linear complexity of my own personal experience of it, to surrender my anxiety about the reality that it can and will be lost to me no matter how I measure it. While I am not sure which books I will re-read this year, I am sure I will continue the practice.

Is there anyone you need to forgive in 2026?

• Let another’s success inspire you, but never diminish you.

I forgive for writing one of the best reviews of a contemporary book I’ve seen on Substack in the past year, about Erin Somers’ The Ten Year Affair.6 He contextualizes it alongside Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. He reads Somers so closely and perfectly and in the process says some of the truest words about marriage I have ever read. It’s the kind of review that’s almost as good as reading the book.

Here is a link to his review. His latest book is The Future Was Color.

Entertainment, Weakly

The Horror of the Husband

If you wanted to be irritating, you could distill the history of the modern literary novel down to two characters whose infidelities drive each to suicide. Even better is their polarity: one is tragic, the other comic; and ever after we have Anna novels or Emma novels — a beautiful and bereft mother sobbing as she throws herself on to the brutal tracks …

Read more

4 months ago · 68 likes · 6 comments · Patrick Nathan

When I read his piece, I had been fumbling with my own close reading of Somers’ book alongside Anna Karenina and Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment. I decided it was taking too much time— more time than it took me to read her book. Was it worth it and did anyone care? I forgive Patrick for being so good that, when I read his piece, any opinions I had about imagination, humiliation, aging, and the extramarital affair, and how Somers’ book makes this new, dissolved into the belief they had already been more elegantly and convincingly articulated, with clarity I hadn’t reached.

But I regret my decision. Reflecting on this moment reminds me of the drive that led me to create this newsletter in December 2023. Back then, I had so many thoughts about new books in conversation with older ones and nowhere to put them, no one to share them with. They take so much time to capture. It could be read as a form of insanity to spend life tsuo do that in the age of six bullet point blog posts and AI generated book blogs that have three times as many subscribers as my newsletter does. But if it’s insanity, it also keeps me sane and when I remember to be, I’m so glad to be able to make the time to offer your mind this version of mine.

Share

Cheers to a happy new year,

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.” So begins the final chapter in which Fanny Price— a child cast off from a home overwhelmed with mouths to be raised in material comfort (but in the shadow of her socially desirable cousins) on the Bertram estate—expediently becomes its favored daughter.

Fanny has paid her first visit to her family since she was sent away nearly a decade before. Appalled as she is by her attention-seeking and money worshipping cousins and their fashionable friends, as unimpressed by her laconic aunt’s uselessness, and as hesitantly questioning of her plantation owning uncle’s continued enslavement of people he can’t legally trade, three months’ discomfort with her family’s food and manners and their mutual indifference teach her that she can no longer belong to the Price family. Her visit emboldens her to conceive of Mansfield Park as home for the first time. But knowing her place, she cannot bring herself to request to return unless summoned.

Fanny’s restoration, like our modern class comforts, comes at a price: what we take, what we leave, and how much of ourselves we can afford to exchange in order to belong.

Subscribe now

As a judge for the Samuel Richardson self-published fiction prize cooked up by , I’ve spent the last several weeks reading outside my usual preferences — which, it turns out, was a very clarifying experience. My task was to choose one finalist from the seven book-length works of self-published fiction in my pile and review it for my newsletter subscribers. All the judges will do the same, then we’ll all read the selected finalists to choose a winner.

Given all the discourse about how contemporary publishing has doomed literature by focusing on the market and pandering to readers, I was curious about what I might be missing. I had hoped I might be wowed by some unsung talent. In reality, I spent a lot of time bored or confused by what I was reading. I began to feel truly worried about wasting your time with my commitment to this contest and about doing a disservice to the writers as well. As one of my favorite Merve Emre maxims goes, “It’s not challenging to get people to not read something. People are not reading things all the time.”

My pick for finalist: Cubafruit by Alexander Sorondo

That said, the book I’ve selected as a finalist, Cubafruit by , is worth talking about. It’s a sprawling, genre-blurring political thriller that argues with itself about history, double-dealing and storytelling. From the epigraph, which takes the editorial license of plugging the fictional name of the novel’s island of San Mara into a John Quincy Adams’s quote about his famous theory of Cuba, this book caught my attention with its ambition:

…and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but to fall to the ground, San Mara, forcibly disjoined from its own natural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.

Here is an author who will take some liberties with history and text, to create something new.

A cinematic political thriller

Cubafruit gets going with a cinematic hook. It’s 2022. An eminent biographer based in a neighborhood resembling Little Havana, Miami, receives a call from an anonymous woman minutes before a live telephone interview on national TV. She says, “I’m looking at you through a rifle scope.” The reader should know she means business, as we’ve just seen her shoot an innocent bystander. From there, the story lunges into a cat-and-mouse game between a the biographer and the caller, who insists she knows about his complicity with his subject, a former VP to a Caribbean dictator, and with a past still unfolding in real time.

The book weaves a minute-by-minute unfolding of that drama with multiple 20th century timelines in an alternative history of Cuba, constructing a web of political violence. At its heart is the uneasy triangle between the people who make history, the people who try to survive it, and the people who live to tell about it.

A sprawling cast of characters develop and switch allegiances, offing each other on the regular as the island nation of San Mara tries to find a way to deal with its legacy of enslavement, embargo, exile and spies. The narrative ricochets in a new direction with each bloody shootout as this process of elimination leaves the only victors—is the dictator alive, or is that a video of a convincing avatar?— the complicit, and those motivated for revenge.

Fantastical flourishes

I really enjoyed the fantastical elements of this world. Across timelines and borders, characters of all stripes enjoy a tropical beverage called cubafruit: it sounds like its half smoothie, half kava, and half cocaine. (Yes, I know that’s three halves, but that’s the energy of this book: excessive and fully committed to its own intensity.) A wolf dog appears at moments of moral ambiguity; vampiric fish and some rather muscular spiders torment the characters and contribute to the overall horror of their experiences.

A maximalist gambit

The chapters featuring a CIA agent called Pavel Bender feel like an escape from the agitation of the rest of the characters— quieter, more psychological, and grounded in duty regardless of the machinations around him. You can feel the author placing the whole political cosmos in his hands.

Cubafruit is baggy at 530 pages, and several of the characters seem to exist only to suffer in gruesome detail that made me wish someone—anyone—had suggested cutting 20% of the gore and made Sorondo choose which one character would get to shit his pants in the final draft. As is, Cubafruit is a maximalist gambit, with some threads left dangling and some scenes that feel like they came straight from the unfiltered id.

Why it matters

What makes Cubafruit feel relevant in 2025 is the way it depicts circumstances that are playing themselves out right now: operatives of the government disappear people from our streets. Boats in the Caribbean, and their passengers, have been obliterated with impunity. Someday, some whistleblowers and journalists will write volumes explaining the dealings undergirding these horrors and perhaps the victims’ family members will wonder what they— like the biographer at the center of this novel— were doing while this happened.

Sorondo’s candid Acknowledgments address his grief and shame over failing to sell the novel. His decision to self-publish it anyway with the encouragement of his partner gives the project a moving sense of integrity. It takes self-awareness and courage to stand by an effort that has fallen short of one’s own standards, without placing the blame on the publishing industry or suggesting readers just don’t know what’s good. And without giving up.

A writer to watch

Sorondo writes a thoughtful newsletter, , (this post about the phone wallpaper he has seen while working as a cashier was featured by Substack and I personally loved this post about an argument with his manager). He’s a writer to watch in the future and I’m glad to recommend Cubafruit as a finalist for the Samuel Richardson award.

See also…

The Curriculum

This Sam Richardson Finalist is a Beekeeping Murder Mystery

NOTE: This essay is part of the Sam Richardson Prize competition, an award for the best self-published literary novels. Many thanks to Naomi Kanakia for welcoming my participation as a judge. (EDIT: you can read Will Caverly on Substack at Mercenary Pen…

Read more

5 months ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · T. Benjamin White

Cat Guy

GLITTERBALLS by Michele Howarth

Glitterballs deserves more attention than 6 reviews on Goodreads. Howarth is a talented writer, and she easily rose to the top of my pile of novels for the Samuel Richardson Award from the first paragraph of the introduction…

Read more

6 months ago · 6 likes · Moo Cat

Woman of Letters

This awards-nominated novel is pretty good

For the last week I’ve been reading a self-published novel, Drive A, that the author submitted to a contest I’m running. This book is pretty good! I enjoyed reading it, and with this post I’m announcing Drive A as a finalist for the Samuel Richardson Award…

Read more

6 months ago · 53 likes · 6 comments · Naomi Kanakia

This weekend I got to go to the Texas Book Festival gala. For work! was the MC, and in person she sounds just like her newsletter and podcast. She had the audacity to tell the people to shush their chatter so we could hear the guest poets read—and I loved her for it. The Texas Book Festival team does a great job with every detail, and if you have a chance to visit Austin in early November for a bookish weekend, I highly recommend it.1

Revisiting Lightning Rods while writing for my last post about Helen DeWitt’s new book with Ilya Gridneff, Your Name Here, reminded me how much I love to read about work. Books about work show how people exist inside systems they didn’t design. I love a novel or memoir that gets the workplace exactly right, even when it’s so wrong.

Then The New York Times created the perfect segue by publishing a spectacularly bad opinion piece about the workplace, then changing the rage bait headline twice. Like a teenager trying to fix a bad tweet, each version was somehow worse than the last. Everyone suddenly wanted to talk about what’s gone wrong with work and who’s to blame—which is basically my Roman Empire.

The answer to the question they asked, of course, is no: women did not ruin the workplace. Men didn’t either, since to ruin something requires it to have been good in the first place. People have complained about work regardless of gender since the dawn of jobs.

Jessica Winter nailed this in her review of Scott Galloway’s new book Notes on Being a Man for The New Yorker, dismantling the idea that “feminizing” the workplace explains why young men are struggling—with college, relationships, and living anywhere but their childhood bedroom. She points to another new book, Men at Work: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen Who Built It by Glenn Kurtz. Guess what? In one of the manliest workplaces ever, the men were miserable in the same ways!

After nearly 30 years of various professional jobs including a stint running university career services, plus my habit of asking everyone my favorite get-to-know you question “tell me a story about your first job,” here’s what I’ve learned about how to un-ruin it.

The matrix

The major tasks in every job fall somewhere along the spectrum between Working a System —> Human Drama, and every role depends on others to some degree between Lone Wolf —> Cog in a Hierarchical Machine. Most of us are capable of operating in a range along this spectrum, but some zones feel easier physically and emotionally. The first key to job satisfaction is to get paid for spending most of your time in the quadrant that aligns to the kind of energy you feel fine about trading for money. If your job feels very draining all the time, you are not working in your best energy quadrant.

Some people I work with read this, so let me say: my job with the Tucson Festival of Books is the perfect upper-right quadrant Goldilocks setup—I get to support individual humans’ creative goals through the synchronized efforts of a team. I believe literature matters and community connections matter and every day I get to align my own task list to these things, even when I’m just writing emails or making phone calls to ask for money. Some days I’m mired in bureaucracy like insurance and taxes (too cold); other days, dealing with some idiosyncratic complain-y situation (too hot). But mostly, it’s just right.

But my work life was not always like this. There are jobs at different levels of the pay scale in every quadrant, but what happens sometimes is that people can be tempted to leave a preferred quadrant for an opportunity to ascend a ladder and get paid more money. I say, for happiness sake, save as much of that money as possible to create a runway for when misery ensues, to maybe make it feel okay to move laterally or take a step “down” to something in a better energy quadrant.

Of course it’s important to find a workplace where most people aren’t jerks—whatever their gender. It is scientifically proven this is easier when you are more like the people in charge, as no matter what they do they’ll be less likely to seem like jerks to you and vice versa.

That’s the tricky part, for women or minorities working in fields that have traditionally been run by a different group of people, or I guess now also for the dudes and ladies who grew up thinking they’d only be working for a dude and are sad the dudes are not always the only ones in charge anymore. They are realizing it does not always feel good to be different from your bosses and peers. I am not making light of discrimination or harassment in the workplace. There are standards for these things that must be met. A person of any gender who does not meet these standards is not a jerk; they’re an asshole. A workplace with “no assholes” rules doesn’t guarantee joy, but it’s a minimum requirement for being a place worth showing up to.

If you can also align your career with some worthwhile human endeavor2, you might just pull off the trifecta. But this step is not absolutely necessary for happiness at work. It is possible to find enough meaning elsewhere in life. The balance worth striving for is earning a living without feeling like we’re throwing our lives away.

Anyway, I realize this is all often so much harder than I’m making it sound. So here are a few books that understand how strange, frustrating, funny, and occasionally sublime it can be to have a job.

A reading menu

Hotshot: A Life on Fire, River Selby (2025)

In the first chapter of this memoir, River Selby, a non-binary former wildland firefighter serving on a fire clean-up crew asks a boss about how to become a hotshot, only to be told they can’t because they’re a girl. Selby would go on to serve as a hotshot for four years. But this book is more than a tale of a struggle against gender-based discrimination and harassment in the workplace. It’s also a history of fire policy and climate change, and a personal story of self-acceptance and healing.

Moderation, Elaine Castillo (2025)

Girlie Delmundo is the best content moderator in the world. She’s survived seeing the worst things people post online with her sanity intact, and now she’s getting a promotion that will let her help out her extended Filipino family with their recession fallout debts. She’ll become a virtual reality moderator for Playground, the latest and greatest virtual-reality tool for gaming and therapeutic applications. Its inventor has died by suicide and as Girlie gets closer to the co-founder who knew him best, she finds herself falling in love and caught up in corporate intrigue. Moderation is a satire about the technology industry, combined with a class conscious romance. It feels like a book club book, by the author of How to Read Now.

New Paltz, New Paltz, Mike Powell (2025)

Ben, the main character in this slim novel by Tucson writer Mike Powell, is a fact-checker at a gossip magazine. The irony of this role is not lost on him, and he enjoys riding the slipstream of this and other strangely enjoyable observations of the kinds of subtle mismatches that create the texture of life. A mysterious young woman also slips in and out of view, and into his bed, once. When the breezy cruelty of his job connects him to a tragedy, he has his George Clooney/Rodrigo S.M. moment. A sweet little indie novel that spent some time on the Asterism bestsellers list last summer.

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, Olga Ravn, trans. Martin Aitken (2023)

Aboard the interstellar Six-Thousand ship, the human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. Objects, some type of living stones, from the planet New Discovery brought on board create strange attachments. As the crew begins to question the purpose of their work and their very existence, major problems with the mission emerge.

Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, Studs Terkel (1974, 1997)

“Ought not there be an increment, earned though not yet received, from one’s daily work—an acknowledgement of man’s being?” With all the discourse on the threat to man’s being posed by women working, I’ve been dipping back into this classic oral history of 100 Americans’ working lives. Originally published in 1974 and reissued in 1997, this book has inspired not only Barack Obama’s 2023 Netflix series “Working: What We Do All Day” (which did not quite work)— but also, I just discovered, a Stephen Schwartz musical available from my public library. There’s also a one-hour 2017 audio documentary, Working in America, made from the best of Terkel’s recordings that’s worth a listen.

Honorable mention:

I haven’t been able to get my hands on it yet, but ’s recent review of Todd James Pierce’s deep dive into Making Mary Poppins makes it sounds appealing on the theme of workplace non-fiction:

Todd James Pierce’s Making Mary Poppins is that rare, behind-the-scenes Hollywood story whose appeal comes not from revelations of bad behavior or a cavalcade of disasters, but instead from the pleasure in watching an simple idea slowly snowball into an epochal triumph through the judicious application of talent, patience, and professionalism.

See also…

• ’s post on the NYT Opinion.

• ’s first post is a wild literary workplace story.

Eden Collinsworth

WHEREIN I PROVE THAT IT IS SOMETIMES POSSIBLE TO GET AWAY WITH FOLLY.

Lucian of Samosata, a 2nd century Hellenized Syrian, warned that those who write about leaving a place they know for another they don’t will always embellish what they have experienced once they arrive. This is not the case for the newly arrived in New York—a place where it’s impossible to downplay the characteristics of the locals who are famously stra…

Read more

5 months ago · 16 likes · 3 comments · Eden Collinsworth

So tell me…

• A story about your first job?

• Has anyone seen this Working: The Musical business live? I do not generally go in for musicals but I wish I could see this one. Apparently the last production had new songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda?

• What are you reading and is it any good?

Not only is it built from emails, online images, and digital fragments— it anticipated the moment capital-L Literature would live in inboxes. Long before these practices were widespread, DeWitt was experimenting with reader-supported writing, self-distribution, and unconventional publishing. Now a book, Your Name Here breaks every convention to make its point about the compromises and luck traditional publishing requires.

Before Your Name Here came out in print from Dalkey Archive Press and appeared on the Publishers Weekly top ten books of 2025 list1 this week—a full seventeen years after Jenny Turner reviewed it for the London Review of Books—there was the PDF. When DeWitt couldn’t find a publisher in 2007, she offered the file via her blog for a suggested donation of $8. In its Winter 2008 issue, n+1 excerpted the first chapter lamenting its failure to find a U.S. publisher.2

DeWitt, of course, wasn’t a typical self-published author. Her debut, The Last Samurai (2000), was a critical sensation—a Booker-longlisted novel that brought in a nice advance and sold well despite epic mishandling by its publisher, Talk Miramax Books, which collapsed before publishing the second book in her two-book deal. What followed were years of stalled projects, agents unable or unwilling to place her manuscripts, and struggles to get her work back into print. In a 2016 interview with upon the re-release of The Last Samurai by New Directions, she described being broke, railed against the incompetence of agents, editors, and publishers, and connected these experiences to her multiple suicide attempts.

Requesting contributions from readers of her online blog and her books became a matter of survival. From a fascinating 2008 interview with if:book:

Agents go after big advances – which means a writer does a roadshow to buy silence somewhere down the line. It’s done this way because this is the way it’s done. It doesn’t have to be done this way; if it were done a different way, writers would write better books in less time… the Internet has the power to reduce the amount of time writers have to trade for legitimacy. It has the power to change readers’ relationship to writers. If a book (or a blog, or a web comic) changed your life, why not buy its author a bicycle? Or a goat? Or a bottle of wine? Why not offer its author six off-season months in your summer cottage on the Cape?

Those look to me to be likelier ways forward than for writers to pay the rent by selling PDFs online.

She’d rely on direct reader support for years to come. In her Author’s Note to Lightning Rods (2011), she thanks the readers whose donations kept her going while The Last Samurai was out of print. Her blog, paperpools, ran for eighteen years, a mix of updates, rants, and working notes—with a Ko-fi link.

Until Dalkey announced Your Name Here in September 2024, it stood as another example of her unlucky encounters with the industry. The novel reflects her unwavering insistence that writers should be able to set the terms for distribution of their work in its very architecture. It’s a wild, fragmented collaboration that cites If on a winter’s night a traveler, 81/2, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich as formal inspiration.

It’s August 2006. From Berlin, reclusive novelist Helen DeWitt corresponds with 26-year-old Australian paparazzo Ilya Gridneff, whom she met in a London pub years earlier. Gridneff chases Angelina and Britney across the Middle East then uses the money he makes to buy some time to research less lucrative stories—crossing the border in Kurdistan, chasing black markets from Tehran to Sarajevo. (Reporter or patron? Hard to say.) Enchanted by his emails, DeWitt becomes convinced she’s discovered the next Hunter S. Thompson. She tries to use her literary clout to get him a book deal so he’ll have funds to leave the celebrity work behind. No dice; meanwhile, DeWitt racks up credit card debt. They begin collaborating on the airport newsstand sensation Your Name Here, hoping their combined forces will bring money and recognition.

But you, reader, are trying to read the book before it’s finished and wishing you’d grabbed a different airport paperback. Maybe recluse Rachel Zozanian’s bestseller, Lotteryland, which chronicles a character navigating a society where everything good in life is doled out by chance. He finds the odds stacked against him, until the much luckier Gaby helps him with his prize claim strategy. Zozanian’s emails and memoirs intercede, revealing that she herself has been driven to the brink by abuse from the people who get books and movies made, tracing her detached malaise back to her college years, when she subsisted on scratch tickets and prostitution. Zozanian’s emails to her lawyer with instructions for finding her body replicate DeWitt’s own highly publicized suicide attempt in 2004. Zozanian also exchanges emails with a series of Russian-named gonzo journalist avatars—Alyosha Pechorin, Misha Kropotkin, Dimitri something—blurring lines between authors, characters, and collaborators, and reminding you (yes, you) that what makes it into print is never the whole story.

If DeWitt has made her incredulity about the idiocy of the publishing world her entire public personality, she is just as clear about how little this actually has to do with her. She doesn’t blame publishers for treating books as commodities. But artists, Your Name Here suggests, may have to play a different game of survival.

Also from the if:book interview:

It strikes me as silly to draw a distinction between wonderful prose in ‘informal’ forms such as e-mails, forms which are currently not classed as commodities and so can’t be sold, and other forms which currently happen to be classed as commodities. Most modern readers pay much more attention to Shakespeare’s plays than to The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis; the plays only got published because friends of Shakespeare’s thought it worth the trouble to see them into print. The Internet ought to make us more aware of the extraordinary resources of language and images, many of which don’t slot well into what publishers see as publishable. It’s silly to blame publishers for dealing with the market as they see it; we should look for other ways of ensuring that people capable of wonderful writing have time for it.

Your Name Here reads as a “stressful slog”3 through the many snakes and ladders required to possibly get paid for one’s crackling prose to become a book or a movie. There were many times when I wanted to quit this book, not least on pages 291, 475, and 577, where the authors blatantly poke fun at the reader’s despair (“Where is this going?” “You’re extremely aggrieved…there are narrative strands which you find hard to follow.” “You’re on page 475 and you still have no idea what’s going on.”). The pop culture and current event references date from the early 2000s in a way that feels very Wayback Machine rather than fully ‘motivated’, to use one of DeWitt-the-character’s favorite ways to describe meaningful allusions in fiction. But flashes of engaging brilliance4, the promise of a payoff in one of DeWitt’s signature flips of power at the end, plus the skills I’ve developed skimming the 137 daily work-related emails I receive to find the good parts5 pulled me through.

The novel is recursive, funny, and exasperating. It has not been edited through the lens of shared reality. These people are getting away with something! As such it’s primarily a tome for the real DeWitt heads, who will thrill to spot seeds of the obsessions and patterns addressed much more economically in the other books published while YNH was stuck in PDF purgatory.

In the end, I was moved by characters committed to the creative life who, like Odysseus, “can wheel and deal from the depths of despair the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom will never desert [them].”

As a judge for ’s Samuel Richardson prize, I’ve been reading a lot of self-published fiction lately. I have been struck by the variety of strategies the authors use to try to balance what’s weird and wonderful about their work with conventions on which hopes of traditional publishing can be hung. But one, with ire clearly born of deep frustration with rejection in art and life, veered so far from attempting to accommodate the reader that it became ridiculous in its pursuit of shock value. Your Name Here likewise refuses to oblige. To the extent it works, it’s because it never surrenders its good nature.

DeWitt writes about the mindset required to hold fast to belief in an unconventional vision in Lightning Rods, her satirical novel about an encyclopedia salesman turned failed vacuum cleaner salesman who comes up with a scheme to get rich by providing prostitutes-in-disguise to high-performing male corporate types to reduce their sexual harassment of female colleagues:

If you don’t have what it takes, you can waste a lot of time asking yourself, ‘How can I get what it takes?’ The question you should be asking yourself is ‘Is there something that takes what I have to offer?’

DeWitt recently told The Baffler that she can’t get excited about Substack.6 Indeed there are some eerie parallels between the platform and the Lotteryland she and Gridneff have imagined, a place where the odds of hitting a jackpot are low and receiving a little help from your luckier and better positioned friends is the best hope for good things to come your way. But before Substack existed, DeWitt believed in the possibility that writers could depend on readers directly. If she showed up wherever she could be found, they might help her.

DeWitt’s blog has been dark since April. One hopes that with the publication of Your Name Here she has found the months of silence and the absence of worry about money needed to concentrate on new work. But if she wants to get back to blogging, I can’t help but think she’d find good company and readers willing to pay her here.

Literary Substack gets what writers go through for their words to reach readers with some semblance of their intentions intact. (Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, Monster of a Land forthcoming) recently captured on Notes her own struggle with grim copy edits that made her want to work in a bar again because it’s a “healthier environment.”

Even lucky moments as a published writer require the ability to remain grounded and take a financial reality check, as , author of Housemates and the forthcoming Fat Swim shared:

Ilya’s last word in Your Name Here is “Halp,” followed by bank details. Isn’t it every writer’s wish: to be noticed but not consumed, to be read but not erased by noise from those who cannot yet see what only that writer can make exist? And, ultimately, to receive a little help—from readers and friends?

Every month I write about a hyped new release. If you’re new to Helen DeWitt and not sure whether she’s for you after reading this review, start with The English Understand Wool— it’s like a little Golden Book for grown ups. The Last Samurai is the one to read if you want to understand why she’s revered as a genius.

I’d love to know:

• Who’s the writer you’d buy a bottle of wine and a bicycle for if they asked?

• Who are you rooting for most to find their readers on Substack? When’s the last time you paid for something you could have read for free?

American berserk

In September, I re-read a book I thought I hated.

The character at the center of American Pastoral by Philip Roth, Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov, is an assimilated third-generation American from a Jewish family, a self-made glove factory owner living in the hills near a WASPy village outside of Newark, New Jersey with his Miss America candidate wife. In a scene that made me laugh out loud, one Saturday morning he skips home from the village post office, acting out his identification with his hero Johnny Appleseed, throwing his arms around as though tossing seeds from a bag at his waist. He loves his life!

It’s the 1960s, and unrest will soon disturb this idyll as his teenage daughter Merry sets off a bomb at that same post office in protest of the Vietnam war. But for that moment, he believes that his intentions and the intentions of the people around him are so good, all they need to do is to keep being responsible, volunteering for committees, voting for the leaders on the side of prosperity and peace and dancing through meadows, confident things will keep getting better.

When I first tried to read this book in 1997, I found it so vile in the first 100 pages that I didn’t make it as far as that satirical scene—let alone to the battle scene of a dinner party that concludes the novel, where it becomes apparent that there’s no real lesson here for the Swede, as imagined by the impotent writer and Swede’s high school classmate, Nathan Zuckerman: he is incorrigibly certain of the morality of his way of life and of the myth that America’s democratic meritocracy is a kind of paradise. I thought at the time that American Pastoral was asking me to accept a worldview in which the role of women and black people and gays and youth and all of those who run counter to the vein of patriarchal intergenerational progress is to wait patiently for history to happen. As though to expect something else was the equivalent of being a killer. How passé.

On being wrong

In a passage I copied into my commonplace notebook, Zuckerman insists:

“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.”

This time around, I found American Pastoral fascinating, in the way it juxtaposes an early 1970s fervor with the nonchalance of the late 1990s. There’s something very proto-Trump about a story centering a man who represses the rift within his own family and society and just starts over as though it never happened. Roth himself was not a Trump supporter, and he was just as adamant that none of his fiction was meant to serve a political message, that American political reality was far more impossibly ludicrous than any novelist could dream. Yet only a novel that so perceptively observed the political context of the second half of the 20th century could be decipherable in this way nearly 30 years later.

When I read it again, closer in age to Swede himself than his radical daughter, I found a meaning in American Pastoral exactly opposed to what I had once understood it to say. I felt it calling me to notice the fragility of American democracy, to reject any fantasy of its purity or other misplaced moralism, and to pay close attention to how quickly democracy can dissolve into extremism. To question my own callow fantasies of progress without violence or suffering.

What now?

These are unexpected times and honestly I’m unsure what my generation is meant to do about it.

Of course there are things to do, and individual people are doing them. But the toolkit feels ill-equipped for the scale of the breakdown. And more than half our peers voted for this mess, after all.

Like the Swede, I am finding it an odd experience to reach a comfortable middle age and believe I know who I am and to love my life, just as the world begins to go fully berserk. Well, really, who are you going to be now?

You know this stereotype: Gen X in the U.S. grew up skeptical of institutions, allergic to gullibility, fluent in detachment. What I think people sometimes miss about our supposed cynicism is that it was all based on the very 1990s assumption that once we were in charge of this liberal democracy, we’d work the rest out. But irony offers little guidance when democracy itself begins to wobble. What does resistance look like now for those of us whose youthful rebellion mostly consisted of shrugging at our elders’ earnest misbeliefs?

A reading list inspired by this quandary

This month’s reading list attempts to locate an underused muscle: the one that turns values into action.

Another bit of Zuckerman wisdom: “People think of history in the long term, but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing.” This is certainly true for the protagonists of these books, whose actions in a particular moment change their own trajectory and the trajectory of their communities.

Taking action might not require us to disappear into a radical cell or set things on fire, though many of the characters in the novels on this list do just that, or worse. They blow up buildings, abandon families, commit to causes that demand everything and justify anything. These books are not a blueprint. What draws me in is the way they explore the moment before the leap—and the long echo after. They linger in the aftermath, in the lives shaped or shattered by earlier convictions.

Some of these books feature a reckoning in midlife with what their protagonists once believed; others make sense of what their parents or predecessors did in the name of justice. That intergenerational reckoning feels important right now. How do we sort out inherited damage from our own responsibilities— before our own kids write memoirs explaining exactly how we blew it?

These books don’t offer answers. But they sit inside the tension between principle and fallout, between idealism and fatigue, between generations trying, failing, and refusing to carry on as expected. That’s the territory I want to live in this month.

Mother Mary Comes To Me, Arundhati Roy (2025)

This has been in my ears during my commute and at the gym all week, and it’s so shockingly good. Roy herself reads this memoir of growing up with her “gangster” of a mother, a feminist activist whose Supreme Court case overturned the inheritance laws that kept Indian women from their share of family property; a woman who left her husband and was subsequently shunned by her family and community— but who rose from those ashes to create a school attended by the children of privileged classes. Roy admires her for her fighting spirit but Mrs. Roy, as she’s called throughout, also turned her rage on her daughter with singular cruelty that left deep impressions on the author’s psyche. I’m at the point where Roy says enough to the abuse and becomes estranged from Mrs. Roy, starting her writing career and her own trajectory of political activism—and I’m actually looking forward to housekeeping as an excuse to binge the next chapters.

Purity, Jonathan Franzen (2015)

In this novel by the ultimate chronicler of highly-educated, white Gen X disillusionment, Pip Tyler, real name Purity, has had enough of her reclusive mother’s refusal to identify her father or tell her anything about her family history. Recently graduated and eager to get some kind of start on managing significant student loan debt, Pip’s recruited by a German activist to join a Wiki-leaks style organization based in Bolivia. Its leader, Andreas Wolf, has a checkered Cold War past. When she returns to the U.S., she becomes entwined in a complex triangle with a celebrated whistleblower and journalist. This novel winks at Dickens, as young Pip discovers an inheritance based in anything-but-pure secrets and manipulation. I’ve had it on my shelf for awhile and I’m intrigued enough by the connections it wants to draw between online groupthink and totalitarianism to finally read it.

The Vagrants, Yiyun Li (2009)

Li’s first novel takes us to 1970s China. A spirited young follower of Chairman Mao, Gu Shan, has renounced her faith in Communism and awaits execution. Her mother hatches a courageous plan to follow the custom of burning her only child’s clothing to help her journey into the next world. Her father, who gave up on her long ago, retreats into memory. As the anti-communist movement rocks Beijing, the backlash becomes increasingly severe. Gu Shan’s death affects a wide array of characters, from a beautiful radio announcer to a lonely seven-year old boy and a hungry young girl forced to make moral choices to survive. Another one that has been lingering in my piles. Li’s recent memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow was recently named to the shortlist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Eat the Document, Dana Spiotta (2006)

I loved this very American novel about dissent for the way it ironically connects the dots between early 1970s radical dissent and late 1990s social pranksters. Teenage Jason delves deep into old The Beach Boys masters and obscure films as he tries to suss out his mother Louise’s hidden past. The reader knows from the start that she’s really Mary Whitaker whose radical anti-Vietnam actions sent her and the love of her life, Bobby Desoto, underground. Now she’s thinking about turning herself in. Mordantly observant about culture and character, with a deep ambivalence about the American ease at tossing off the past to reinvent the self. If you like this one, you might also like Didion’s Democracy.

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2004)

Toward the end of his life the Reverend John Ames begins a letter to his son, recounting the arc of three generations of men’s lives. He writes about the tension between his father, a pacifist, and his grandfather who kept a pistol and bloody shirts from the fight between abolitionists and settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. I picked this one up at a Friends of the Library sale and have frequently passed it over in favor of novels that seem more to my taste for strong female characters, questionable decisions, and experimental style. Right now, I’m attracted to it for the jacket promise that it will explore “how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten” and because brilliant recommended it to me as one of the great novels with a protagonist over 50.

All About Love, bell hooks (1999)

If you think you’ve got Boomers figured out, remember: bell hooks was one. While this classic very much starts out with a “kids these days” tone, lamenting that her students at Yale in the 1990s exist in a state of lovelessness, hooks tracks this to an intergenerational failure to provide a definition and a model for learning to love. Her response to the question “What is love?” proposes a path to care, compassion and unity that might heal individuals and a nation. It has been years since I revisited this one, and I’m curious how it will hold up in light of the current polarizing divisions at the root of so much collective suffering.

100th post

Honestly, whether you’ve read one or 100 of these letters: thank you for being here. Reading alone is overrated. Creating these themed mash-ups and shelf-talking the best new releases in literary fiction over more than 1,000 hours of reading and writing has quietly rearranged my life—it matters that you are on the other end.

I’ve been thinking about a new direction I want to try with this newsletter—don’t worry, it’s not a tote bag! Like anyone else making things on the internet, it’s easier to take risks when I know someone’s paying attention. If you’ve been reading regularly, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

So tell me…

• How have you put your values into action lately?

• I took a summer season break from writing longer comparative themed reviews, bringing backlist books into conversation with each other, in favor the Shelf Talkers series— a quick review of one hyped new release each month. It’s been fun and I want to keep it going. Now that it’s autumn, at least according to the calendar, should I bring the longer smarty-pants style back? Who wants more email from me? You might convince me one way or another…

• Bookshop.org is offering 20% off Banned and Diverse Books through 10/19 with code BBW25. Every time I try to shop their special site, it freezes. Is this a conspiracy?

Cheers,

The shelf talker, modeled after those whimsical paper labels highlighting titles in indie bookstores, consists of a few sentences summing up the appeal to the book’s ideal reader. A more complete review of my own reading experience follows.

Lily King, queen of the love triangle, has done it again. An unnamed female narrator recalls her time at the center of an enmeshed trio, set against a backdrop of undergraduate intellectual fervor and betrayal. Nearly 30 years after graduation and the end of a passionate first love, the threesome are reunited in dire circumstances. What does she owe these men, to whom her experience remains so illegible? Is the present ever too late for the truth? Heart the Lover is full of witty pleasures for readers and writers, with moments of Gen X nostalgia to heighten its erotic and narrative tension.

My take

Let’s start with the cover art, featuring a woman’s eyes with white petals falling like tears. What classic cover does it remind you of?

“Daisies” is how the scholarly young strivers, Sam and Yash, refer to their dates, women they put on a pedestal then tear down for not quite deserving it—à la Daisy Buchanan. The disembodied, floating eyes and lips recall the 1925 Cugat cover of The Great Gatsby. But unlike Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, this duo at the center of Heart the Lover are best of friends.

Enter the narrator, who they affectionately nickname Jordan. King combines the classic love triangle with a friends-to-lovers story, rich with pitch perfect banter and believable chemistry. Anyone who remembers dating in the days before text messages and location sharing, when long distance meant “too expensive” and the sound of the postman’s truck could set a heart racing, may especially appreciate its slow burn.

The lovers in this story bond over their shared literary ambitions. Scenes of reading aloud, studying the library, copying meaningful passages into letters, sharing copies of books and stories (real and imagined), a brief literary tour of Paris, and the narrator giving a book talks create a pleasurable atmosphere for readers who remember college literature classes with nostalgia.

Fans of Euphoria and Writers & Lovers will find familiar the theme of love vs. ambition, and especially the expectations women confront when a choice between the two presents itself. At times reading the first half of this book, I wondered why King was interested in exploring this theme again from the perspective of less mature and complex characters than in her two prior novels. Take this passage:

On the trail, we talk as we often do about books, what makes the magic, where the genius lies. He says it’s in the structure. It’s always in the structure. We argue about this. I insist it can be in a number of elements–the images, the dialogue, all the ways in which the narrative comes to life– and he says it’s always the form that makes the difference. I say the structure of War and Peace was no great shakes, and he breaks the book down for me section by section to show how Tolstoy was reconceiving both The Iliad and The Aeneid to build his masterpiece.

We know from the first lines that this narrator will grow up to be an author. She’s writing this book and it’s not her first. From the vantage point of maturity, we can see that she’ll need to overcome her tolerance for this kind of lecture and find her capacity to focus on her own authority and following her own life path to accomplish that. But for now: there’s a meadow and the sun is shining and time is on her side.

In the inevitable unraveling of this romance, made all the more devastating by the ’90s of it all, and the tragic reunion that makes up the second half of the book, King perfectly captures the experience of being of a certain age, not married to a first love, knowing this was the only and the best choice, and yet—losing a love that once seemed perfect and everlasting will forever change the way a person can love and so it’s never really over.

There’s a twist to the second half that gives Heart the Lover, and the passage quoted above, some additional interest for readers who’ve been anticipating another Lily King novel since 2020. It’s a clever clapback at critiques of women’s literature and romance as predictable and structurally uninteresting. Overall, I enjoyed this book and was grateful for this extra loop in the narrative bow that otherwise tied up this messy love/sob story a bit too neatly.

Why read it now:

King fans: get your hands on a copy this week when it comes out—and don’t read any other reviews until you’ve finished it, preferably in one day with plenty of tissues on hand. Seriously, this one is ripe for spoilers, and it’s most fun to read it without knowing what to expect.

You like the idea of the tragic uncle figure, stoic and unattached to the end but beloved by all.

You won’t like it if:

You’ve cried enough already this year. You think crying is only for babies or women with unresolved daddy issues.

Subscribe now

In case you missed it

Cheers,

As I took in the view at the top, I realized the muscles around my eyebrows and mouth were tired, the way my cheeks can hurt after spending time with old friends in whose presence I can’t stop smiling, because I’d been making “awed face” the whole time.

This is how I want to live the rest of my life, deepening these awe lines.

In preparation for this milestone, this year I’ve taught myself to sleep through the night again. I’ve been walking like I just discovered legs and I have blended pea protein for breakfast most days. In other words, at 50 I am killing it as a baby. And who is more awed by this world than a baby?

In my reading, I find I’m gravitating toward protagonists with some gravitas. They’re over 50, they’ve still got something they want—and ideally their sense of humor, too. They’re at the beginning or end of their third act and mortality plus the cultural change they’ve witnessed create an urgency to their final transformation.

None of us know how much time we’ll have, so whether you’re 25 or 85, here are 5 astounding novels featuring formerly young main characters worth reading before it’s too late:

All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West (1931)

As a young girl, Lady Slane wanted to be an artist. Instead, she marries a Viceroy of India and a member of the House of Lords and becomes a mother of six. Now 88 and widowed, these children anticipate dividing up the family property and the calendar of her care but the lady has another plan in mind for herself. She revels in her freedom to pursue her ambitions and the company of some unsuitable companions, while there’s still time. Authored by the real-life inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s character Orlando.

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch (1978)

This 1978 Booker Prize winner has the audacity to start with a long paragraph describing the colors of the sea. It might be tempting to judge this book and end it there, but please keep going to discover that this is the opening paragraph of the memoirs of one of the least self-aware characters in fiction, Charles Arrowby, a self-retired theatre personality and most ingeniously bad cook. He’s bought an isolated house by the sea to write his memoirs. He is a silly person who imagines himself a Prospero who can script the roles of others to make up for lost time. Read it to meditate on the concepts of self-delusion and the ethical and philosophical question of allowing ego to be pierced by others, so that we might respond to them as they are rather than as we fantasize they might be.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997)

This novel was all the rage the year I graduated college. When I tried to read it then, I threw it across the room in disgust before page 100. I was not going to waste my feminist youth on old men talking about “pussy” to mean “women” without even having the decency to capitalize the word, or the story of a father who passionately kisses his eleven-year-old daughter on her request. But I am enjoying it this time around and this is how I know I’m a grown up now.

It’s 1995 and esteemed writer Nathan Zuckerman receives a letter from Swede Levov, a legendary athlete and boy made good from his Newark high school days. Swede, who seems to be living the assimilated American dream, says he wants to meet up for dinner to get some advice about writing a tribute to his departed father. This turns out to be a meal of shallow platitudes and Zuckerman sums Swede up as a self-contented simpleton. Within months, Swede will be dead and Zuckerman will realize he’d gotten him all wrong. In 1968, Swede’s adored daughter committed an act of protest against the Vietnam War that killed a man, undoing generations of efforts to participate in the myth America has made of itself. One of the best books I’ll read this year, I’m certain.

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt (2021)

A wry and moving account of unrequited motherly love, capturing estrangement and regret with language so funny it breaks your heart twice. Since I read Iman Mersal’s Motherhood and Its Ghosts last month, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of motherhood as a bond that by its nature runs in more than one direction and this book turned out to be an unexpectedly perfect pairing. Another one sure to make my end-of-year highlights.

Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark (2022)

This September hopeful was recommended by several trusted readers in response to a Note I posted seeking recommendations on this theme of main characters over age 50. Early September feels like the unshowered armpit of the year here in Tucson and this story of a writer’s quest to finish the final novel in her popular series and donate the peninsula in Maine where she’s spent all 79 summers of her life promises to take me to a summer idyll sorely missing from my life.

See also…

• Last month’s Women in Translation menu also included a couple of great novels that fit this theme. Check out The Door or Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead for characters whose mortality lends urgency to their pursuit of their singular version of an ethical life.

• on Iris Murdoch’s treatise on morality, art and what novels are for.

  Wolfish!

  Where has the moral gravitas gone from novels?

  Hello friends…

  Read more

  7 months ago · 31 likes · 23 comments · Tash

• on The Sea, the Sea.

  Books on GIF

  'The Sea, the Sea' by Iris Murdoch

  I came into Iris Murdoch’s Booker Prize-winning novel, ‘The Sea, the Sea,’ completely cold when I started it during a quiet weekend in Montauk. Based solely on the title, it seemed the perfect book to bring on a trip where my goals were to read, relax and listen to the ocean. I don’t remember how the book got on my …

  Read more

  4 years ago · 21 likes · 9 comments · Books on GIF

Cheers,

The shelf talker, modeled after those whimsical paper labels you see highlighting titles in indie bookstores consists of a few sentences summing up highlights of the book, is written to appeal to the book’s ideal reader. A more complete review of my own reading experience follows. Enjoy!

If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You by Leigh Stein
August 26 (Ballantine)

Gothic with a ring light glow. In this earnest but funny remix of Rebecca, Dayna, an elder millenial media industry castoff, takes a last-ditch job managing a crumbling TikTok hype house. Olivia, an orphan, has bluffed her way into the house to investigate the disappearance of Becca, a tarot card influencer whose followers believe her content holds messages meant uniquely for them. Expect workplace drama, staged romance, and parasocial chaos, all haunted by sad girl artists. Written for anyone who, for better or worse, considers influencing as real a career option as any. The scroll never ends—will you look away after the first chapter?

My take

Last spring, I read Rebecca for the first time as part of an exploration of narrative loops. Taken with it, I started exploring contemporary retellings. While in the sleep restriction phase of an insomnia cure, which I was at the time, a recommended brain soothing activity is to color in an adult coloring book. Reading these smoothed out commercial retellings felt like watching the author do that instead, and I found I preferred it.

Around that same time, Leigh Stein posted a take on structural twists in literary fiction. I tagged it, and she popped into my Substack comments to share that the seed of the idea for her new novel had come in a class she’d taken on Rebecca. This is how I, someone who had no idea what a hype house was six months ago, became aware of If You’re Seeing This It’s Meant for You.

I’d recently downloaded TikTok under the guise of responsible parenting of a tween who watches a lot of YouTube shorts but is not allowed to mainline this content from the primary app. My FYP filled with women my age joking about cougar puberty, salad and cocktail recipes, a blue-eyed Scotsman talking dirty, a “skinny motivation” influencer from Scottsdale whose highly edited videos I’d watch to the end just to see if I could catch her blinking— and Leigh herself, with smart thoughts about new and classic books.

After a few months of this, I deleted the TikTok app from my phone. When I tried to reinstall it recently, I ended up with a child’s account. Unable to search for content beyond the instrumental music and landscape videos fed to me by the algorithm. Limited to 1 hour per day. This makes it official: I do not understand how to use that app!

The book’s genius lies in the way it fulfills the title’s promise. To an outsider like me, it reads like a dare. To creators, it’s an inside joke about how savvy content can induce followers to believe they have an authentic relationship with the person behind the online performance. The fact that for some these one-sided relationships turn delusional and erotomanic will play heavily into the plot. The novel’s designed so each type—the literary reader, the social media fans, the creator— can find in this book what they already know to look for. It operates on a different level for each audience that might approach it.

Like a successful reel, the novel starts with a strong hook. By way of a Reddit post with undeniable identifying details forwarded by a friend, Dayna discovers en route with her moving truck that her boyfriend does not want to live with her after all. It’s funny and establishes real stakes for Dayna. When she calls up Craig Deckler, a man from her past, to accept a job in his family’s historic mansion turned hype house, I thought we might be heading for a satire— and many of the traditionally published reviews I’ve read refer to it as such. But the tone changes once Dayna commits to her new job managing the careers of the young people in the house and trying to earn a commission that will let her get a fresh start, too. The novel’s sympathies lie not only with Dayna, whose traditional media career has also been swept away by the algorithm. It’s also earnest about the younger characters who accept monetizing their life milestones, charisma and trauma dumps as a viable option for material survival and creative freedom.

The Rebecca references are there— creepy passageways, clothes and costumes, and questionable motives all around. A body without a name, mirroring a name without a body. Who is losing their grip on reality, and who knows the true story? What have these women gotten themselves into, falling into a house they can’t leave without knowing its history and the secrets passed down with it? The literary references were fun to track, but Stein pulls some punches to make the twist less villanous and shocking than the original classic. The romances feel like dalliances; they’re missing the decisiveness and mutual need that invest the emotional arc of Rebecca with so much dread. While his actions are misguided, Craig Deckler’s intentions toward Becca and Dayna both ultimately can be read as protective and fatherly. The original Max DeWinter is much scarier.

By the third act, I felt like I’d been scrolling recommended videos for too long. I knew had other things to do and read, and yet kept flicking to the next page (yes, I read it on my phone) seeking a final satisfying hit to end on a high. So meta.

Back when TikTok let me lurk, I found the comments on some of Stein’s literary book videos fascinating. Young women commenting that they had never heard of this genre “literary fiction” before, and could she recommend some more? And so politely, she would! I love this about If You’re Seeing This Its Meant for You: it’s a brownie with a zucchini and avocado base, served with a straight face. And they’re reading it!

Call me a reply guy, but 10 copies of this book will be arriving at my house next week, my admission ticket to join Stein’s “hype house” for accomplished people who have a love-hate relationship with the internet, want to create content that doesn’t make them want to jump off a bridge, and need support to be beginners in public (see: child controls). I have some fun ideas for what to do with the pre-ordered copies and I’m looking forward to learning something about gaining attention for books while holding onto my own.

• What’s on your FYP worth watching?

• What classic retellings do you love?

• What September new releases are on your radar?

Cheers,

Dear readers,

You know how book influencers sometimes post about how overwhelmed they are by their TBR? Book publicists keep sending them so many free books and their bookmail is out of control. The built-in shelves organized by color serving as the backdrop are just too full to accommodate these new tomes! Let’s empathize with them, envy them at the same time, and watch their reels all the way through…

My tsundoku is way past reasonable, too. But I have no one to blame but myself for this sorry state of affairs. Let this sad evidence de-influence you from aspiring to my example:

If anyone asks me how I have achieved my success in life, my most honest answer would have to be a list called “WE DON’T LIVE THIS WAY ANYMORE.” I can’t change most of what I would like to in this world, but this silly list lights my fucking fire for the things I can. This is where I name ways I’m living beneath my standards—in my mean friend voice. Last weekend I wrote: “Congrats, your room once again has too many books and nowhere to read them. Your mattress is underqualified for its job as a library.”

Shelves better suited to my space may end up being part of my solution, but first I need to fix my system for intake and outflow. In July alone, I bought 16 paper books and two more were given to me (one about Japanese pickling techniques and the other about the architecture of London— my family appreciates my many interests). While many people read books this quickly, I usually read only five or six per month, never more than nine— and usually at least a couple are books I already own, borrowed from the library, or in audio/digital format. The math is not mathing.

Creating this month’s list entirely from books I already own reminded me why I acquire them faster than I can read them. Browsing my shelves to discover that a title my past self chose is exactly what my current self wants to read gives me such a unique pleasure. It’s worth a little chaos.

August is Women in Translation month. WiTMonth, created by Meytal Radzinski in 2014, invites readers to celebrate writing by women in languages other than English.1 Sorting through my stash to see if I had anything suitable, I found five unread translated titles by women— plus one on my Kindle. Who knew past me was so thoughtful?!

Here are this month’s hopefuls, in reverse chronological order of their publication in English, including books by two Nobel Prize winners:

We are Green and Trembling (2025)

by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, trans. Robin Myers

This novel, by the cofounder of Argentina’s Ni una menos movement, is based on the life of Antonio De Erauso, a real figure from the era of the Spanish conquest who fled a Basque convent and a dead-end life as a nun to become a soldier cabin boy and conquistador. Pursued by the army he deserted and responsible for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement, Antonio contemplates one more metamorphosis to save the new world from extinction.

Motherhood and Its Ghosts (2025)

by Iman Mersal (trans. Robin Moger)

Egyptian writer, translator, and literary scholar Iman Mersal has only one photograph of her mother, who died in childbirth at age 27. The woman in this photograph looks nothing like the woman she remembers. Now a mother herself, she wonders how it’s possible to represent an individual woman whose complex inner landscape is overshadowed by the most looming of archetypes. This book is part of Transit Books’s series of book-length narrative non-fiction essays, Undelivered Lectures. The covers, designed by Anna Morrison, are lovely.

Your Utopia (2024)

by Bora Chung (trans. Anton Hur)

This is a set of stories translated from Korean, set in near and distant futures to explore the possible fates of humanity with a blend of horror, absurdity and dark humor. This appeared on a few best of 2024 lists, including Time and Kirkus. I don’t know much about this author or her other work (Cursed Bunny seems to be her more well-known collection) but this book insisted on following me home one day last year and now I’m going to finally read it.

Greek Lessons (2024)

by Han Hang (trans. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won)

A woman who cannot speak takes Greek classes from a man losing his sight. Greek Lessons, by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Han Kang, tells the story of their unlikely bond, as they share their private anguish and personal losses. This book also appeared on a lot of 2024 best-of-the-year lists and I’d like to read it before catching up with her latest, We Do Not Part. I love to read a short book in one sitting. Greek Lessons by Han Kang clocks in at 174 pages and has the potential to fill a satisfying few hours.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2020)

Olga Tokarczuk (trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

I DNF’d The Books of Jacob, my first attempt at reading Tokarczuk. It wasn’t that I hated it exactly, but early 2022 was not a time when I was in the mindset to take on 1,000 pages that felt like a second job to read. Since then, I’ve felt intimidated to try another of the Nobel Laureate’s works. Friends , and encouraged me, recommending this book in response to my Note crowdsourcing books with protagonists over the age of 50.

Drive Your Plow is a thriller/fairy tale taking place on the border between Poland and the Czech Republic. Janina is an older woman protagonist whose interests in astrology, wildlife, and translating William Blake’s poetry converge with a series of murders targeting members of a local hunting club. I’m 85 pages in and loving it so far.

The Door (2015)

by Magda Szabo (trans. Len Rix, intro by Ali Smith)

A Hungarian writer with an on-again-off-again relationship to Communist authorities builds a strange bond with her housekeeper, Emerence, over 20 years. Illiterate, stubborn, abrupt, and exceedingly private, Emerence gradually takes control of the household and becomes indispensable to Magda. At the same time, she comes to depend on the writer as well. I’m intrigued by what seems to be a stylish novel rooted in domestic events and the experiences of a singular woman.

I’m still reading Mansfield Park as well and trying to catch up with of ’s read-along schedule.

• Would it be crazy to maintain a home library that tips the balance in the direction of books to-be-read over books already read?

• What’s the longest a book has sat on your shelf before becoming the right thing at the right time?

• Comment with a woman in translation whose work has been underrated, or who you’re excited to read for any reason this month.

Cheers,

• Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

• Long Distance: Stories by Ayşegül Savaş

I’m still looking for the read that will define this summer. Have any of you found it?

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

Vera’s a ten-year old with three weighty goals. She has to keep her parents, Daddy and Anne Mom, together; meet her Mom Mom, the Korean birth mother her father says abandoned them back when Vera was a “tough baby,” before she dies of cancer; and make a friend. 

Vera’s a kind of prestige Ramona Quimby. A neurologically different elementary schooler with attention-seeking tendencies, she’s growing up in New York with her father Igor, a down-on-his-luck magazine editor, and Boston Brahmin stepmother. Anne, whose trust fund holds the home together but who does not work, keeps the family “merely rich.” Her father’s career lends them some precarious cultural capital. Vera’s well aware that none of this is quite enough for either of her parents. 

Shteyngart steers us out of YA territory with this marital strife and goes even further by dropping his fifth-grader protagonist into a near future dystopia. Here Vera, half Russian Jew and half Korean by virtue of two biological parents who immigrated as children, has been saddled by a teacher with the role of debating the pro position of a proposed constitutional amendment called Five Three. Five Three will grant 5/3 of a vote to “exceptional Americans” who, the teacher says, “landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.” This includes Anne and Vera’s half brother Dylan, though Anne is a progressive who fundraises to defeat Five Three. As Igor disintegrates under the economic and social pressure, his alcoholism and attraction to nefarious forces bent on media manipulation are not lost on Vera.

Vera’s free-range escapades while her parents refuse to deal with their problems involve her commandeering the family’s autonomous vehicle through a menstrual cycle checkpoint with a males-only express lane. In this novel, we’re far beyond Cleary’s nostalgic late 20th century suburban utopia, where a bicycle bought for $6 at an auction is all a child needs to be free.

• Why read it now: Vera means “faith” in Russian, and this is a book about a child who already possesses “the pity, and wonder and faith older people needed just to get through the rest of their lives.” It makes fun of the tragedy of the United States coming apart without making light of it, by showing what it looks like through the eyes of this precocious all-American child.

• You won’t like it if: A sitcome laugh track annoys you. Shteyngart is a first-rate observer of the ridiculous habits of people (see “Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever”) but in this case the punchlines of the jokes, often attributed to the father figure who most resembles Shteyngart himself as he is portrayed in this recent profile, produced a flamboyant mental “ba dum tsh.” It’s very energetically clever.

Similarly, a quirky aspect of Vera’s voice, which tracks adult idioms and vocabulary she’s trying out for the first time by putting those words in quotation marks, wears out early through overuse.

Long Distance: Stories by Ayşegül Savaş

The cover of image of Long Distance suits its contents perfectly. Set mostly in unnamed European cities, with an occasional transcontinental experience woven in, these stories by Ayşegül Savaş, a Turkish writer who lives in Paris, carry the reader across the distance of decisive moments that change relationships and make it impossible to return to the place they began. Expectations thwarted, a shared horrifying secret, a deceit, or a grief not shared– once the characters have seen each other clearly, they often move on and can only understand the change in retrospect, facing backwards on the train.

There’s another way that this book reminds me of the experience of rail travel. The characters experience common life milestones, such as study abroad, a pregnancy, receiving timeworn parenting advice, confronting centuries-old political and religious conflict within a contemporary social circle, witnessing a parent’s decline. These are well-traveled routes. Yet even while sharing the same proverbial car, each person’s experience is private. As one character observes, when she finds herself shocked to learn a friend of her younger cousin has gone missing and what happened to him, under circumstances similar to the narrator’s own experience with a friend at a similar age: “I was aware the lives of strangers appeared improbable only because they were seen from a distance.” 

Deceptively quiet, these stories feature characters whose muddy motivations and missed opportunities for connection contain plenty of nuances to both discuss with a group and to prompt self-reflection.

• Why read it now: Will you be on a European train sometime soon? Or do you wish you could be? Part of me wishes I’d saved this one for my upcoming trip on the Eurostar for the perfect atmosphere.

• You won’t like it if: There’s only one male narrator in the collection, so if this will make you feel some sort of way about your prospects in the literary world, I recommend scrolling on. The ideal reader for this book wants to experience an intimacy with women who confess their mistakes and mine them retrospectively for wisdom.

Let me know if you’ve read a great new book this summer, and what you’re hoping I might review in August.

Subscribe now

Cheers,

I’ve read 40 books so far this year and I’ve noticed a pattern. From the coincidence of reading three books in April featuring women confined to the guest room of their homes, to the Dutch country house at stake in The Safekeep, to the isolated outpost in Iliac Crest, to Anna Karenina’s journey from St. Petersburg and Moscow to Italy and Vronsky’s summer villa—plus Kitty’s makeover of Levin’s estate—I’ve felt most absorbed in reading so far this year when real estate was in play.

Now might be the time to course-correct, but why fight these obsessions? I have at least 12 books still on my interest list that align to the theme. Obsessing over curb appeal, fantasies of ownership, homes that become a trap and how people leave them create dramatic situations where characters can show us their nuances and vulnerabilities.

Here’s a list of six to consider this month, with some additional options for taking the theme in a more contemporary or darker direction as well. 

Rental House by Weike Wang (2024)

Keru, a Chinese-born consultant raised mostly in Minnesota as an only child of parents suspicious of anything easy, and Nate, a scientist from a rural white family of shopkeepers who don’t understand his academic life or “foreign” wife, make a complementary match. The novel takes place over two vacations at summer rentals where the characters' sensitivities and flaws have nowhere to hide. The couple first invite their parents for consecutive visits to a place on Cape Cod, exposing the limits of belonging and understanding within their own and each other’s families. Years later on a visit to the Catskills, they navigate the assumptions of their temporary neighbors and a surprise family visit. As their sheepdog Mantou and their parents age, the couple grapple with what it means to make a family and home from what’s yours for now.

A zinger-filled critique of the tensions that simmer in even the most low-key intercultural or multiracial relationships, this is a heartwarming quick read.

North Woods by Daniel Mason (2023)

Summer is the best time to read historical fiction. According to the jacket copy, it’s “a sweeping novel about a solitary house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across centuries,” I skipped this one when it came out because it was getting so much hype. The lusty beetle chapter seemed a bridge too far and also I thought it seemed like a knock off Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx, which I loved back in the mid-90s even though the critics did not. But when I picked it up from my shelf and read the blurbs recently, it hit me with The Vaster Wilds vibes—and that’s a reading experience I wish I could have for the first time again. 

Real Estate by Deborah Levy (2021)

In the third and final installment of Deborah Levy’s A Living Autobiography series, the author moves from her rented flat and writing sheds in London to other temporary homes in Santa Fe, Mumbai, Paris, Berlin, Hydra. All the while she adds fantastic details to the imaginary property she would like to own someday. She calls this her Unreal Estate. I’ve been listening to this on audio and will definitely be buying a hard copy so I can underline her wry observations about home and what we value, as women and as a society.

In one of my favorite incidents, she relates arriving uninvited to a literary party, prepared to identify herself as Elena Ferrante or her character Lila. The guest of honor proceeds to mock her and her ensuing reflection is full of the irony and exhilaration of the perfect comeback. recently reposted her open letter to Levy, and it opens a window to the breezeway between Real Estate and The Möbius Book, which fed my obsession with the theme of women and their walls.

The Days of Abandonment (trans. 2005) by Elena Ferrante

Levy mention of Ferrante put me in mind of this short novel, which tracks Olga’s crash out after her husband abandons her, casually informing her of his intent to leave as they clear the table after lunch. She finds herself somehow locked inside her apartment during a summer heat wave. I’m curious how Ferrante will set this up and get her out of the predicament. At a slim 178 pages, this seems like a good way for me to find out what all the Ferrante love is about without needing to trigger my series phobia. If it grabs me, it will be just in time for ’s My Brilliant Ferrante, which is a chance to read along through the author’s complete oeuvre in August with one of her biggest fans.

The Feast (1950) by Margaret Kennedy

This was ’s book of the summer last year. She described it as “a midcentury British version of the White Lotus.” Doesn’t that sound fun? The Sidall family has turned their seaside home into an inn, in the hopes of raising funds for the youngest child’s school fees. In the prologue, we learn the inn was crushed when a cliff collapsed and buried it. Only a few have survived. The story starts a week leading up to the catastrophe, in chapters alternating points of view among the household help and the guests. For the first 30 pages I wasn’t sure about the hokiness of it, but by page 50 I was into it and amused to discover the characters’ sins. I have my favorite naughty ones, but I’m not sure they’ll make it out alive.

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

Published in 1814, this tale of poor Fanny Price, sent to live with wealthy relatives at the titular estate, sold out its first and second printings. But Mansfield Park was not publicly reviewed until 1821 and has generally been considered the lesser of Austen’s works. In a recent excerpt in the NYT, supposedly from her intro to a new edition coming out with Vintage this month I could not find, Lauren Groff argues this darker, weirder novel is actually the most complex and artistically mature of Austen’s work. It subtly lulled the populace into considering their complicity by linking slavery and the Church of England. I’m in it for the interiors and the subversive tendencies.

I’ve been trying to read classics more consistently this year, and this will be my pick for July and August. Thanks to for scheduling this as the current read-along for her year-long project to read all of Austen. Here’s the schedule she created, which I’ll draw on to pace myself. 

Make it hyped

From my three-month appointment with Anna Karenina, I learned that reading a classic with care while also living my life and keeping up with what’s new as I like to do takes the time it takes.

Depending on how easily Mansfield Park goes down, here are a couple others I would like to dip into this month as well:

If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You (out Aug. 26). ’s contemporary gothic novel, about an influencer who gets sucked into a TikTok hype house when her boyfriend breaks off their plans to move in together in a Reddit post, takes inspiration from Rebecca, which was the most fun I’ve had reading a book so far this year. 

The House of My Mother: A Daughter’s Quest for Freedom by Shari Franke. What’s it like to grow up in a house where your every move feeds your mother’s image and her career as an influencer? The marketing for this memoir puts me in mind of two others I loved: The Glass Castle and Educated, but with the creepy twist that in today’s world crimes of abuse and neglect play out in front of millions of internet users.

Make it darker

In the mood for a darker version? Here are three more I hope to read before end of the year:

• The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch— Substack’s biggest Murdoch Stan, , has details but I don’t want to know yet!

• The Keep by Jennifer Eagan— “gothic vibes, modern problems” according to ’s rec.

• Model Home by Rivers Solomon (out in September) looks creepy.

So tell me…

• What are your favorite books where a house, or escape from one, is at stake?

• Which of these books did you love or hate?

• What’s your favorite thing about your own house/apartment/cave?

• If you were going to undertake a huge completionist project like @Plain Jane or , which author would you choose?

  Leave a comment

  Subscribe now

Cheers,

My daughter advised me to start a BookTok/YouTube account, even though she thinks it will be cringe. When I said I might start believing in Botox if I saw myself on video that much, she reminded me the videos would not be for me to watch— they’d be for other people.

Genius. This is the clear difference between her generation and mine.

Until I hire a carpenter to build my new built-ins (happy birthday to me) as backdrop, I don’t think I’ll be tempted to expand my platform beyond this email newsletter. But this trending mid-year check-in I first saw on ’s TikTok seems like fun and not a waste of makeup for those participating.

In words and stills:

Best book I’ve read so far

Asking me to pick “the best” book is like asking me to pick my best toe. I count on having at least ten and it is ridiculous to choose among them.

By best, do we mean the most recommendable to the most people? The best reading experience? The one the greatest number of people include on their lists of top 10 novels we’ll need after the apocalypse when posting to Substack Notes this month? Or the work of most enduring reputation? Of the books I’ve read this year, Anna Karenina satisfies the last two so I’m going with it. Finished it Sunday and my thoughts for a post may yet come together, so for now I’ll just say that I found this book strangely digressive and a bit preachy, but unmatched in its close observations of gestures and what they reveal about human nature, still so recognizable and true 150 years later. Who knew the squeezing of a sponge could wring my heart?

A book I just finished

Beautifully written and inhabited. How is The Safekeep a debut? Loaded with plenty of clues that make the twist seem inevitable, but it’s still so enjoyable to go along. My favorite passage:

Sometimes I think about Pap and the time he wanted to show me how to play checkers and I said no, boring game. I want to scream at myself. Now you’ll never know how he plays checkers or how he explains the rules and these are things you’ll never ever ever know. That’s what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never ever find out anything new about them.

Book(s) I’m currently reading

Real Estate on audio, Long Distance e-book (stay tuned for a review), and The Feast in print, my preferred format. After reading The Safekeep and also enjoying Rebecca this year, I’m feeling drawn to books that have themes of house and home.

A book that did not meet my expectations

I recently wrote about how Flashlight’s opening set high expectations. The true story of how the real crimes this book was based on were discovered blew my mind, but Choi’s made-up coincidence, centering the novel’s most clueless American character, disappointed me. I wouldn’t have known to look for that story without her book though.

Runner-up for this category: Audition which I wrote about here.

A book that exceeded my expectations

Violent characters and misfits with their nicknames, voices, and strange circumstances tapped into my empathy, almost against my will. This is Not Miami takes the reader below the surface of a chaotic and fragmented society, into its darkly gorgeous heart.

The prettiest book I’ve added to shelf this year

I signed up for a subscription to Transit Books and their covers wow me with their simple beauty every time. The photo doesn’t do justice because much of the pleasure is in the textured paper they’re printed on.

A book I can’t wait to start reading

After her husband abandons her, a woman becomes trapped inside her own apartment during a summer heat wave. I have to know more.

Show me yours!

How’s your reading year been going? Have a mid-year check-in to share? I’d love to know. The comments are open for your lists or links to your own videos/posts.

Leave a comment

Cheers,

Subscribe now

I’m trying out something new! Each month I’ll write a Shelf Talker, spotlighting one hyped new release— the kind of book that earns prime placement on bookstore tables or makes a lot of noise on the apps and interviews. I’ll tell you if I think it’s worth the noise.
The monthly themed reading menus focused on backlist titles will continue as usual.

If you like this new feature, I invite you to ❤️, engage, and share.

This month’s pick is Flashlight by Susan Choi.

Flashlight’s excellent opening

Flashlight has been featured on several “most anticipated books of the year” lists and its launch was featured in all the major publications. While I did not love how Choi’s 2019 National Book Award winner Trust Exercise—an angry trickster of a book about a disconcerting topic—made me feel, I knew the whole time I was reading it that I was in the hands of a masterful writer who could keep me off balance and yet compel me to turn the page. I wanted to see what Choi would do with a more straightforward mystery, which is how Flashlight was marketed.

After reading the opening, I thought I was hooked. Flashlight takes as its prologue a lightly edited short story by the same title published in The New Yorker in 2020.1 The story focuses a beam of light on one incident, a child’s visit to a school psychologist that’s obviously part of a much more complicated story, in a way that reveals so much depth about the family dynamics and the situation even as the details of the backstory remain obscured. Interestingly, the story Flashlight itself starts with a prologue.

A father and daughter walk along the beach on a dark night, at a point in time prior to the story’s timeline. They discuss swimming lessons, and her feigned hatred of them is revealed as a contentious response to her mother. The father is the preferred parent. He says what we learn may have been his last words to the child: a request that she show gratitude she doesn’t yet feel to the mother they’ve left behind at home, who is ill and unable to walk.

These rich details take on more meaning as the story unfolds. Through Louisa's childish point-of-view, we experience the visit to this psychologist in the aftermath of that night when her father disappeared. She lays out her claim to wisdom, which she then tests real-time with this psychologist: “No one was ever listening closely–even the people who especially claimed to be listening were not really listening.” We learn she’s smarter than the adults around her, proud to withhold from them whatever it is they may expect from her with contempt, even as she hopes someone will notice what she’s up to. But as usual, he doesn’t notice until she’s gone.

Can you think of any other examples of this, where an author opens a novel with a short story they previously published? It’s an intriguing dare Choi sets for herself, in the sense described by recently in her piece about what makes a good opening to a work of fiction. The prologue lays out a test for the author, to make a compelling longer work out of the elements of a successful short story. And for the reader, it’s a challenge to pay attention to those major motivating elements throughout the longer narrative. 

The opening lays out the elements that will be remixed throughout the novel– Louisa’s alignment with her father Seok and rejection of her mother Anne, additional family members previously unknown, moving between countries, illness, intergenerational estrangement. The disappearance of course, and Anne and Louisa’s response to the trauma, and a flashlight that’s not just a flashlight. But readers who are paying attention will find that Flashlight is not quite the mystery it’s sold as. If you want a mystery, you will have to forget you have read the prologue as you go on (and don’t read the rest of this review)!

The specific way Louisa acts out when the psychologist brings up the question of what happened to her father answers that question with heartrending clarity, even as she disavows her initial statements about what she witnessed. The opening reveals what happened to the father. Unless the reader is one of those adults who don’t listen, of course. Because Louisa’s behavior unsettles, and the adults in the story do not. Instead, they close the door on her.

And from the first chapter, a richly researched account of Seok’s coming of age as a Korean migrant in Japan after World War II and his family’s return to North Korea that leaves him open to migrate to the U.S., I knew whodunnit. With the biggest questions about what happened to Seok answered by page 50 and nearly 400 pages to go to discover whether his last words in the prologue to the short story really would signal the end of this relationship, the tension around the mystery sags early.

A very serious middle. A disappointing end.

There are still plenty of open questions however about how and why and whether the truth will ever become know. But as focused as the point of view illuminating the opener is, the language and timeline lose their charge beyond the first pages. In Trust Excercise and the short story Flashlight, Choi’s muscular prose strides through time, landing efficient punches of insight that seem to belong specifically to the character. But the rest of this novel meanders.

In later chapters, the point-of-view shifts among Seok/Serk, Anne, Louisa and Tobias, a drifter who drops in and out of the family’s narrative, and the chapters don’t follow each other chronologically. By creating characters who don't like to reveal much about themselves to each other and who, when they have choice in the matter, avoid each other, Choi drags out the revelations that lead to the novel’s conclusion. The arcs of these four characters require patience, because in isolation any growth they experience in relation to the family dynamics or the central questions of the story unfolds slowly. Anne and Louisa in particular never talk about Seok, except through an obvious deflection in the case of a missing cat, until Louisa herself is a mother. There’s no one working to solve any mystery, unless its the reader.

For anyone interested in the banal evil of the world’s most secretive regime, or in better understanding the nuances of the Korean diaspora, Flashlight is not a waste of time. It is well-researched. Choi creates tolerable distance from the brutal realities by fictionalizing real accounts of systematic destitution, kidnapping and imprisonment. In that regard, it’s a worthy performance.2 Looking back from the end on that opening moment with the psychologist, the missed opportunity to have known all along takes on greater poignancy. In that sense, the opening has a lot of integrity.

In the final pages, Louisa’s character shows that she has grown in a way I found moving, but the denouement depends on a disappointingly contrived coincidence that centers the book’s most clueless character, a laughably typical specimen of bumbling American traveler in the East, as the best listener of the bunch. The resolution is deliberate on her part, but accidental for the characters. While I appreciate that Choi takes her initial wanna-bet? dare laid out in the opening seriously by addressing Luisa’s initial claim to wisdom that “nobody’s listening,” ultimately I didn’t buy the way she disproves it.

Subscribe now

July new releases

I haven’t decided which July book to review yet. You can help me choose. Which July new release would you be most interested in reading about in next month’s Shelf Talker feature? Let me know by responding to this subscriber poll.

Vera, or Faith by (July 8)

Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (July 8)

The Other Wife by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy (July 15)

Everyone is Lying to You by (July 15)

So tell me…

• Have you read Flashlight, the short story or the novel, and what did you think?

• Novels with the best openings: we’re listening!

• When people ask me how I have time to read so much and write these posts, my usual answer is “I don’t really sleep.” But that’s changing! After nearly a decade of (not) sleeping like a toddler on a red-eye, I’ve made it through 6 weeks of the sleep restriction phase of CBT for insomnia and now if I wake up I almost always go right back to sleep. Wish I would have known this was possible sooner. Insomnia recovery: ask me anything!

• What books would you recommend to an insomniac?

  Leave a comment

Cheers,

One of my favorite things I saw on Substack this week was ’s talk with , encouraging 1,000 words of summer of writers to stick with their projects for the long haul by cracking themselves up with their own audacity. As a reader, I love to be shocked by what and who a writer has dared to imagine, so this sounds like great advice to me.

I’m in the mood to escape into some audacious female behavior this month. Here are five books on my radar with messy female protagonists. 

Sky Daddy by Kate Folk

Linda’s leading a normal life, barely making it as a comment moderator for a video-sharing platform. She lives in a windowless garage, but allows herself the monthly indulgence of a roundtrip regional flight from SFO. She doesn’t care where she’s going as long as it’s on a handsome plane. She has a secret obsession with aircraft– and yes, it’s sexual. The absurd premise makes me smile and shake my head everytime I think about it. If anyone can pull it off, it’s Kate Folk. 

The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden

It’s summer 1961 and Isabel’s brother has dropped his girlfriend Eva off at her house in the Dutch countryside. Eva’s the antithesis of Isabel, who has constructed for herself a domestic environment of absolute exquisite order, every detail carefully chosen, a place for everything and everything in its place. There’s a twist– these people and the house they’re in are not what they seem. I don’t know more and please don’t tell me. I have been trying not to stumble into any spoilers for The Safekeep, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, because the description made me think this is exactly the kind I need to buy in paperback and take with me on a vacation where I will proceed to ignore everyone and everything around me until I finish it. 

Big Swiss by Jennifer Beagin

Greta’s in her early 30s 45 (and a proud liar) and has recently left a steady relationship with a man to move to an ancient farmhouse in Hudson, NY to live with her friend Sabine and a hive of bees. She finds work as a transcriptionist for the town’s main sex therapist, who calls himself Om. In her spare time, she writes letters to her dead mother and tries to repress her own suicidal impulses. She becomes fascinated by the voice and story of one of Om’s repressed married clients, initials FEW, and begins to think of her as “Big Swiss.” One day, Greta hears that voice in public and the two quickly become enmeshed. But Greta has signed an NDA and can’t/won’t tell Big Swiss that she has eavesdropped on her therapy sessions. Outlandish, right? 

This moved up on my TBR when described it  as “a more enjoyable (for me) version of All Fours.” Since I read it last June, Miranda July’s book has held its spot as queen of the hill of novels based on women behaving so wrong it feels right. Maybe it’s time to challenge that perch?

Bunny by Mona Awad

Samantha Heather Mackey’s an MFA student doesn’t fit in with her cohort of saccharine, sinister rich girls who call each other “Bunny” and move as a unit. But one day she accepts an invitation to their “Smut Salon,” leaving her only friend Ava behind. Bunny has been compared to every funny and horrific tale of friendship gone wrong— from Clueless, Heathers, and Mean Girls to The Secret History and Eileen. I skipped this one when it came out in 2019 because the hype was too much. My friend gave me her copy a few months ago with the warning that she wasn’t sure what to think. With Awad’s prequel/sequel launching in September, the time to figure that out for myself is now or never.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Did anyone else read this book as a teenager, skimming over all the parts that didn’t have to do with Anna and Vronsky’s storyline? Now I’m trying to give this classic its due. Last month I listened during my long walks to this narration by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who I adore, and I’m finding the parts about agriculture and economics much more interesting.

Since it has gotten hot here, I’m walking a lot less and my progress has slowed. To finish, I am going to read a hard copy in tandem. Audible is cagey about which translation Gyllenhaal is reading from, but the internet tells me it’s one by Constance Garnett. The only translation of hers I found was an abridged illustrated version I didn’t like the looks of, so I’ve purchased this one translated by Rosamund Bartlett instead. Did I make the right choice? If you have an informed opinion about the differences in translations and which is best, I would love to hear about it in the comments.

See also…

• Stacie Shannon Denetsosie, author of The Missing Morningstar, has been named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35. I really enjoyed this collection of short stories, featured on the blog last year. Nice choice , , , . Check her out!

• Naomi Kanakia has created theSamuel Richardson Prize for Self-Published Literary Novel (or Story Collection)and I will be one of the judges. Submit your most audacious work to Naomi by July 31.

• This is the image in my head as I’ve watched the drama between Musk and ’rump play itself out this week. So Messy!

  

  Cheers,

  

  Subscribe now