The Bloody Love of Poe: On Richard Kopley’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Life

A flutter of raven feathers accompanies each recitation of the name: Edgar Allan Poe. He is the “Master of the Macabre.” If we need visual assistance to remember him, we can look at the “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype, which shows him gaunt, with his left eyebrow collapsed, wearing a cravat resembling a torn bedsheet tied into a noose, his arms crossed. This is what has been made of him by the inclusion of his Gothic fictions in the short story anthologies and all the film adaptations.

The Whimper After the Bang: On Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World and Birth Rate Fiction

Sex has always been a public concern for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that reproduction tends to require it. Who is having sex with whom? Who is procreating and how many times? No society has ever been indifferent to these questions. Their answers reveal who will hold power, the size and quality of a society’s fighting force, and the agricultural and architectural needs of generations to follow.

Against Literature: On Adolfo Bioy Casares’ Borges

The first thing a young Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) learned in his conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was to value writing that was deliberate, restrained, and clear. Bioy dates this revelation to sometime between 1931 and 1946, before he began the diary that would chronicle their friendship, a record that starts in May 1947 and ends in 1989, three years after Borges’ death. Long considered a cult object among Spanish-speaking readers, Borges — the title of this 700-page diary — is set to be released in English for the first time in October 2026 by NYRB Classics, in a translation by Valerie Miles.

Manic Pixie Dream Bestie: On Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds

“There was no question that we would immediately connect and fuse together, becoming inseparable,” thinks Ruth, the narrator of Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel Lonely Crowds, while running into a new classmate at the grocery store. She’s right. Her friendship with the classmate, Maria, leads to decades of inseparability. First at Catholic school (where they are two of the only Black girls), then Bard College (where they are two of the only Black girls), and, finally, in the New York art scene (where they are two of the only Black girls). Maria is brash, ambitious, callous. Ruth is shy, indecisive, sensitive. There is both the solace of sameness and the attraction of opposites.

The Good Cop Problem: On Melanie Anagnos’ Nightswimming

“Two of the big knocks against crime fiction,” according to writer Sam Wiebe, “[are] that it glamorizes the police and fetishizes female victims.” These are fair knocks, but also the very pitfalls that smart crime fiction exploits. For sharp practitioners, the genre becomes “a venue of tension where the justice system and the treatment of women is most criticized and debated.” Melanie Anagnos’ new novel Nightswimming joins this tradition. Set in 1979 Paterson, New Jersey, it works within familiar procedural rhythms while pulling apart the myth of institutional virtue.

Cocktail Horror: On Alexander Sorondo’s Cubafruit

One mark of a great motif is its ability to linger whether you understand it or not. I did not understand why every character in Alexander Sorondo’s debut novel Cubafruit needed to be drinking cubafruit in every scene, but after about 50 pages, I wanted to drink some myself. This presented a difficulty: Neither the drink nor the plant it’s made from exists outside of the novel. Like those Harry Potter fans in line for butterbeer lattes at Books-A-Million, I too wanted to taste the fictional world I was inhabiting. I mixed two parts guava juice with one part Cointreau, one part reposado, one part rum, two shakes of Peychaud’s bitters, and a squeeze of lime.

A Jaunty Descent Into Expat Hell: On Chris Tharp’s The Cuttlefish

Had Chris Tharp titled his fictional travelogue / prison memoir / food diary something along the lines of, say, Locked Up in Asia: A Journey to Hell and Back, or, conversely, The ESL Movement: A Continuance of Colonialism? it could very well have scraped the lower rungs of a 2025 bestseller list. From Midnight Express to Locked Up Abroad, everyone and their mother seems to love hearing about obnoxious Americans or Brits getting locked up for decades off the back of their bad behavior in foreign lands.

Coming and Age: On Alex Muka’s Hell or Hangover

Alex Muka’s Hell or Hangover marks the boisterous, exuberant return of the male gaze to those literary precincts from which it has been excluded for some time now. Lou Kennedy, a 25-year-old half-Cuban, half-Irish, all-Jersey Hobokenite, is a trad cad and debauchee of epic proportions undergoing a crisis of faith. Despite the prodigious amount of booze and innumerable lines of coke he consumes in the week we spend with him, which he, with an engaging combination of guilt and glee, informs us, has been his M.O. since college, a sense of emptiness is fast encroaching.

A Cat Chasing a Laser Beam: On Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction

Over the course of 33 days, I read Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction. I set myself the arbitrary goal of reading exactly one chapter every morning I could, and the overall experience felt like a prolonged conversation with a warm and unassuming friend. In interviews, Frank has clarified that his book does not offer a survey or — “God forbid” — a theory of the novel in the modern era. Instead, with “the structure of something like a traditional biography,” he set out to narrate how the 20th-century novel emerged, changed, struggled, and grew old.

Paradise Lost: On Michael Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite

Before TikTok crowned legions of influencers, taste was ruled by a singular aristocracy: the magazine editors. In his debut book, Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America, author and New York Times media correspondent Michael Grynbaum pleads the case for cultural gatekeeping in an era of algorithmic overwhelm and creative chaos. And what gatekeeper has wielded greater influence over the collective consciousness than the media conglomerate Condé Nast, which once, as Grynbaum reminds us, “had a foothold in nearly every sphere and phase of American life”?

You Will Not Remember This Essay: On “Antimemes” and the Failures of Rationalism

How do you build the perfect defense against cognitive blind spots? More than any other, this is the question that undergirds the highly influential online “rationalist” movement. What sounds like an introductory philosophy exercise has, over the past decade, precipitated deep-pocketed research institutes, financial collapse, at least one abusive cult, at least one other murderous cult, and national political tumult. A currently sold-out science fiction paperback might offer the answer.

The Dog Days of Covid: On Michael Cunningham’s Day

There’s a handful of things that absolutely everybody has an opinion on, and few are more contentious than what does or doesn’t screw up children. Just when it seemed no topic could escape our ever-widening social divides, school closures during the Covid pandemic made many of us — from dues-paying party members to the politically nomadic — come together in wondering if there were downsides to isolating children from each other. That moment of parental ecumenism lasted about five minutes, of course, before various concerns were seen as politically “coded.”

Where Is the Asian American Portnoy?: On Carolyn Lei-Lanilau’s Ono Ono Girl’s Hula

Some years ago, Tablet, a Jewish online magazine for which I was once a frequent contributor, ran a series of articles considering the parallels between the experiences of American Jews and Asian Americans: success, assimilation, complaints about quotas at Harvard as well as a habit of annoying Anglo-Saxons with a striver mentality, hunger for status, and frustrating dedication to all the external signs of a now-vanished WASP elite (the house in Connecticut, the perfect sweater) without cultivating its dedication to the appearance of ease, poise, and discretion or the maintenance of a low speaking volume in restaurants.

Everyone Once in Berlin: On Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection

Perfection is a modern-day myth. The recently translated novel, now shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, tells the story of Anna and Tom, a young European couple who move to Berlin around 2010, but beyond that I can’t tell you much about them. I don’t know where they’re from — one would assume Italy, like the novel’s author, Vincenzo Latronico — what they look like, or what happened in their childhood. I don’t know how they talk because there is no dialogue in the novel. I can barely even tell you about a single incident from their lives in any precise detail. This is not a weakness of Perfection, however, but a strength.

The Graham Greene Gambit: On Susan Choi’s Flashlight

The writer Joy Williams once spit wit at a young author regarding what makes a great novelist. “They can do everything,” she said. “That’s sort of the point. You gotta do everything well.” Bad news for all the sentence hobbyists. You can’t just provoke attention. You have to sustain it. Not just with good syntax, but good scenes, good dialogue, good pacing, good action, good structure, and ideally some amount of gold that’s spun from whatever mess of hay we find ourselves rummaging through as humans, as Americans, as writers in a supposedly and increasingly post-literate age. Do it all as well as possible, and don’t forget to tell the truth.