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.
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.
Last year, while at a literary magazine party at a big Greek restaurant in New York City’s Financial District, I saw Alex Karpovsky mingling in the crowd near the bar. I walked over and let him know that I’ve watched Girls, start to finish, about eight times. He said something like, “Wow, that must be a world record.” I couldn’t tell if he was flattered or alarmed. Karpovsky is an actor who played Ray, one of the main supporting characters in Lena Dunham’s HBO show, Girls. But of course you knew that, or else why would you be reading this?
Artist Molly Crabapple’s monumental Here Where We Live Is Our Country is by and for the dispossessed, including diaspora Jews who cannot now, or never could, imagine Israel as home. For the Jewish Bund, “The diaspora was home,” writes Crabapple. “Bundists created the doctrine of do’ikayt, or ‘Hereness.’ Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood.”
Emoji-faced Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House and star of the YouTube-friendly game show What’s My Line?, is no longer remembered. In his lifetime, he was close to Frank Sinatra (a pallbearer at Cerf’s funeral), Truman Capote (declined to be a pallbearer — too waifish?), William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Dr. Seuss, etc. etc. etc. Each one easily worth a monumental biography; yet in Nothing Random Gayle Feldman gives Cerf and his publishing kingdom (only after his death an empire) the 1,000-page treatment.
In June 2020, a friend and I were walking to a Black Lives Matter protest in Columbus, Ohio. Pristine downtown storefronts with boarded-up windows made things feel fake-apocalyptic. Then we heard the sound of glass smashing and people screaming. My friend wanted to leave, but I insisted we turn the corner to see what was happening. We stuck our heads past the faux-brick wall and saw no one. The screaming and window-smashing cut to dialogue. It was coming from a television in someone’s apartment. The protest, when we found it, was also an overproduced phantasm.
On October 7, 1955, five poets stood on a tiny stage at the back of a small art gallery in an unfashionable part of San Francisco and read their most challenging work. The result was an astounding success that no one expected. It was the right collection of poets reading in the right venue at the right time to the right audience. Against all odds, their work resonated with the approximately 150 people in the crowd and sparked a literary revolution. That night is widely considered the birth of the San Francisco Renaissance as well as the moment when the Beat Generation dramatically expanded and began to go public.
Around the corner from where I’m writing this in southern Stockholm, clean center at the dark heart of suburbia’s placid, unquivering normalness, lives a young couple who wake up every day and pretend it’s still 1929. She dresses in Hooverettes and rayon slips, he in a top hat and double-breasted British Warm. She reads housewife magazines from the late ’20s, he polishes the vintage silver sconces. At night she executes 1930s recipes while he sits in the “smoking room” listening to Artie Shaw. Occasionally, when I go out for walks, I can see them strolling along the street. One needn’t squint or look twice. The piled fur lapels are hard to ignore.
An interviewer once asked Patti Smith whether she’d always planned on becoming a rock musician, and she responded with a characteristically impassioned rant against labels. “Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that?” she said. “I’ve always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then they called me a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.”
I came to Aymann Ismail’s memoir Becoming Baba eagerly, not only because I’ve been writing about fatherhood for many years, but also because one of the great surprises of my 2025 was a personal exploration of Islam. It’s a courageous book, and it satisfies on both counts. But its enduring influence, if it has one, will lie more in its discussion of faith.
A woman stands on a stage under harsh, punishing red light, wearing a black skirt over tight black pants. Her hair is a thick black mane, swept back from her face, and her eyes are wide and dark and her gaze pierces you like a bullet. She is topless, but her body is covered in blood and her wrathful eyes dare you to sexualize her.
Toward the end of this essay, I’m going to tell you about the time 30 years ago when Jim Harrison — the singular American poet and novelist — stole my date. This happened at a literary festival in Key West when I was 25 years old. Worse, I had flown there from East Lansing, Michigan, with nearly the sole purpose of meeting Harrison, whom I idolized.
“The Mysticism of Money”: that was the brassily alliterative title of a 1922 essay published by Harold Loeb in Broom, the magazine he co-founded and bankrolled. Contemporary American culture, Loeb observed, had positioned commerce as its new religion. Europeans made money as a means to old-school ends; Americans had started to make it for the sake of making it. This was strange and unsettling, but the upside was an emerging metropolitan culture of startling energy — as Loeb put it, “vigorous, crude, expressive, alive with metaphors, Rabelaisian.”
The calls came in around 10:40 on the night of August 25, 1955. Thomas McGuinn, the dispatcher on shift in the Hamilton County Sheriff’s office, had been on the job for three years, but had never encountered anything like this. Sgt. Ralph Weber and patrolman Ernest Nehrer were watching a “big, bright, round” object above the Fernald atomic plant — where uranium ore was processed for nuclear weapons.
William James would like you to imagine that you are stuck on a mountain ledge, “from which the only escape is by a terrible leap.” Now for the good news: if you have faith that you can jump across, then you will. But let yourself brood on the odds of success and “you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss.”