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.

Submerged Populations vs. Representation: On Max Delsohn’s CRAWL and Anton Solomonik’s Realistic Fiction

Two short story collections by trans men were released in 2025, CRAWL by Max Delsohn and Realistic Fiction by Anton Solomonik. (A disclosure: Max Delsohn is a friend of mine.) Both collections are humorous, and both collections feature a lot of pink on their covers. I’m fond of these color schemes, as if together these covers wink at their contents’ ironic approach to representing masculinity. One might expect the covers to assert their authors’ identity more firmly, considering how rarely books are released by trans men.

Straight Man: On Ben Lerner’s Transcription

Adjectives cling to Ben Lerner like cockleburs. He is “subtle and sinuous,” per James Wood in the New Yorker. His work is “virtuosic,” in the words of Tao Lin for The Believer. The MacArthur Foundation bestowed a fellowship upon him. Of or pertaining to the intellect — these are the descriptors that pile before his feet. It predated his turn into fiction, too. Back when he was exclusively a poet, his post-Language melding of theory and lyricism was similarly feted for its erudition.

Cannibalism, Pederasty, and the Next Upgrade: On Sibylle Berg’s Grime

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, is a cop out. Rhetorically, it’s clear, easy to agree with, and safe to pronounce in even the most banal contexts. But if anyone besides me or Charles Dickens uses it, feel free to ignore the rest. They’re most often trying to run out the clock. To the best/worst of times view, one might respond: pick a fucking side already. Few will.

Normie Transgression: On Rob Doyle’s Cameo

Rob Doyle’s Cameo has a distinctly “postmodern” resonance that seems almost archaic in the present moment. Three decades removed from its heyday in the Gen-X literature of the 1990s, Doyle writes in the stylistic lineage of writers like Bret Easton Ellis. The aesthetic legacy of this “postmodernism” was a recuperation of certain elements rooted in the literary “avant-garde” extended to the level of pastiche, and alluding to ideas more elevated and profound than what was actually communicated at the level of text.

The Corporeal Internet Novel: On Cairo Smith’s Scenebux

Seldom does a book predict its imminent descent into textual illegibility, but Cairo Smith’s Scenebux ends with an interesting flourish I have yet to see in other similar works — an afterword containing a lengthy list of references that are “extremely specifically situated in time from the death of Pope Francis to mid-July of 2025.” The effect is to create a map-like web of ephemeral signposts and hyper-localized cultural references, sufficiently layered such that even the Extremely Online reader will find it hard to catch all or even most of them.

The Barbarism of Yesteryear: On Max Watman’s Tomorrow, the War

One shouldn’t look to fiction for historical phenomenology, but I’m not sure of another art form better suited to communicating to our contemporary selves what life felt like in the distant past. The philosophical notion of phenomenology was an attempt to understand previous eras on their own terms, instead of imposing our present mores onto them. This would suggest that the best way to get a sense of the past would be to read first-hand accounts from various periods, which might provide a sense of their prevailing zeitgeists.

I Fear LA: On Luke Goebel’s Kill Dick

Susie Vogelman is young, beautiful, loaded, and completely and hopelessly addicted to OxyContin. After her roommate overdoses on prescription drugs and dies, Susie drops out of NYU. We meet her as she’s living in the sprawling Los Angeles mansion that belongs to her father — corporate counsel to the Sickler family, a thinly veiled stand-in for the Sacklers, of Purdue Pharma fame.

High School Confidential: On Peter Shull’s Why Teach?

William, or “Mr. Able” as his students and colleagues know him, is having a crisis of faith. An English teacher in the far western flatness of Kansas, he too is being flattened — worn down by his fourth year of teaching at the high school from which he graduated, a job he fell into through haphazard idealism and his father’s school board connections. “It’s not the kids . . . and not their parents,” he explains in the opening pages of Why Teach?, Peter Shull’s earnest new novel.

Heil Hollywood: On Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director

There’s an unspoken rule that if you write a novel about Nazis, the point can’t simply be “the Nazis were evil” or “keeping company with Nazis is wrong.” But judging from the American reception of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel The Director — which has been noted for its “unnerving timing” and described as “curiously prophetic” — you’d think that was exactly the book he’d written.

Banal Over Broadway: On Woody Allen’s What’s With Baum?

{Cough, clears throat}. Chapter one. It’s 1991 in Manhattan. Cue a Gershwin piano trill, followed by sirens; open on an old lady getting her purse snatched. An ambulance whizzes by. Gray skies and rain; a little group of shivering hookers. Oh yeah, the roaring ’90s. But this isn’t Midtown. No, no, we’re in the crosshairs of 88th Street and Second Avenue. One building has a line outside. We zoom in on the awning — it’s Elaine’s, the glamorous literary canteen. The camera takes us inside, tracking.

How to Love a Monster: On George Saunders’ Vigil

George Saunders has spent a career unpacking one of the central contradictions of life: that we are loving creatures capable of creating monstrous worlds. Since his debut collection in 1996, Saunders has become something of a secular saint, a writer whose sense of the world’s abounding horrors is balanced with a trademark humor and humanity. In one way, his most recent offering, Vigil, is the extension of those themes his devotees have come to love.

Absurd Harvest: On Michael Jerome Plunkett’s Zone Rouge

America’s power to wage war hangs more on the sex life of the greater sage-grouse than you might guess. You wouldn’t want to overstate the case. If you were to rank determinants of wartime readiness, the greater sage-grouse’s amorous entanglements would probably place behind things like defense outlays and the upkeep of stealth bombers. But those entanglements do play a small role, and that’s still more than most imagine. It is certainly more than I did until only a few years ago. Then I took command of a cavalry troop in the U.S. Army and lost my innocence forever.

The Stagnation of the Literary Left: On Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song

The world is worried about fascism. Across the U.S. and Europe, conservative, nationalist, or populist movements are on the rise. The rhetoric is intense. Many people, including politicians in power in the U.S., have likened Donald Trump to Hitler. We’ve seen what appeared to be a Nazi salute from a major tech mogul. Other tech guys fell in line — they want to keep doing what they’re doing, after all. Not all the people who voted for the current administration are bigoted, misogynistic racists, of course, but some of them are. Most of them — or at least the ones I have contact with — just wanted better wages and cheaper groceries.

The Exilic Style: On Ruyan Meng’s The Morgue Keeper

Ruyan Meng’s second novel, The Morgue Keeper, follows the exhausted, ultraresilient Qing Yuan, a morgue attendant in Mao’s China who runs afoul of the vengeful state while investigating the mysterious death of an unidentified woman known only as “number 19.” The book is harrowing in the strict etymological sense, not in the cloudy uprooted sense with which the word is often deployed: it left me feeling like I’d been scraped over by a plough’s tines. Cut into, yes, and a bit sore, yes, but also more open, more fertile of mind.