The Unrelenting Hoofbeats of the New Literature: On Caleb Caudell’s The Quarrymen

What is the state of American literature today? This loaded question never has an easy answer, and invariably the debate grows tedious, ideological and sociological combatants racing to their predictable corners, fists wearily raised. In my years as a novelist and columnist and now editor-in-chief of this publication, I’ve come to believe that large, conglomerate publishers care less about disgorging excellent literature than they once did — that this pursuit, for a variety of reasons, is less interesting to them.

Between Life and Death: On Tom Howard’s Invisibilia

The short story collection is a difficult and awkward form. It lacks the unity of the novel, and unlike a narrative that stands alone in a literary or cultural magazine, each story seems as if it should somehow be connected to the other stories around it. This, of course, is despite the fact that many of the stories in the collection will have already been published separately in the aforementioned magazines and journals.

The Literary Wars, Before and After the Language Crusade: On Karen Yin’s The Conscious Style Guide and Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous!

Is politics downstream of culture? Not in the publishing industry. This is evident in the recent publication of two books on editing and publishing, Karen Yin’s The Conscious Style Guide (2024) and Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous! (2025). The first is a call for editors to advance social justice through equitable language while the second reports from inside the publishing industry on the outcome.

You Modern Folk: On Robert Polito’s After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace

Bob Dylan turned 85 in May, and as of this writing he is still on the road. This year and counting he has played 27 shows — that’s six more than Geese in roughly half the time: his spring tour opened in Omaha on March 21 and closed in Abilene on May 1. As he says: “What could be bad about traveling places, seeing different things, moving? It keeps you alive.” Dylan has played over 3,000 live shows since 1993.

Lunar Caustic: On Emmalea Russo’s The Moon Papers

There exists such a thing as a “poet’s novel” — that is, a novel written by a writer who is primarily a poet. Notable examples include The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell, and The Issa Valley by Czesław Miłosz. These aren’t just novels that happen to have been written by poets. They are novels that express a certain poetic sensibility. They dwell lovingly on description, whether of landscapes or clothing or furniture.

A Dim Flicker: On Jesi Bender’s Child of Light

“Works of art are of an infinite solitude,” Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet, “and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”Child of Light, a novel written by the artist, poet, and playwright Jesi Bender, has certainly received its fair share of love. One reviewer likens the prose to Nabokov’s and calls one passage in particular as “concise and devastating an illustration of inherited trauma as you’re ever likely to see in print.”

The Infertility of Time: On Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume

Solvej Balle’s book series On the Calculation of Volume is all about waiting. This waiting extends to its readership. Though it’s cast as a septology, only six of the books are published, and of those, only four have been translated into English. Book V is scheduled to be released in English in November. Book seven does not have a release date, not even in its original language.

He Said They Said: On Jim Windolf’s Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other — and the World

There was a boy in postwar Liverpool, and his name was Mike. Mike had a girlfriend named Celia, who once let him borrow a record by an American folk singer who pretended to be a lonesome hobo, though he was really just a middle-class kid from Minnesota, but with an exceptional musical talent. Mike went home to 20 Forthlin Road and played the record. Mike had a brother named Paul, who didn’t think much of the music.

The Great Defiant Life: On Alma Guillermoprieto’s The Years of Blood

For decades, the Mexican-born journalist Alma Guillermoprieto has been respected, if not revered, as the preeminent English-language chronicler of the trials and triumphs of contemporary life in Latin America. When she speaks, people in the know tend to listen. The Years of Blood: Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America, published last year, is Guillermoprieto’s latest and final collection of reportage from the region. There is plenty of bloodshed in the 21 compiled stories — and while there is plenty of life too, these are largely not the kinds of tales she originally set out to record.

Do Plants Go to Heaven?: On Michael Pollan’s A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

To live with plants, even if one lives alone, is to not truly live alone. Plants are living beings, with both a genesis and a death; for a while, like us, they are infused with life and then that life recedes. I have wondered whether plants go to heaven when they die. Or whether their life essence, once it leaves their material substance, joins the greater consciousness, and whether we can feel their spirit surrounding us the way we do when a person dies. “Everything alive is sentient,” Michael Pollan says in his new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.

The Case for Booksmaxxing: On Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books?

We live in an unprecedented moment for booksmaxxing. I don’t know how I could otherwise make my way through authors like Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard — the latter of whom surely wrote not to be understood. With ChatGPT to help me sentence by sentence at times, Wikipedia, and the ungodly profusion of podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, and other internet rabbit holes, I feel that I could read almost anything.

Life on a Tube Filled With Seamen: On Yannick Murphy’s Things That Are Funny on a Submarine But Not Really

Military life has long served as reliable fodder for American literature, which should come as no surprise: something about stories of men from all corners of the country facing danger as a team is inherently dramatic. From Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage to Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, authors have mined the ups and downs of military life not just to shine a light on what makes those institutions — and the people who work them — tick, but also the American experience as a whole.

Easy Writer: On Ted Geltner’s Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson

One of the most irritating things we learn in Ted Geltner’s new biography of Denis Johnson, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures, is just how easy it all was for Denis. Not that Denis’ life was easy — anyone who’s picked up Jesus’ Son is at least dimly aware that DJ blasted away his 20s careening between dope and booze before he got his act together — but the writing, if we’re to believe Geltner’s reverent account, came to him with blissful, galling ease.