Childhood is Over: On Adam Ross’ Playworld

It happens suddenly, sometimes before we even recognize it, and we don’t get any say. We might be slow to acknowledge it; we might even resist it. But we can’t avoid it, or wish it away. Eventually we learn to process it, accept it, move forward. What other choice do we have? Adulthood comes for all of us, sooner or later. We might mourn what we’ve lost. Or we might be relieved that childhood — with its attendant confusion, anxiety, and lack of freedom — is over. Either way, there’s no turning back. Griffin Hurt, the young protagonist of Playworld, an outstanding new novel by Adam Ross, is a student of adulthood. Precocious and observant, he absorbs its manners and mores, familiarizes himself with its customs and concealments. The world of adults is disorienting and opaque, but he learns how to ingratiate himself with them, approximate their behavior. Like a kid trying on his father’s clothing, he might be able to convince you that the suit jacket is his — but look closer, and you’ll see the tailoring is off.

The Devil and Mary Gaitskill: On Sex (and Hopelessness) in Fiction

Among the dozens of stories Mary Gaitskill has published since her 1988 debut Bad Behavior, only one — “Secretary,” a detached BDSM narrative from that collection — has been loosely adapted for the screen. On its face, this fact is not entirely surprising. Gaitskill is, above all else, a prose stylist, renowned more for short fiction than her whipsawing novels, her characters prone to white-collar monotony and lurid sexual encounters. But if these themes have scared off Hollywood producers, they haven’t posed such obstacles for her closest peers, excavators of middle-American intercourse like John Irving and Joyce Carol Oates. In Gaitskill’s case, the sex isn’t the problem so much as its temperature, the hopelessness that precedes and follows.

Searching for Bigger: Where is the Black Working Class in Contemporary Literary Fiction?

A century ago, Claude McKay published Home to Harlem, a novel narrating Black working-class experiences in the eponymous Black Mecca in the aftermath of the First World War. Home to Harlem is considered to be one of the first successful Black novels and was a seminal text of the Harlem Renaissance. W.E.B. Du Bois hated it. Du Bois wrote after reading the novel that “after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” The reality is that Du Bois saw novels that depicted the lives of Harlem in the streets, brothels, the shipyards and the cabarets as fantastical and catering to a white audience. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, McKay was an immigrant writer from Jamaica who worked as a waiter in various establishments to earn his living, having dropped out of the Tuskegee Institute. Jazz, sex and blues are common in the novel because jazz, sex and blues were common in Harlem despite how it may have ruffled some conservative Black folks’ feathers. His novel focuses on two Black male characters in the interwar period encountering a racist society and the violence of working-class life in Harlem.

Amputation: An Exclusive Excerpt from Bruce Wagner’s Forthcoming Novel

The night before, Trooper the Surfer was way up in the Highlands fooling around with the trans bros—most of them were topless but still had pussies—he wasn’t a chaser but met one at the beach (Rory) who said he ‘cracked the egg about a year ago and had top surgery.’ Trooper gave his stock lifestyle-response, his Pete Davidson/Chad ‘Cool,’ and Rory, smiling with a degree of seriousness, said, ‘I’m making my own decisions. I’m my own legal guardian and people don’t understand that.’ He invited the surfer over and whoa the manse was a fuckin motherlode. Trooper’s uncle couldn’t believe all the shit he stole—the trans bros were so rich they didn’t notice or care. His uncle said, ‘Hell, we need to go back,’ but they never got it together. But now the fires were coming and the unbreasted coven was comatose from G—all of them AirPodded except Rory, who loved his cheap Dóttir Freedoms headphones, and Jank, who loved his (Dad’s) $8,000 HIFIMAN Susvara Planar Magnetics—so no one heard the cold, cyclonic 80 mph Santa Anas—Didion and Ray Chandler wouldn’t know a cold Santa Ana if it super-scooped them from the grave, but that’s what it was—cold, cold, cold—all were oblivious to the embers ghost gust-riding the winds to dance with the detonated nitrous tanks in the guest house stocked for the Armin van Buuren DJ’d dumbly titled ‘Fyre Too!’ house party fest set for tomorrow. Nor did they watch the roof/walls blow out and marry the firestorm—nor see the cathedral-size canyon overlook living room window explode, instantly severing the Neo Rauch Die Herrin canvas (and Jank’s left subclavian). Nor could they witness the on-fire cougar studded with fatal shrapnel quills that cannonballed into the tableau like some animatronic loser fleeing di Cosimo’s great painting of a forest inferno; nor hear its sick-making stereophonic scream or smell the febrile anal bloodstink of its extirpation at the foot of the melted Basquiat black crowned king (a gift from Mom to Dad) and the melty Kara Walker and smelting steel-titted Louise Bourgeois’s The Good Mother (gift from Dad to Mom). Eerily, their cadavers were preserved (mostly) by a timely windblown plash of pink retardant, enough for an astute fireman to note in the aftermath that each had the same horizontal sub-aureole scar, i.e. what was believed to be a rich boys’ sleepover was amended by the coroner to a gaggle of FTM twinks.

Tragedy and Its Discontents: On Moshe Zvi Marvit’s Nothing Vast

One of the chief pleasures of Moshe Zvi Marvit’s sweeping family saga Nothing Vast is the way it transports you to places and times that feel soothingly distant from here and now. His characters move from Morocco and Poland to France, America, and Israel, and we meet them at various times between 1932 and 1973. Here is the sweet, foamy tea of 1935 Casablanca, poured from high above the table to keep the sand out; there, the “grimy” port city of 1956 Marseille and the boiling America of 1965, where “workers were rising up against fat business owners called pigs and taking over the factories.” Being immersed in these worlds and periods, however turbulent, is a pleasure, even though part of the point is that they aren’t really so distant after all. As Faulkner might have put it, the past of a family or nation is never dead; it’s not even past.

The Town Where Journeys End: On The Inland Sea

The train exits Matsuyama through the curving walls of pine and bamboo which give way to the city’s rural outskirts. Here, rice fields are shaved low for the winter, mowed down to a tan stubble of hardened stalks that bend and break over each other in the last phase of their growth, or the first phase of what comes after growth. They are truly the dead of winter. All that is left for them is their immolation at the hands of their farmer, most likely a grandmother in a floral handkerchief and sunglasses. Beside and above these wrecked fields rise the maroon branches and black-green leaves of mikan trees, only just harvested, the round gaps where their fruit hung still traced by supple foliage. They are about a meter tall and stand perfectly distanced the way Japanese preschoolers do when they go out on the town for an excursion. Unlike rice, which is harvested, crushed, burned, then replanted every year, the mikan trees last around three decades. They are the favorite children of Ehime, doted on by aging farmers across the prefecture and yielding mikan juice, butter, jam, lotion, jelly, and sake.

The Colossus of Brooklyn: On Thomas Wolfe and Infinite Loneliness

The retreat center was attached to a grand, turn-of-the-century hotel, straight out of The Shining, manned by a skeleton crew for the winter. Wandering the grounds, I poked my head into the old lobby. Past the worn armchairs and covered grand piano, I found a musty little library with the door unlocked. There is nothing quite like the almost holy feeling of presence in an informal, well-cared-for library. When you enter, the books seem to whisper — Shhhhhh, hey, there's someone coming. I tiptoed around, inspecting the familiar Northeastern canon — the Cheevers, Roths, Eugene O’Neills, and the Updike, so much Updike. One musty black spine called out to me from the shelves, its title eroded by time — a copy of the long-out-of-print Thomas Wolfe Reader. That’s Thomas Wolfe, Southerner, born 1900, not Tom Wolfe, later-century dandy of The Hamptons. Thomas Wolfe grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. As a precocious young playwright at UNC-Chapel Hill, he left the spiritually suffused but stultifying red clay of his native land to make his way in New York. By many accounts, he was an enfant terrible there, pissing people off mightily.

The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic

A few years ago, the novelist William T. Vollmann was diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis wasn’t great but he went ahead with the treatment. A length of intestine drawn out and snipped. It was awful but it worked. The cancer went into remission. Then his daughter died. Then he got dropped by his publisher. Then he got hit by a car. Then he got a pulmonary embolism. But things are looking up. William T. Vollmann spent “twelve or fifteen years” researching and writing a novel about the CIA called A Table for Fortune; as of this writing it has a few back-channel blurbs from editors and assistants who’ve caught glimpses and say it might be his masterpiece, or at the very least a new sort of achievement for him. But when he finished it, in 2022, he turned it over to his publisher, the final installment of a multi-book contract (although even that part gets complicated), and that’s when, to use Vollmann’s words, “Viking fired me.”

Ross Douthat’s Sandbox Universe: On Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

All apologetics are bold. You need guts to ask someone to reconsider their entire worldview. Viewed in that light, Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious might seem like a more modest entry to the genre. Douthat, one of the few right-leaning columnists at the New York Times, stops short of asking everyone to join him in his Catholicism, or even in Christianity. Instead, he aims at a wider target, arguing in favor of believing in God and joining a religion. Believe is not a treatise on why religion is good for you as a person, or good for society. Instead, Douthat writes that it is “especially important now to defend not just the spiritual but the religious — meaning not just the experience of the numinous but the attempt to think rationally about it, not just the personal pursuit of the mystical but faith’s structured and communal forms, not just ideas about how one might encounter something worthy of the name of God but ideas about what such a God might want from us.” Accordingly, the first three chapters argue for the factual truth of religious ideas like God, the soul, and spiritual experiences. The next three chapters make an argument that established, organized religion is the right response to these claims. A final, more personal chapter details Douthat’s own specifically Christian beliefs.

The Moral Authority of a Body: On Kate Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

Kate Manne’s Unshrinking is very successful in achieving the ends it sets for itself. It is an exemplary trade book, and we may expect it to win some prizes, and to be an absolute hit in the book clubs. Part of what is involved in being an exemplary trade book in 2025 is the display of a tight focus on a clearly defined cluster of points, easily transferable into the bullet-point format (prize juries do not typically read their books cover to cover). This book’s core philosophical notion, and one of the principal bullet points that was likely part of its initial “elevator pitch,” is what Manne calls “the moral authority of the body”: if your appetite makes itself known to your conscious mind, its imperative comes with real moral force. “In my view,” she writes, “bodily imperatives constitute our most important moral imperatives.” We’ll get back to this notion soon. But let me first briefly note what else might have got mentioned in that short elevator ride shared by Manne’s agent and publisher. It would surely have been clarified that the book is not about fatphobia in general, but about the intersectional experience of fatphobia on the part of women and girls. Eating disorders and harmful dieting will have been said, in that elevator, to be a feature of misogynist societies in particular. There are undoubtedly gendered dimensions of the problem. Yet too much emphasis on these can obscure from view just how varied judgments about the goodness or badness of fat can be in different times and places, and can also conceal from us many of the genuinely universal problems, philosophical and practical, of human embodiment. This latter point has considerable personal importance to me. When I was a young man, just 19 years old, I began a two-year bout of rather severe anorexia, constantly in and out of hospitals and psychiatrists’ offices, hooked up to IV’s, fretted over. I was six feet tall and I weighed 99 pounds. I purged myself with laxatives and diuretics every morning before my weigh-in. If the scale ever crept up past 100, I doubled down on my efforts at self-starvation.

“Ten Years of Useless Labor”: On Danzy Senza’s Colored Television

Danzy Senna’s Colored Television spent last summer winning praise from the usual legacy publications as The Novel We Need Right Now: A serious book by a seasoned author willing to sink her teeth into debates around race and class, “representation” and “inclusion” in post-2020 America. Senna has traversed this terrain for a quarter-century in fiction and memoir, deploying a mix of dark humor, historical insight, and pop-culture fluency to craft narratives of biracial women and men — or, to use the term she prefers, mulattos. On that model, Colored Television features quotations from Jefferson’s letters, parodies of mid-century sociology texts, meditations on Carol Channing, cameos by Kim and Kanye. But this collage of content is held together by forms and themes as old as the novel itself — mimetic desire, status-chasing, and marital troubles, to name a few. Much of the plot is set in motion by a scene that could have been ripped from the pages of Balzac, Dreiser, or Richard Wright, not to mention Cervantes: A woman sees an image of a happy family in a sales catalog, and tries to make her own life look like theirs. Personal and professional mayhem ensues, much of it very funny. Senna’s relentless cynicism will likely titillate the readers of the Good Morning America Book Club, but it also hamstrings her capacities as a social critic.

The Magic Eye: On the Art (and Life) of Joan Mitchell

A couple years ago, I got the idea that I should spend a week in Paris by myself. Considering I have a boyfriend who could have gone with me and that, perhaps more pertinently, I don’t speak French, the decision was confusing to a handful of people I know. I was satisfied by my own reasoning for the trip — I wanted to travel alone, to be in a situation in which I’m entirely out of my element, at least once while I’m young. Also, JetBlue had a sale. Still, I could read the awkwardness in their eyes, the real questions not being asked, when they’d look at me and carefully go, “So… what are you going to do there?” Really, what I wanted to do there was see the Joan Mitchell paintings at the Centre Pompidou. I’d still never seen a piece of hers in person then, the frenetic swipes and smears which I loved so much observed only ever through my various screens. A depressing thought! While it hadn’t been part of my decision to take the trip, in my loose planning it came to hold a kind of post-hoc, kismet-like significance for me — a chance to finally commune with Mitchell, my fellow Chicagoan-turned-New-Yorker, in the country that she made her ultimate home.

Toward a Sordid Utopia?: On Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small

The writer Lore Segal — known in particular for Other People’s Houses, her novelized account of fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria as a ten-year-old — once asked Vivian Gornick to explain feminism. “What is it that you want? I don’t think I’ve ever understood,” Segal said. Startled to be asked such a question in the early 2000s, Gornick began to explain. Segal listened to Gornick’s perspective and then summarized, “with something like wonderment, ‘You have a passion for equality.’” Gornick was astonished that Segal didn’t. “I have a passion for many other things,” Segal said, “for love, and friendship, for good conversation, for living inside another’s imagination — but not for equality. There are many things I cannot live without before I cannot live without equality.”

Stalking the Trillion-Footed Digital Beast: On Udith Dematagoda’s Agonist

Whatever your feelings about the internet and its tortuous torrential stream of information, misinformation, fragments of dialogue, rants, advertisements, etc., it is, for better or worse — good or evil — totalizing in its effects, and here to stay. Social media, as part of the online ecosystem, has made its own insidious specific contributions as part of this “world wide web” (as the internet used to be called) and users have no qualms about exposing their lives online. Tens of millions of people panic about how to share their “hot takes” or transform their little acts of daily living, no matter how banal, into posts, and then sit and desperately wait for approval, counting the “likes” they receive to tally up their sense of self-worth.

It Wasn’t Real, But It Was Beautiful: On the WWE Holiday Tour Live and Gabe Habash’s Stephen Florida

Last year, on the day after Christmas, I went alone to the WWE Holiday Tour Live at Madison Square Garden, where I sat in nosebleed seats. I wore a plaid button-down shirt and black jeans. I listened to “Danza Kuduro” on repeat on the half-hour walk from my apartment. My life was stable for the first time in two years. I was twenty-nine, living in New York after a nearly ten year hiatus, and dating a wonderful medical student at the University of Michigan who loved me very much. Everything was good. But I hadn’t finished writing my book and editors often edged me on whether my short stories would make it into their magazines (Not this story, but maybe the next one? Keep submitting to us!). I loved the medical student, but sometimes worried about our relationship. We never fought! Was that good? Or did it hint at some pliability of his that was a weakness of character? Back in New York, I felt like an animal free for the first time. I wanted to see men pound each other on the aptly named Boxing Day.