Ooh, we read some very good stuff this month. (That’s the royal we. It’s still just me.) New Deborah Levy! New Ann Patchett! A book that will either make you want to throw your phone in a lake OR buy a better protective case for it! And a serious contender for my Book of the Year, if I was a person that ranked them instead of just reading them.

Read, enjoy, discuss!

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein
Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy + Gertrude Stein + Paris: come on, there’s no world in which I’m not immediately reading and loving this book. It is a novel and there is a storyline here—we have a writer researching Gertrude Stein, a friend who has lost a cat, a potential love interest—but really this book is Levy being Levy and dropping perfectly insightful pearls of wisdom without even appearing to try. From one of my many dog-eared pages:

If we create ourselves with and through language, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein’s project was to dismantle herself and a whole century through language, to uncreate herself as she had been created by her father, by her sneering professor at Johns Hopkins, by her brother, to undo the manner of the nineteenth century. Get rid of commas. Get rid of question marks. She did not want to be told when to take a breath and when something was a question or who to love or how to dress. Get rid of cliches. Break through the conversations of genre. Stein was going to step out of the frame, away from the life of her mother and aunts, away from the uncomfortable femininities that had been societally constructed to keep her in her place.

You will like this if you’re into: Stories about Stein and Alice B. Toklas and Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway in Paris in the 20s. Women who do exactly what they want, conventions be damned.

Continue your Levy deep dive with: her “living autobiographies,” Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate. The Position of Spoons. If you prefer fiction, Hot Milk, Swimming Home and The Man Who Saw Everything, although if I’m being honest Levy’s fiction and nonfiction read the same to me and I mean that as the highest compliment.

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Whistler
Ann Patchett

A middle-aged woman runs into her ex-stepfather—a man she loved dearly but briefly, the second of her mother’s three marriages, which ended when she was still just a kid—at the Met. They slowly and sweetly rekindle their relationship and dig through old trauma and understand everything a little differently. It’s Patchett perfection and I read it in two days. So worth the long library hold.

You will like this if you’re into: Ann Patchett! (And you should know by now whether you are or not, but you probably are.)

Continue your Patchett deep dive with: oh my gosh, everything. Bel Canto, The Patron Saint of Liars, Commonwealth, The Dutch House, etc etc etc. I haven’t read any of her non-fiction (yet) but to be honest it’s mostly because I don’t think I would ever recover from Truth & Beauty, which is about her longtime friendship with the late poet Lucy Grealy.

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Transcription
Ben Lerner

Before reading this book, I had never read any Ben Lerner and had no idea that he is a MacCarthur genius grant recipient once described by the New York Times as “the most talented writer of his generation.” Oops and congratulations to that man! However, as a former journalist, I couldn’t resist Transcription’s premise, a classic nightmare for me and my kind: a writer breaks his phone right before an important interview and has no way to record the conversation. What’s he going to do? Write notes as fast as he possibly can? (Have tried; cannot recommend.) Pull a Truman Capote and claim he has an almost 100% reliable “audio memory”? (Have not tried; would not recommend.) Anyway, this book is both about that and not at all about that: it’s about the limitations of not just memory but conversation and even communication in general, plus legacy and fatherhood and fact and fiction and lots of other big fascinating ideas.

You will like this if you’re into: meandering conversations. Academics. Thinking about cutting down on your screen time.

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Nebraska
Monica Datta

I should start by saying that this is the kind of book that feels, upon finishing, like a real accomplishment. It’s absolutely not an easy read! It’s about a woman who has killed her severely disabled child and the lives she and her family live before, during and after her prison sentence. It’s not only thematically rough but long and incredibly complicated: it moves backwards and forwards across generations and perspectives and continents without much notice, all the while being elaborately annotated via footnotes by a peripheral character. (I found the footnotes—which ranged from snarky asides to in-depth historical and psychoanalytical citations—distracting at first, and for a verified Fast Reader they slowed me down in a way that I initially found annoying. After a while, I came to miss them when I had a few pages without them. I hate when literary devices feel like a trick—nobody likes a show-off—but this was not that, although clearly Monica Datta is extremely capable of showing off if she wanted to.) For all the darkness and grief and complexities and hurdles, this book was incredibly rewarding and already feels like it will be one of my year’s favorites. I hate saying books are Powerful or Important because what do I know, but Kaitlin Phillips of said it’s going to win the Pulitzer and I wouldn’t like to argue with her!

You will like this if you’re into: big, sweeping, ambitious, multi-generational immigrant family sagas. Psychoanalysts.

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Favorable Margins Hall of Fame:

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
1940

The other day, New York Magazine’s excellent newsletter published a story about how 20 well-read people, from Keith McNally to Zohran Mamdani to Julie Andrews, find time for books. I ate it all up, of course—reading in the bathtub, reading in the middle of the night, reading like a bat hanging from the rafters (thank you for that visual, David Remnick)—but I particularly loved this little nugget from Parul Sehgal, critic-at-large at the New York Times:

I spent the first half of my life trying to conceal my reading from my parents and now the second half trying to conceal it from my children. Right now, I’m supposed to be at the bank, but I’m standing outside the bank trying to reread this glorious novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Nobody gives me any peace, and I can’t read it at home, so I have invented this bank errand. I understand that books and reading are meant to be virtuous. But nothing that feels as good can be entirely virtuous, right? So when I say how much I read, it’s not with pride. I should be doing all these other things and I resolutely don’t because I generally read a book a day, whether old or new. I’m not proud of this. Who’s raising my children while I’m doing this? Where are they? I feel like Emma Bovary, leaving my children to their own devices and running off with a novel.

It makes me want to immediately head to the bank, where I have absolutely no business being, with my old copy of Carson McCullers’ classic. Then maybe I’ll take The Member of the Wedding, which I also adore, to the dry cleaners.

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God, I love books.

Till next time,
Emily

I just got back home to New York after two weeks in Orange County, California, and Portland, Oregon, visiting friends and family and spending a lot of time with some really excellent children: Billie, Sadie, Piper, Henry, Palmer, Inez, Lucy, and Oona. (That’s my own seven-year-old, my two nieces and nephew, and a handful more belonging to two sets of very good friends.) I read a lot on my own on this trip—more on those books in a couple weeks—but I also spent much of my time away shopping for and reading kids’ books.

I’ve been thinking about kids’ books a lot lately, ever since my friend Pat sent me a copy of Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children by Mac Barnett. Barnett is the genius behind some of my favorite children’s books (I dare you not to crack up all the way through Sam and Dave Dig a Hole), and Make Believe is not a children’s book but a book for adults about children’s books. It’s about how kids are a lot more brilliant than most adults give them credit for, and how their unique experiences and worldviews actually make them the perfect audiences for literary fiction. (My favorite takeaway? Every room that a kid walks into—classroom, grocery store, grandma’s house—has a different set of rules: an alternate reality that they’re asked to accept without question. So why on earth would they question whether the details or storylines in their books are realistic? Imagine having a brain that open.) It’s smart, funny, insightful and irreverent literary criticism from a guy who takes kids seriously, and it’s a total delight.

There are a lot of truly awful kids’ books out there, but kids deserve better—as do the grown-ups who have to read them. In that spirit: below, I give you a roundup of my very favorite kids’ books.

(BTW: maybe you don’t have or want kids! That’s cool—they’re cute but sooo sticky and they literally never stop talking. Feel free to ignore this edition of Favorable Margins for now. But one day you may have to go to a child’s birthday party, godspeed, and I hope this list serves you well then.)

A Giraffe and a Half
Shel Silverstein
1964

There’s so much Shel Silverstein to love—Where the Sidewalk Ends, The Missing Piece, even the revered but honestly kinda messed up Giving Tree—but A Giraffe and a Half is my personal favorite. Read it to your kid’s classroom, do the longest page all in one breath (“a giraffe and a half with a rat on his hat looking cute in a suit with a rose on his nose and a bee on his knee…” etc), and prepare to amaze.

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I Want My Hat Back
Jon Klassen
2011

A genuinely hilarious book with a spit take-worthy ending (larceny and murder!?), by Jon Klassen, the frequent writing and illustrating partner to the aforementioned Mac Barnett.

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In the Night Kitchen
Maurice Sendak
1970

Dreamy, surreal, and frankly weird as hell, by the man who also brought us Where the Wild Things Are. (Don’t worry, our protagonist Mickey does NOT end up baked into a cake…but it’s a close one.)

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Fritz and the Beautiful Horses
Jan Brett
1981

A personal story: when I was a kid I wanted to write and illustrate children’s books myself, and Jan Brett was my idol. I must have been about six when she did a signing at a bookstore in my town, and it’s the most starstruck I have ever been to this day. I couldn’t speak. Fritz and the Beautiful Horses is a classic underdog story about a sweet and dependable little pony who saves the day when the regal and glamorous horses choke under pressure. (They don’t want to mess up their hair, and really, who could blame them?)

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CDB!
William Steig
1968

This is a fun one: the whole book is written as a series of letters and numbers that you have to decipher into words and sentences. Reading aloud is crucial. (CDB = see the bee, NQ = thank you, IF6X = I have six eggs.)

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Frog and Toad are Friends
Arnold Lobel
1970

I’m not going to get into the “are Frog and Toad gay” debate here (although for the record, I hope they are, and Bert and Ernie, too). Instead, let’s celebrate this sweet friendship and how much these boys—one green and cheerful, one brown and grumpy—genuinely love spending time together, telling stories and looking for lost buttons and going for swims.

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Strega Nona
Tomie dePaola
1975

Tomie dePaola was a hugely prolific writer and illustrator, but this story about a kind old witch with a magic pot that produces endless spaghetti is closest to my heart. Bottomless pasta? I’m there.

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They All Saw the Cat
Brendan Wenzel
2016

What does a cat look like to a bird, a dog, a worm, a flea? Your kid will love the illustrations; you’ll love the actually kinda crazy deep exploration of perspective and perception.

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Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus
Mo Willems
2003

If you spend any time around children, you’re used to endless negotiating with small, unreasonable people, but even you may be surprised at how many ways there are to tell a pigeon that no, he unfortunately cannot drive the bus. Mo Willems (Welcome, We Are In A Book, Knuffle Bunny) is another of the all-time greats.

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Sunshine
Ludwig Bemelmans
1950

Picking Sunshine over the Madeline books is a controversial move, I know, but let’s be honest—you and/or whoever you’re buying this book for have already read Madeline. I love that this book is set in New York, I love that it’s about a real estate debacle (only in New York!), I love the umbrella-based economics lesson, I love the grumpy old man, I love the illustrations. Read it and then go to the Carlyle for a martini after you put your baby to bed.

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The Color Monster
Anna Llenas
2012

Most books that try to teach kids or parents a lesson do a pretty bad job of it, but this one I think about literally all the time, both for my daughter and myself. The so-simple-it’s-genius premise: color monster is feeling upset and doesn’t know why. His colors are all tangled up. As we read, we help the color monster sort each color into a corresponding feeling (red is angry, green is calm, blue is sad) so he can better identify what’s really going on here. Everyone loves emotional regulation!

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The Smeds and the Smoos
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler
2019

You can’t really go wrong with anything in the Donaldson/Scheffler canon (see: The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom, The Snail and the Whale), but this rhyming Romeo and Juliet retelling—without the tragic ending, don’t worry—is charming and funny and lovely. Smeds are red, Smoos are blue, never the twain shall meet…until they do.

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I actually can’t believe how much I’ve omitted here (forgive me, Dr. Seuss!!), and I hate to leave off the Beverly Clearys and Roald Dahls and other books for slightly older readers (…and the parents who’ll love Ramona and Matilda forever, hi, that’s me). But we have to end this somewhere, so let’s end it there for now. As always, message me if you want more recs.

Happy reading, hug the sticky kids in your life, and see you in a couple weeks for my August roundup. There’s some really good stuff coming.

Till next time,
Emily

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I hope this finds you in a powerfully air-conditioned space. If you’re looking for an excellent new place to read this month, I would love to recommend the Clinamen show at the Park Avenue Armory, where a bunch of ceramic bowls float around in big pools of water and gently clink against each other. It’s dark (but light enough to see a book) and cool (crucial) and almost absurdly peaceful, and you can sit or lie down and chill and hang out as long as you want. (At least until August 9, when it closes.) And if you need a book to bring with you, I recommend…these.

Orlanda
Jacqueline Harpman

I have to start by confessing that I have not yet read Orlando, the classic Virginia Woolf novel that Orlanda is based on. Orlando (1928) is about an English nobleman who morphs into a woman over the course of several centuries; Orlanda (first published in 1996 but out now in a new translation) follows a thirty-something female English teacher who somehow throws a little piece of her consciousness into a twenty-something man. How would a woman behave if she could abandon the shackles of a female body? (For one, she/he has a lot of sex.) And how does the female body that gets left behind behave now that her formerly-repressed tomboy side is off thriving somewhere without her? It’s all very wild and funny and fun and fascinating and eventually even slightly evil and stressful and suspenseful.

You will like this if you’re into: Orlando (one presumes!). Beyonce’s If I Were A Boy. Gender ideology.

Continue your Harpman deep dive with: I Who Have Never Known Men, the post-apocalyptic 1995 novel that somehow everyone seems to be reading again these days. (Including me. How does this happen? Is it a BookTok thing? I can’t engage with that but I did really like this book.)

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Banal Nightmare
Halle Butler

A group of the worst people you’ve ever encountered are living in a university town in the midwest. Moddie, our main character, has moved back here, her hometown, after fleeing an outrageously bad boyfriend and their outrageously bad fellow artist friends in Chicago. Do any of these people have any redeeming qualities? Not really! Is this book absolutely vicious and funny as hell? Yesss.

You will like this if you’re into: ultra-specific and hilariously awful millennial behavior. (The character sending passive-aggressive emails full of therapy-speak to her girlfriends at all hours of the night haunts me.) Books where everyone acts like they like each other but actually hate each other.

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Lion
Sonya Walger

My now-retired father (hi dad!) used to run a produce company in southern California, and after reading this book I have never been more grateful that he chose potatoes and onions as his business instead of race car driving, skydiving, cocaine using, money laundering, being occasionally incarcerated, and regularly abandoning spouses and children to start new families—all of those things sound super fun, obviously, but turns out they make for a pretty bad dad. This book is about one such bad dad and the daughter that can’t help but love him (even as she gets old enough to realize what kind of man he is). It’s heartbreaking—particularly for the mother, “the one who stayed,” sob—but beautifully written and based on the author’s actual dad and actual life, which, yikes.

You will like this if you’re into: Coming of age stories, messy family dynamics and wise-beyond-their-years-but-god-it’s-unfair-that-they-have-to-be children. Prose that reads like poetry. Annoyingly multi-talented authors (Walger is also a successful working actress best known as Penny on Lost).

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Vigil
George Saunders

The premise: when you’re dying, you get assigned an angel/ghost/otherworldly being whose role is to usher you into the afterlife. In this case, Jill is our angel, a sweet and mostly naive creature who died tragically at 22 and therefore remains eternally in that state. Her assignment is K.J. Boone, an 80-something oil tycoon dying of cancer, and her challenge is getting this objectively Bad Man to show some remorse for enthusiastically destroying the planet before he shuffles off the old mortal coil. The moralizing here is…not subtle! I really enjoyed it anyway.

You will like this if you’re into: writers who take writing very, very seriously but still know how to be funny. Thinking about destiny and free will and legacy but also maybe rolling your eyes a little at the virtue of it all.

Continue your Saunders deep dive with: Tenth of December (weird and excellent short stories). Lincoln in the Bardo (similar to Vigil in that it takes place in that space between death and afterlife but better by all accounts). A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (which I have yet to read but is on my list! It’s a book version of the MFA class on Russian short stories that Saunders teaches at Syracuse).

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Favorable Margins Hall of Fame:

The Patron Saint of Liars
Ann Patchett
1992

Everyone is jazzed about Whistler, Ann Patchett’s latest, right now. I am jazzed about Whistler right now! I can’t wait to read it. It’s just that the library waiting list for it is looong, as is so often the case with highly buzzed-about books. So in case you too are anxiously awaiting some buzzy new book, a gentle reminder that it actually doesn’t matter at all who the first one to read anything is. (I forget this often, get impatient, and buy the book anyway, and I worry that some day I will end up like this guy.)

You truly can’t go wrong with Commonwealth or Bel Canto or The Magician’s Assistant or The Dutch House (I had a real Patchett deep dive moment a few years ago; couldn’t recommend that approach more), but The Patron Saint of Liars is her first novel and a great place to start if you’re new to the Patchett canon. It’s about a woman, married and pregnant and unhappy about both of those conditions, who flees her life to give birth at a Catholic home for unwed mothers. Instead of giving the baby up and going back to her life—the usual path for visitors of Saint Elizabeth’s—she and the baby stay, settle, and grow up together among the nuns there. It’s a very good book and maybe by the time you’ve read it Whistler will finally be available! (And if not, do Bel Canto next.)

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Okay I know I literally just said that it’s okay to wait and not read the buzzy new books the minute they come out, BUT…who else is so excited for Cool Machine!? More on that next month. Thanks for reading, thanks for caring, see you at the library, bye!

Till next time,
Emily

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This newsletter has settled into a groove with one post on what I’ve actually read each month (here’s April, May and June, if you missed them), and one that’s a theme-based roundup (summer, Pride) of books I’ve read and loved over many years.

This month, the days are long, the temperatures are oppressive, and our roundup theme is: women becoming increasingly unhinged.

Feral women. Women slowly unraveling. (Or quickly unraveling. Why not be efficient?) Women on the verge of…any number of things, mostly bad. We may be, collectively, in a delicate space at this particular point in history—I won’t list the reasons why—but the good news is that great books have been written about these heroic and delusional and outrageous and audacious and occasionally just simply unwell characters since long before things like you-know-who getting elected and civilization falling apart.

(One extremely specific programming note: in my last post I wrote about having recently read a lot of books about young-ish women who are deeply fucked up, impossibly clever, and incredibly cynical. Their interests often include pharmaceuticals, trauma, and being smarter and sadder than everyone around them. Listen, we can love an unsympathetic main character, and these books are often funny—cynicism can be very funny—but I have had enough for the time being and this list is not about them. Earnestness is brave; let’s be earnest!)

Obviously we’re starting with The Yellow Wallpaper. Shall we begin?

The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1892

A woman with a “nervous condition” and “hysterical tendencies” (who among us!?) is trapped in a room with horrible yellow patterned wallpaper. She’s not allowed to work or write so of course the only thing left for her to do is slowly lose her mind. A classic of the genre and proof that bad home decor actually CAN destroy you.

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The Vegetarian
Han Kang
2007

This book was a little violent for me, so proceed with caution if you’re not good with blood. It starts with Yeong-hye becoming a vegetarian; it ends with Yeong-hye becoming…a tree. Allegorical and intense and very dark. (Nobel prize-winning, if that matters to you.)

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Edith’s Diary
Patricia Highsmith
1977

A slow descent into madness is not an uncommon theme with Patricia Highsmith, but we don’t often get it from her with a female lead. This is a particularly fun unreliable narrator moment: Edith keeps a diary, and when things in her actual life aren’t going the way she wants (her kid is a weirdo, her husband is leaving her for a younger woman) she starts recording her preferred life instead. Then she starts believing it. Oops!

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All Fours
Miranda July
2024

Everything that needs to be said about this book on the internet has already been said, but I do feel that this particular list can’t exist without it. For the unfamiliar (wait, where have you been hiding and can I come?): a cross-country road trip that ends abruptly 20 minutes from home; a sordid affair with a young man who works at a rental car company; an elaborately renovated and redecorated motel room (lol). Our unnamed protagonist makes all manner of curious decisions but the thing that stuck with me most about this book was how at one point she crowdsources the answers to “how do we want our lives to look?” from her female friends. Wild that it feels revolutionary to ask ourselves what we really want!

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The Princess of 72nd Street
Elaine Kraf
1979

Ellen is a bipolar artist on the Upper West Side who experiences manic episodes—she refers to them as “radiances” and I respect this rebrand—where she calls herself Esmerelda and thinks she’s a princess. These episodes inevitably end in chaos, but what I liked about this book was how clear-eyed it is about mental illness: she not only knows what’s happening, she actually kind of loves what’s happening, at least while it’s happening. Lots to say here about female agency and freedom.

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Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
1847

There may be no literary woman on the verge quite like poor sweet Catherine Earnshaw-Linton-Heathcliff. Young love is real love, sure, but these crazy moors kids really take it to a level that is, frankly, dangerous: she’s so in love that she literally DIES. (The book is obviously hugely better than the movie but I not-so-secretly loved the movie too, mostly because I respect that Emerald Fennell and co. went all in.)

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The Most
Jessica Anthony
2024

The Most is about a suburban housewife in the 1950s who gets into the pool at her apartment complex and then just…refuses to get out. Can relate.

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The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
1963

You could read this because Kat Stratford, patron saint of tempestuous women everywhere, reads a ludicrously large copy in 10 Things I Hate About You. You could read this because you’re fascinated by the iconic Barbizon Hotel for Women (I am, and fun fact: my grandmother lived there in the late 40s and was apparently briefly acquainted with little Edie Beale). Or you could read it just because you want to feel grateful that we’re not using unanaesthetized electroshock therapy to treat depressive episodes anymore!

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The Coin
Yasmin Zaher
2024

Here we have a woman so fixated on hygiene that she goes everywhere with a CVS basket full of soaps. This woman later turns her Brooklyn apartment into an outdoor-indoor wilderness complete with dirt floors and a koi pond. This same woman later gets caught up in a scheme flipping Birkins with a homeless man she calls Trenchcoat. While all this is happening, she’s grappling with consumerism and class and sexuality and American values and Palestinian displacement. She is going through it!

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Enjoy, and good luck to us all. I wish everyone competent therapists, well-balanced meds, ice-cold gin martinis and as much inner peace as is realistically possible in this year of our Lorde 2026. July’s reads coming in a couple weeks.

Till next time,
Emily

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Happy Summer, happy Pride, happy Knicks, happy everything. Two quick pieces of housekeeping this month: first, I have been asked by a beloved and loyal subscriber (hi Jenny!) to include Goodreads links in my posts, because some people apparently like to be more organized in their to-be-read lists than I do. (I personally prefer a sophisticated combination of notes app lists, gmail drafts and the Brooklyn Public Library app’s holds function.) Second, I have a Bookshop.org shop now! So if you’re not interested in me being long-winded below (valid) but you do just want to buy some new books, you can save your time and do that here.

This month’s lineup: the new Douglas Stuart, the literary equivalent of Groundhog Day, gender-bending lumberjacks and a book I kinda hated but am still thinking about. Enjoy!

John of John
Douglas Stuart

John-Calum Macleod comes back to his tiny Scottish island after a few years of art school in Glasgow (and, more importantly, a glimpse of life outside of his tiny Scottish island). He’s young, he’s gay, he’s closeted—back home, anyway—and he wants much more than to be stuck in a house with his deeply religious sheep farmer/weaver father and irreverent grandmother but has no idea how to get out. Eventually while reading this, your heart will break for Cal, for Cal’s dad, for the mother who left them both when he was a kid, and for most of the other residents of the island. But you will, if you’re like me, love every second anyway. Surprising and gorgeous and sad and very, very lovely.

You will like this if you’re into: amazingly Scottish names (Innes MacInness; Doll Macdonald, Ishbel the sheep!). Amazingly Scottish vernacular (bairn, cannae, mamaidh!). Gorgeously precise descriptions of colors from an author who used to be a fashion designer (the exact color of blackberries in August, the chafed red of a drunkard’s face!). Impossible yet beautiful queer love stories.

Continue your Stuart deep dive with: Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo (more on that here). You may cry; you’ve been warned!

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On the Calculation of Volume III
Solvej Balle

For the unfamiliar: On the Calculation of Volume will eventually be a seven-part series about a woman stuck in an endless time loop where every day she wakes up and it’s November 18 again. (So far only four books in the series have been published in English.) The first one I read and loved, but I kinda secretly hoped I wouldn’t like the second one because the idea of reading seven books that are about being trapped in time made me feel like I might go as insane as our protagonist. Unfortunately I loved number two, and unfortunately I loved number three, which means…we’re all still here and it’s still November 18. The twist in book three? There are others out there like her, and they’re starting to find each other.

You will like this if you’re into: Groundhog Day if there was less Bill Murray and more, I don’t know, grappling with the weight of human existence!? Thinking about things like isolation and purpose and community and an individual’s impact on the world. (I know this all sounds Big and Serious and it probably doesn’t help that it’s Danish but I promise these are fascinating books, and actually surprisingly quick and fun reads. I read almost the entire first book in the sculpture garden at the MoMA one day last summer and I could not recommend that approach more.)

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Stag Dance
Torrey Peters

I have yet to read Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters’ debut novel, but when I read that Stag Dance was nominated for a Pulitzer I grabbed it from the library because I am easily influenced by nonsense like that. Stag Dance is a book in four parts, all of which get real deep into how incredibly messy the idea of gender can be: who’s masculine enough, who’s feminine enough, who’s trans enough, who’s queer enough—and what do we do with the ones that aren’t? It’s wild and sometimes uncomfortable and often unclear and it’s supposed to be like that and that’s okay, and yes I’m still talking about the book but also just…life in 2026?

You will like this if you’re into: thinking about gender and why it matters. Books that break your brain a little, or a lot. Wildly imaginative worlds including but not limited to lumberjacks, apocalypses, secret romances and one absolutely twisted night in Vegas.

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Offseason
Avigayl Sharp

You know what? I didn’t love this book. This is definitely reductive and possibly unfair, but I’ve read a lot of books lately about young-ish women who are deeply fucked up, impossibly clever, and incredibly cynical, and while these books are often very funny (Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno made me laugh out loud) they also sometimes make me feel pretty…empty (Flat Earth by Annika Jade Levy, Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash).

Offseason is about a 28-year-old teacher at a girls’ academy in the Northeast who’s obsessed with Joseph Stalin and generational trauma—her own, and as a concept. It had its moments! One quote I really did like:

“Anything, I thought, repeated enough times could become a comfort. That was the whole problem.”

Wow, yes. Amazing because this applies equally to bad life choices and also things like the new Hilary Duff album. (Listen to “Future Tripping” 100 times in a row and tell me I’m wrong! And I say that with absolute and sincere millennial reverence.) Anyway: this brings me to a question I have for YOU. Do you want to read only about books I enjoyed? Or are you interested in books I read even if I didn’t?

You will like Offseason if you’re into: deeply fucked up, impossibly clever, and incredibly cynical women. Characters in perpetual limbo. Insane family dynamics.

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Favorable Margins Hall of Fame:

The Colossus of New York
Colson Whitehead
2003

Some day I’ll shut up about how great Colson Whitehead is but today is not that day. I’ve loved his fiction for a very long time (more on that here) but somehow I only recently discovered The Colossus of New York (thank you, Alana!), which is kinda like E.B. White’s Here is New York if it was written 50 years later and by Colson Whitehead. It is, as so many wonderful pieces of art are, a love letter to New York, and if you’re as sickeningly romantic about this city as I am you will cry reading it on the subway and then get emotional about the fact that New York is the best place in the whole world to cry on the subway. There are a thousand passages I want to share but I’ll restrain myself to a couple paragraphs here:

History books and public television documentaries are always trying to tell you all sorts of "facts" about New York. That Canal Street used to be a canal. That Bryant Park used to be a reservoir. It's all hokum. I've been to Canal Street, and the only time I ever saw a river flow through it was during the last water-main explosion. Never listen to what people tell you about old New York, because if you didn't witness it, it is not a part of your New York and might as well be Jersey. Except for that bit about the Dutch buying Manhattan for twenty-four bucks there are and always will be braggarts who "got in at the right time."

There are eight million naked cities in this naked city—they dispute and disagree. The New York City you live in is not my New York City; how could it be? This place multiplies when you're not looking. We move over here, we move over there. Over a lifetime, that adds up to a lot of neighborhoods, the motley construction material of your jerry-built metropolis. Your favorite newsstands, restaurants, movie theaters, subway stations and barbershops are replaced by your next neighborhood's favorites. It gets to be quite a sum. Before you know it, you have your own personal skyline.

It’s perfect. Please read it and go cry on the train.

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That’s all I’ve got for today. As always: thanks for caring, thanks for reading, like and subscribe, support your local library, goodbye!

Till next time,
Emily

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Hi gay!

I’ve worked in and around marketing departments long enough to know that much Pride-related bandwagon-jumping is done by companies that don’t particularly care about the LGBTQ+ community but would love to make a buck selling their available-in-June-only rainbow-colored product line. Bleak! But since I can assure you that we here at Favorable Margins (we = me, it’s just me) are not making any bucks on anything to do with this Substack (at least until this thing blows up—then the paywall’s coming, suckers!), you’re just going to have to trust that my interest in big, beautiful, gay-as-hell books is authentic and that I read them all year round. Maybe you should, too. Happy Pride.

Cassandra at the Wedding
Dorothy Baker
1962

Everybody loves a witty but damaged lesbian who’s too smart for her own good! This one’s trying to sabotage her twin sister’s wedding, and it’s not going well.

Myra Breckinridge
Gore Vidal
1968

I saw Marc Jacobs reading Myra Breckinridge on Instagram, so I read Myra Breckinridge: it’s campy and culty and satirical and hilarious. Myra’s a trans woman at an acting academy in Hollywood and the way she loves taking down men is just delicious. (Iconic opening line: “I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess.”)

Less
Andrew Sean Greer
2017

A middle-aged writer goes on an increasingly elaborate literary world tour to avoid thinking about his ex-boyfriend’s upcoming wedding. (Spoiler: it doesn’t work!) Sweet and sad and happy and lovely and made me laugh out loud on basically every other page. Looks like a beach read (derogatory), actually won a Pulitzer.

Young Mungo
Douglas Stuart
2022

A heartbreaking and beautiful story about a boy in Glasgow in the ‘90s and his first love. You should also read Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which is also heartbreaking and beautiful. (I just got a copy his latest, John of John, and I’m anticipating it being…heartbreaking and beautiful!)

Blackouts
Justin Torres
2023

Wild and dreamy and fascinating and ambiguously autobiographical, which of course makes it only more fascinating. Two men, one dying, one younger, meet again after having been institutionalized together years before, and they spend their time telling stories about their lives around a framework of the real 1941 book Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.

The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson
2015

You may know by now that I don’t do a lot of nonfiction around here—and in fact, when I got this book from the library, I thought it was a novel. (Sometimes I request books and then immediately forget where and what I heard about them. Surprise!) Anyway: it’s actually part memoir, part academic exploration of gender and womanhood and motherhood and queerness and romantic partnerships and aging and it’s all just absolutely engrossing.

Answered Prayers
Truman Capote
1987

I have a lot to say about this one, but I’ll try to keep it brief. This was Capote’s unfinished last novel, the work he thought would be his In Search of Lost time, a book that was delayed and delayed and delayed as Capote wrestled with various substance abuses before eventually getting published in parts—which led to all his friends abandoning him for airing their thinly-veiled dirty laundry to the world. What’s gay about it, you ask? The narrator, P.B. Jones, a Capote-esque writer (shocking) and the bitchiest little queen you’ve maybe ever read. La Cote Basque was the chapter that arguably ruined Capote’s life and it’s both deeply tragic and very, very funny.

The New Life
Tom Crewe
2023

Two men in 1890s London are writing a book in defense of gay love at a time when it was punishable by imprisonment and hard labor—then Oscar Wilde gets arrested and they have to decide whether publishing their work is worth the risk to themselves, their loved ones and their families. A beautiful book.

Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
1956

An American man and an Italian man meet in Paris in the 50s, have an affair, and eat oysters and drink white wine—and this would all be as gorgeous and idyllic as it sounds if it wasn’t for the bi panic and tragic ending. (Related: did you know they were still using the guillotine in France in the 50s? They didn’t quit that until 1977!!)

Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
2002

This book has been criticized for being written by a straight man about an intersex protagonist struggling with his gender identity. This may be fair—but still worth reading in the opinion of Favorable Margins. Cal/Calliope is a beautiful character, and the sweeping multi-generational backstory about a Greek family that eventually settles in Detroit is also so wild and great. We love a complicated (understatement) family saga.

The Safekeep
Yael van der Wouden
2024

Hot lesbian love affair with a side of post-Holocaust revenge plot. Truly, need I say more?

Carol
Patrica Highsmith
1952

I would get so many demerits from the lesbian council if I left this one off. We’re all obsessed with the Todd Haynes movie, obviously, but as a certified Patricia Highsmith fangirl I must ask you to also read this book, which was originally published with the title The Price of Salt and under the pseudonym Claire Morgan because 1952 was…not a great time to be an out lesbian. (Thank god Cate Blanchett fixed everything.)

Shop the full list here, if you like.

What did I miss? I know I missed a lot. Brokeback Mountain I left off because it’s technically a novella but if you have a New Yorker subscription or a sneaky way of getting around a paywall you can and should read it in full here. (Sob.) Share your favorites in the comments please.

June’s picks coming in a few weeks. They may or may not be gay too!

Till next time,
Emily

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I’m freshly returned from a birthday trip to Paros, Greece, where the only thing I did more of than floating in the Aegean was sitting on my little Airbnb terrace with a book and whatever the Greek version of aperitivo is. (Don’t ask me how much feta I ate.) I brought five books with me for a weeklong trip and I finished three: The Hill, The Things We Never Say, and BUtterfield 8. I apologize to whoever will get my library copies next for the sand and/or olive oil smudges. All those (and a few more May highlights), right this way.

The Hill
Harriet Clark

You know those books that leave you kind of stunned when you close them at the end? This was one of those for me. The basic premise: a young girl visits her mother every Saturday in the prison where she’s serving a life sentence for a bank robbery gone very wrong. It’s dreamy and tragic and beautiful and surprisingly funny, with this poor little girl trapped between worlds: she doesn’t belong in prison, she doesn’t belong with her grandparents, with whom she lives. She’s forever in limbo, and it’s written in a way that’s sort of childlike in that it’s both slightly detached and breathtakingly wise at the same time. (One line that I can’t stop thinking about, when our protagonist is having a conversation with her mother in the prison visiting room: “She looked at me from behind her face.” !!!)

You will like this if you’re into: complicated and wrenching family histories. Coming-of-age stories with a side of incarceration. An incredible supporting cast of old ladies (no spoilers, but the scene with grandmother’s burning wig!).

The Things We Never Say
Elizabeth Strout

We don’t deserve Elizabeth Strout. I don’t think there’s a more empathetic writer out there. Her newest book is about a middle-aged high school history teacher called Artie, but it’s really about how there’s so much we don’t know about the people we think we know. One thing that consistently blows me away about Strout is how she writes about America today; it’s amazingly delicate and unique. I’ve read plenty of fiction that touches on Trump and Covid and Israel and Palestine and the great big mess we’re all in, and it often seems like the writer is trying to make a point. I can’t fault this. There are points to be made! But Strout does something kind of remarkable, I think, where it’s not overdone or politicized (any more than it reasonably must be) but it’s still much more than just context for the daily lives of her wonderful and very human characters. It makes me very grateful that she is as prolific as she is, because I really need her to make sense of some of this shit for me.

You will like this if you’re into: tiny, beautiful stories about beautiful, ordinary people. Great teachers and sweet, clueless teenagers. Family secrets.

Continue your Strout deep dive with: This isn’t helpful, but I have to just say you should read everything, any and all of the Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton books. If you’re new to Elizabeth Strout, you should not be overwhelmed by her volume and you should not worry about reading her books in any particular order. The same characters appear in different books, and it might make the most sense to go chronologically, but every one stands alone, so you do you. (Get ready to fan out though when Olive and Lucy meet in Tell Me Everything!)

The Palm House
Gwendoline Riley

This is the first book I’ve read by Gwendoline Riley, and I’m not embarrassed to tell you that I bought it because I liked the cover and there was a feature about her in the Times’ Style section; something about Riley and her books seemed very chic. (They are, although I get that that’s a stupid word to use here! Understated is probably better.) This one’s about the longtime friendship between two magazine editors in London in a time when the media industry feels increasingly doomed.

You will like this if you’re into: cynical journalists whining about the idiots on the business side. Too many post-work drinks in old English pubs. Writing that does a lot with a little.

The Fine Art of Lying
Alexandra Andrews

An annoying confession: when there’s a Reese’s (or Oprah’s, or Jenna’s) Book Club sticker on a book, I am less likely to want to read it. It’s not that I think the book is going to be less good; it’s just that I don’t want to read a book that everyone is reading. I don’t want that marketing! I want to feel like I’ve discovered something myself—or, if I’m honest, by someone cool telling me about it, and that someone is…maybe not Reese Witherspoon? (Am I alone here?) All that said, I’m thrilled to tell you that I heard about this book NOT from Reese Witherspoon but because the author is someone I worked with many years ago and so my street cred remains intact. (Shut up, Emily.) Anyway! I ate up this book in about a day and loved every second of it: it’s twisty and turny and sexy and has art heists and affairs and evil rich people and murder. So much fun.

You will like this if you’re into: Murder mysteries that name-drop Rothko and Ruscha. The (filthy) inner workings of the fine art world. Guessing whodunit and probably being wrong!

Favorable Margins Hall of Fame:

BUtterfield 8
John O’Hara
1935

If you lived in New York in the early aughts, you’ll remember the speakeasy revival trend where you had to do silly things like go through a phone booth in the back of a hot dog shop and give someone a password to get into some impossibly hip hidden bar in the back. The problem with this (for me) always was that prohibition had at that point been over for 75 years. Drinking was legal for anyone over 21—and acceptable for some under-21s, depending on where you were drinking—and so it seemed like a lot of song and dance to do a thing that you could just…do.

This book is great for a lot of reasons, one of which is that that whole speakeasy thing actually was incredibly glamorous when it was a necessity. Our heroine is Gloria Wandrous (amazing name), and she is heroically unapologetic in her love of drinking rye and sleeping around even if it occasionally doesn’t go all that well for her (understatement). We’ve got stolen mink coats, we’ve got bad married men, we’ve got buckets of gin and we’ve got a lot of post-Great Depression messiness that’s all fun until it really, really isn’t. Read it!

Before I go: I know I don’t ever shut up about the library around here (have you heard, they just give you books for FREE!?), but I do occasionally buy books, both new and used. I recently paid a visit to Ruby’s House of Crystals near Red Hook—a story for another day—and stumbled across Freebird, a used bookstore next door that does some really excellent work categorizing their inventory (“unflattering author photos” was a particularly fun section). I am now the proud owner of a book called Remarkable Names of Real People, which actually is just a list of remarkable names of real people, including:

• Bambina Broccoli of New York City

• Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila, Philippines

• Larry Derryberry of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

• Luscious Pea of New Orleans, Louisiana

• Miss Pinkey Dickey Dukes of Branchville, South Carolina

• Orange Marmalade Lemon of Wichita, Kansas

• Mrs. Tackaberry McAdoo of New York City

• Sir Cloudsley Shovel, an admiral in the Royal Navy

  

You’re welcome!

Till next time,
Emily

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I’m fundamentally opposed to the concept of a beach book the same way I’m fundamentally opposed to the concept of a beach body: they’re both just the thing…at the beach. Not a different version of the thing. Of course I can understand why you wouldn’t want to haul a 900-page hardcover in your cute little straw bag (get a Kindle, I won’t judge you!), but in my mind there’s no reason why the content of a book should be different based on where you happen to be reading it. You can disagree, but it’s my newsletter.

Now, that being said, a summer book is a distinct kind of book. A summer book has a summer vibe. It could be a 900-page hardcover or a 90-page novella, but there must be some intangible summer quality: maybe it literally takes place in the summertime, or just somewhere very hot. Maybe there’s a large body of water involved. Maybe there’s a laziness or dreaminess or lawlessness or some sense of isolation or that there-are-no-rules-it’s-vacation-what-even-is-time quality.

In honor of this beautiful, sunny New York day, here are a few of my favorites like that: a summer reading list for you, if you’d like one. This is not an assignment; no book reports will be due in September. (But if you want to talk about them, let’s!) Read them at the beach or on your fire escape or in the park or inside with the AC cranked all the way up.

Hot Milk
Deborah Levy
2016

The kind of book where everything feels a little sinister just by virtue of it being oppressively hot with no central air. It’s a mother-daughter drama in a village in Southern Spain, with oceans of codependency and guilt and resentment—but fun stuff too, like mystery illnesses and ill-advised flings and jellyfish!

We The Animals
Justin Torres
2011

A gorgeously written coming-of-age story about three young Puerto Rican-American brothers growing up in upstate New York: very few rules, very little supervision, all very wild and chaotic and tender and touching.

Outline
Rachel Cusk
2014

Not on this list just because of the beautiful conch shell on the cover (but it doesn’t hurt). Our protagonist is a novelist who’s spending the summer teaching in Greece; her conversations with the people around her are full of the kind of casually brilliant insights that make you feel a little stupider in the moment but a lot smarter for having read it.

The Swimmer
John Cheever
1964

A man at a summer pool party in his suburban neighborhood decides to make his way home by swimming through every pool between where he is now and where he’s going. This is what this story is about, but it’s also not at all what this story is about. (Spoiler alert: it’s about madness!)

The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster
1986

Three separate but interconnected detective stories that are surreal and meta and absurd and disorienting and SO, so much fun. Read it and get inspired to wander the hot streets of New York for hours looking for clues. Clues to what? Doesn’t matter!

Bonjour Tristesse
Françoise Sagan
1954

A motherless girl spends her summer in a villa on the French Riviera getting all kinds of tangled up with her father’s various mistresses. Impossible not to love a chic French tragedy written by a literal teenager.

Five-Carat Soul
James McBride
2017

Should we have some perfect short stories for reading in the park on this summer list? Let’s do it. This won’t be the last time you hear about James McBride in this newsletter—he’s brilliant and funny and weird and I once took his class at NYU which is something I will never stop bragging about! This collection is a total kick.

The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides
1993

As Sofia Coppola knows well, there’s absolutely nothing dreamier than a bunch of melancholic teenage blondes in ‘70s suburbia.

East of Eden
John Steinbeck
1952

This deeply Californian book is one that people assume is “serious” because it’s very long and written by a “serious” writer. Yes, it’s a biblical allegory, and yes, it’s about good and evil, and yes, it’s a literal epic, but I promise you it’s more drama-packed than a Bravo reunion show. (I feel this way about Wuthering Heights too, by the way: Real Housewives of the Moors!! But that book didn’t make this list because there’s too much rain and fog.)

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
1939

Sharp and sarcastic and witty as hell. Banter to die for. Cynicism that’s somehow completely charming and a hard-boiled, hard-drinking private detective in 1930s Los Angeles.

Call Me By Your Name
André Aciman
2007

I’ve gone big on Euro summer for this list, but this is in fact our first Italian moment. Yes, the scenery is beautiful—which you’ll know if you saw Timmy and Armie biking through Lombardy, eating peaches and being generally gorgeous in the movie—but the real takeaway is: young love (and/or summer love) is real love!

Consider the Oyster
M.F.K. Fisher
1941

Nonfiction! Imagine! But if summer is a very good time for many cold glasses of Chablis and many oysters on ice (the rule about only eating in oysters in months with the letter R is outdated now; thank you, modern farming and modern refrigeration!), then you should read this charming and perfect little book while you’re at it.

Shop the full list here, if you like.

Now, I need to get back to my stack of library books (May’s hits are coming to your inbox in a couple weeks). In the meantime, I’m about to spend a week on an island in Greece for my 40th birthday (!), doing nothing but floating in the ocean, eating piles of seafood in pools of olive oil and lemon juice…and reading. As always, I’d love your recs, as long as you don’t call them beach books.

Till next time,
Emily

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Welcome to the inaugural issue of Favorable Margins! If you missed my intro letter, you can find it here, but the upshot is that I love books, I hope you do too, and if I can prevent even one person from feeling that paralyzing “what should I read next?” feeling, I’ll be doing this right. I want everyone’s library holds lists to get good and long. Shall we get into this month’s picks?

Brawler
Lauren Groff

This is a book of short stories about all kinds of things, so I’m afraid my synopses are going to have to be offensively reductive. WASPy rich kid turned family fuck-up makes good (or does he?! The last page of this one made me gasp). Four female best friends reunite under tragic circumstances and actually maybe they all hate each other? A retired and depressed married lady thinks she’s taking a gardening course but is actually about to have a lesbian awakening. All that and more!

You will like this if you’re into: the satisfaction of a beginning, middle and end in the time it takes you to commute from Park Slope to Hudson Yards. Deeply dysfunctional family dynamics. Annoyingly good sentences.

Continue your Groff deep dive with: Matrix for 12th-century nuns who go rogue and think they’re god; a slow burn but absolutely nuts in the end. The Vaster Wilds if you’d be the worst survivalist ever (see Isola below). Florida for more brilliant short stories.

Isola
Allegra Goodman

A 16th-century French noblewoman on a ship to the New World gets left on an uninhabited island with basically nothing as punishment for falling in love with her guardian’s secretary. She survives. Apparently this is based on a true story! Holy shit!

You will like this if you’re into: sleeping in a bed and not a cave. (To quote Bowen Yang on a recent episode of Las Culturistas: “when the grid goes down, I’m out.”) Knowing that you will almost definitely never have to defend yourself against a bear. Hard-earned vindication. Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds.

Sisters in Yellow
Mieko Kawakami

Hana is a teenager who, essentially ignored by her mother, moves in with an older woman she idolizes but we all know from the beginning is a little off somehow. They run a bar in Tokyo. They worry about money. They start making money in ways they definitely shouldn’t and they use feng shui, color symbolism and dream interpretation instead of making responsible adult decisions. Who’s in charge here!?

You will like this if you’re into: the kind of book where you think one thing is happening but realize later an entirely different thing has actually happened. Complicated female relationships. Scammers. Getting increasingly stressed out by scammers’ schemes and realizing with some regret that you will never be a scammer!

Crook Manifesto
Colson Whitehead

Firstly I just want to say that it’s frankly annoying for Colson Whitehead to win two Pulitzer Prizes in a row for The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys (both brilliant, both will wreck you, please read both) and then decide to write a trio of 1970s Harlem-set crime capers just for kicks. Writers have no business being THAT good and having THAT much fun at the same time. It’s unfair! However, he has done exactly that: Crook Manifesto is book #2 in the trilogy, following Harlem Shuffle (read this too) and preceding Cool Machine, which comes out later this year. In this book we have a dizzying amount of corruption and bent cops and crooked politicians and arson and fraud and wads of cash in envelopes and baseball bat-wielding goons. Our protagonist, Ray Carney, is a furniture salesman and former fence (a.k.a. the middleman in a heist, the guy who buys and resells stolen goods of all kinds) trying and failing to get straight, alongside a lineup of crooks whose names made me absolutely cackle: Bumpy Johnson, Dizzy Huntley, Corky Bell, Chink Montague, Skippy Damon, Chickie James, Nicky Boots, Zippo, Pepper, I could go on! (See what I mean!? Whitehead is showing off and I’d hate him if I didn’t love him so much.)

You will like this if you’re into: New York in the ‘70s. Bad guys having fun being bad guys. Lines like “The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the ambulances were screaming, and the daylight falling on last night’s crime scenes made the blood twinkle like dew in a green heaven.”

Continue your Whitehead deep dive with: everything mentioned above. The Intuitionist, which is literally about an elevator repairwoman and still I couldn’t put it down. His recent essay in the New York Times about how “if you use [AI] for your art, you’re a freakin’ hack.” (THANK YOU!)

Shop them all here, if you like.

Favorable Margins Hall of Fame:

The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith
1955

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve lent people this book. (My copy recently survived a close call with a friend’s bathtub; I couldn’t be more honored.) It’s another one that’s been overshadowed by the movie and TV adaptations, and while you absolutely will find me losing my mind over Gwyneth Paltrow in a leopard print pillbox hat and Philip Seymour Hoffman leaping out of a cute little red Italian sports car, you must read the book. Patricia Highsmith is a genius at anxiety-inducing psychological thrillers (see also: Strangers on a Train, The Tremor of Forgery, The Price of Salt [a.k.a. Carol, a.k.a. the book that became the gorgeous Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara movie]).

With Ripley we have obsession, murder, identity theft, forgery, increasingly tangled lies—and maybe most importantly we have all this in Italy—and even though Tom Ripley is a terrifying sociopath, you kind of end up…rooting for him? (If you really want to nerd out, let’s talk about how Highsmith was a self-hating lesbian and all her most diabolical characters are queer-coded but brilliant.) There’s actually a whole Ripley series, but for my money you should skip the sequels and just read the original 100 times like I have.

THEN watch the movie. THEN watch the show on Netflix. (I absolutely love you, Andrew Scott, and also I’m dying to discuss the wild but incredible Freddie Miles casting with someone so if you have feelings about this please make yourself known.)

Prego!

Thanks for caring, thanks for reading, support your local library (if it’s BPL’s Central Library, see you there), and send me your own book recs, please and thank you!

Till next time,
Emily

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Welcome to Favorable Margins.

This is a place where I will tell you each month what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been liking, and whether I think you might like it, too. My credentials include a perpetually long library holds list, a lot of opinions both intelligently-formed and otherwise, and many treasured memories of crushing my siblings in summer after summer of family read-a-thons. (Hot tip: if you’re competing by page count, read Gone With the Wind; it’s about 1000 pages long and I know it’s problematic but we should read problematic books too—critically!—and the truth is there is absolutely no better break-up line in history than “My dear, I don’t give a damn.” Rhett!!)

These books will almost always be fiction, because that is what I read. They will probably be “literary fiction” because I am a little bit pretentious like that but they will definitely not be like Karl Ove Knausgaard-level or anything. They will often be new (though as our hero Ann Patchett says on Instagram: if you haven’t read it, it’s new to you), but even if they’re not I’m going to throw a Favorable Margins Hall of Famer into each newsletter as a bonus—because just because Truman Capote and James Baldwin and Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith can’t publish new books anymore doesn’t mean we all shouldn’t be reading their old ones.

My first full issue will arrive in your inbox on Friday, but as an introduction and a preview, let’s kick this whole thing off with our first Hall of Famer. (As a friend recently put it, my love for Truman Capote is basically autobiographical at this point.)

Favorable Margins Hall of Fame:

Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Truman Capote
1958

Audrey Hepburn may have looked charming in a little black dress, but that has absolutely nothing to do with this book and frankly the book deserves better. (Truman Capote famously hated the movie and thought Marilyn Monroe should have played Holly.) It is very much not a romance—it’s full of seedy creeps and social climbers and people using other people and casual crime and one Lulamae Barnes getting married at age 14, eek—although it has one of the most romantic passages about New York that I’ve ever read:

Heaven. I live there, can you believe it? I hope you do too, but even if you don’t, please read this book.

And then, if you like, continue your Capote deep dive with In Cold Blood (duh) if you’re into true crime; A House in the Heights if you live in Brooklyn; Other Voices, Other Rooms if you want Southern Gothic and semi-autobiographical (the early days); and Answered Prayers if you want semi-autobiographical (the later years) and you’re interested in how Capote alienated all his friends and died sad and alone! Then call me to talk about it because I have a lot of thoughts.

Thanks for caring, thanks for reading, support your local library, and send me your own book recs, please and thank you!

Coming Friday: some very excellent short stories, a French noblewoman marooned on an island, and a Japanese teenager in big trouble. See you then.

Till next time,
Emily

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