After I wrote about having a review published in the Wall Street Journal, someone asked in the comments about how one goes about getting review copies. It’s a good question, because on the one hand, it often isn’t that hard to get review copies — it’s way easier to get review copies than to get review assignments! — but it is kind of a complex endeavor. So, for those who are interested, I’ll break down my process here, which I first learned from the ever-generous and have adapted a bit to suit my own purposes.

I’ll do my best to get into all the details, but please let me know in the comments if you have further questions.

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Step 1: Find a Book You Think You Want to Review

There are two primary places where I go to learn about books that are coming out soon. The first is Edelweiss, which is a platform that publishers use to post information about books they’d like to sell to booksellers, including forthcoming books. One of my first newsletters was all about how I use Edelweiss to find books I think I might want to review, and it gets way more granular about filters and catalogs than I will plan to go into here. But for a quick overview: there are two things I love about Edelweiss: 1) it is free to make an account and to search their database to find out about new books, and 2) there is NO ALGORITHM. You just enter some old-fashioned search terms (they’d better be precise!) and use lots of filters. I’m sure someone will ruin it with an AI algorithm soon, but for now, I love it, because I try to read widely and often discover books outside of my normal wheelhouse.

Edelweiss is my favorite tool for finding books that are forthcoming from the big presses, especially the Big 5 (of which the biggest is Penguin Random House).

But! Edelweiss isn’t totally comprehensive. That is, some publishers don’t use it.

So the other places I look are publishers’ websites, which typically will have a way to filter for forthcoming books. (Some of them make it unnecessarily hard. Just saying.) I have a spreadsheet where I keep a list of small presses whose lists I like to check regularly, like Graywolf, Deep Vellum, and Here Below. Some of these small presses do post to Edelweiss, but they release so few titles per year that they can get drowned out by the sheer volume of books from PRH / Hachette / MacMillan / etc., and I want to make sure I don’t miss them.

Two things to keep in mind as you’re researching:

• The bigger the book — that is, the bigger the publisher and the more marketing money there is behind it — the easier it will likely be to get a review copy. For the buzzy releases, a publisher will print a pile of galleys, and they are eager to find people to give them to.

• Pay attention to the release date. If I’m hoping to review a book, I try to get a copy maybe three months or so in advance. I will typically pitch book reviews before I actually have a copy of a book in hand, because magazines and newspapers usually want to run reviews roughly around the release date of a book. But there are times when I want to read a book before writing the pitch (one recent example of this for me is Zachary Mason’s Fabrications, an August poll winner). If I want to read a book before pitching, I will try to request it even earlier — like four or even five months in advance. Sometimes publishers are like, “ma’am, those galleys are not going to be ready for ages,” but they will usually put me on a list to get the book whenever it’s ready.

Step 2: Figure out Whom to Ask for a Copy of Said Book

Once you’ve decided which book you want to review, figure out who the publisher / what the imprint is. Imprints are like mini-presses within a bigger publishing house that have their own staffs. For example, Mariner Books is an imprint of HarperCollins that publishes literary fiction and nonfiction. (Oftentimes, imprints used to be small presses that were then acquired but still retain something of the character of the original press.) If you’re struggling to figure out the press and / or imprint for a particular title, ask Google. Gemini (as much as I LOVE TO HATE IT) could probably help you out.

You will need to contact the publicity team at the appropriate publisher/imprint to request a copy of the book.

Here I will encourage you — especially if you are based in the US and aim to publish book reviews in magazines and newspapers — to pay the $50 annual fee to join the National Book Critics Circle, which gives you access to a spreadsheet with publicists’ email addresses for a huge range of presses and imprints. (It also has a freelancer spreadsheet with information about publication venues, which is even more valuable.) The publicist spreadsheet there isn’t super well maintained, as there is a fair amount of turnover in publishing, but it has often saved me from having to email the general publicity address. On a handful of occasions when I have sent review copy requests to general publicity email addresses, my messages have either ended up falling into a void or taken quite a long time to get to the person who could actually help me.

But if you don’t want to pay $50 for an NBCC membership, you could just find the general email for the publicity team and try that. Most publisher websites have a note somewhere (usually framed as being for “ the media”) that gives you an email address where you can request review copies.

If you’re feeling industrious, you also can do some sleuthing on LinkedIn and your search engine of choice to figure out 1) the names of the people who work in publicity at the imprint and 2) the typical email format for the press in question. You can sometimes guess the appropriate person’s email address that way. But that can be kind of time consuming, so again, I commend the NBCC to you.

Step 3: Write an Email Asking for the Book

Your email starts with the subject line, of course. My formula:

Review Copy Request: [TITLE] by [Author]

These emails shouldn’t be long. I start with a request to forward the email to the right person. My first email almost never ends up being to the person working on the title in question, so this just feels like a nice thing to do.

Good [morning or afternoon],

I hope this finds you well. I am not certain whether you are working on publicity for this title; if not, would you kindly forward this email to the appropriate person at [publisher/imprint]? Thank you!

Then credentials. Your credentials are likely different from mine. I emphasize my academic background and list book reviews that I’ve published before, trying to pick ones that are about sort of similar books to the one I’m requesting. In this example, I was requesting a novel, so I was sure to link to my reviews of fiction as well as the piece in the WSJ. Before I had any bylines in review publications, I had written pieces about books and film on Medium, so I linked to some of those. I’d recommend demonstrating that you write about books, since that is what you are proposing to do with the title you’re requesting. But keep it SHORT, like, 1-2 sentences.

I am a former English Professor (University of Tampa) and freelance book critic who has recently reviewed for the Wall Street Journal (SKIPPING SCHOOL by Dixie Dillon Lane), On the Seawall (CITY LIKE WATER by Dorothy Tse, trans. Natascha Bruce), World Literature Today (A NEW NEW ME by Helen Oyeyemi), and Full Stop (SUPERSAURIO by Meryem el Mehdati, trans. Julia Sanchez).

Ask for the book. If you only want a print copy, just request a review copy and include your mailing address. If you are open to digital review copies, you can say that, and they might send you a PDF or a link to NetGalley instead of or in addition to a print copy. (I don’t really know much about NetGalley other than that it’s a centralized website that publishers use to distribute ARCs. I have sometimes been sent to NetGalley to access a book but have never left a review there.)

I was hoping you could send me a review copy of [TITLE] by [author]. Print or digital works for me. If you’d prefer to send a print copy, you can direct it to the following address:

Nicole Schrag

Address Address

Address Address

And then I end with where I think I’m going to pitch the review, or (as it sometimes the case) where I’ve already pitched it.

I am planning to pitch the review to [publication] and have others in mind if they pass on it.

Many thanks,

Nicole Schrag

nicoleschrag.com

Step 4: Follow Up

It is nice to let publicists know if you end up placing a review of their book, and then to send them a copy of the review once it’s been published.

If you don’t end up placing a review of the book, I’d say don’t sweat it!

I hope that was helpful for someone out there. Please let me know if you have questions. If you happen to be writing your first email to request a review copy and are feeling nervous, I’d be happy to look at a draft! Just message me. If other reviewers out there have advice, please leave a comment, too!

The Work This Week

• My latest raft of pitches has resulted in another review for The Christian Century, so I am, for the moment, at my goal of having two pieces I’m actively working on. Yay!

• I received a glut of review copies over the past couple of weeks and have been reading a lot. I generally try not to write much about books that I am hoping to review, so this is kind of a colorless update, but since it’s taken up oodles of hours this week, I’m gonna mention it!

Other Updates

• I am a couple of weeks into having publicly launched my editing business, and thanks to the magic of networking, I’ve recently had some great conversations — with an editor who freelances on Reedsy, with a ghost writer, with a friend from college who is working on a book — and I am learning a lot and am feeling more immersed in the field. If you or someone you know could use help with writing, pitching, revising, or polishing a nonfiction book, please keep me in mind! My rates are negotiable (just ask for the excellent friends and family discount), and I would love to grow my portfolio.

• Because I’m interested in reviewing Fabrications, I listened to the sci-fi novel Void Star by the same author. Zachary Mason is a computer scientist as well as having received a rave review of his first book — which riffed on the Odyssey — from the legendary NYT book critic Michiko Kakutani. Mason seems, to put it mildly, really smart. I didn’t love Void Star and had this constant sense that I was missing something. There are three main POVs with pretty rapid shifts in perspective. I think it possibly would have been better to read in print, and definitely would have been better with a book club. Void Star was published in 2018, before the ascendence of LLMs, and is already centrally interested in the possibilities for artificial intelligence. Mason is trying to imagine what the perspective of an AI might be — like, how might it perceive (can we use such a word?) and process things like emotions, and how might it engage (interface?) with what humans experience as the material world? Fabrications explores a lot of those same questions, and I am hoping I get to write about them.

• In case you missed it (like I did), there’s a new Phoebe Bridgers record! It’s so spooky. I’ve only made it through the first few songs so far: I can’t listen to her music for long because I’m highly sensitive to angst, but I think her music is headed in an interestingly socially-attuned direction (that we saw in that amazing last track of Punisher) while still being so lyrically sharp. That woman can do IMAGERY. Sadly, unless you can get to Düsseldorf, Stockholm, or Copenhagen, all of the shows are sold out. s/o to the Monday afternoon DJ on my local community radio station, WMNF, for ensuring I only missed this cultural moment by a couple of weeks.

The novel WIP as of 8/27/26: 39,483

2026 Rejection Count: 14/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

My summer The Artist’s Way group held its last meeting this week. Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is a workbook that takes you through a twelve-week course of “creative recovery.” I’ve probably read it through at least ten times, including a handful of rounds with these summer groups I’ve been leading the past few years. But this was my first time going through the book as a self-employed freelancer.

For me, The Artist’s Way has always been less about being an artist and more about learning to approach all of life as a creative endeavor. It’s been a helpful tool for (re)cultivating my sense of vocation, especially as I’ve transitioned out of academia. There’s a lot going on in The Artist’s Way, but a lot of it is about making space to listen for what one’s creative call might be in a given place and time (this is part of what morning pages are for, if you’re familiar with those), and then equipping yourself with lots of ways to move — with little teeny-tiny baby steps — in the direction of that vision. It’s basically the same formula as any other good self-help book: identify your priorities, figure out outcomes related to those priorities, map out a plan for how to achieve the outcomes, and then take your first little action in that plan, then the next, then the next. Eventually, voila! Outcomes achieved.

But part of what Julia Cameron really gets right, I think, is that life almost never works that way. You very rarely just make a plan and work the plan and then get your intended outcomes and thus fulfill your priorities. Here’s the image from The Artist’s Way I’ve been thinking about a lot this summer:

We tend to believe we must go out and shake a few trees to make things happen. I would not deny that shaking a few trees is good for us. In fact, I believe it is necessary. I call it doing the footwork.* I want to say, however, that while the footwork is necessary, I have seldom seen it pay off in a linear fashion. It seems to work more like we shake the apple tree and the universe delivers oranges.

*Italics in original

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Over the past several years, I have done quite a bit of research about different ways to make a living (or, more precisely, money). I’ve watched loads of YouTube videos — about pitching author interview pieces to magazines and selling used stuffed animals on eBay (people actually make money doing this!) and any number of other things — and I’ve attended a free workshop about how to do the footwork to start an editorial business. I have followed quite a lot of the advice I’ve gotten this way, and some of it has proven to be really good.

But I’ve also done informational interviews with writers, editors, and some academics who’ve transitioned into corporate work. And I’ve heard the same story over and over again, especially from people who had pretty big career pivots: the person was just minding their own business shaking some apple trees when the universe delivered oranges. One woman’s daughter was working at Starbucks when a family friend walked in and asked what her mom was doing these days, and (long story short) she ended up being approached to start an organization’s new web publication. Another woman was in a PhD program when she started tutoring as a side gig, and the dad of a middle school student she was working with thought she seemed really competent and recruited her to work for his company.

And if I reflect on my own work trajectories, I see this pattern, too. I’ll be working on something when an opportunity appears that is maybe only obliquely related to the thing I was working on but that is bang in the center of what I am working toward in life. My recent-ish newsletter about networking sort of addresses that. There are any number of strokes of luck, or providence, there. (I will also say that I have shaken plenty of apple trees from which apples have fallen, too. Most of my reviewing work has come in the form of shaking apples out of apple trees [that is, pitching], although my first break that turned into a publication, in which I met a book reviews editor while leading a workshop on building scholarly community, was definitely more of an orange.)

But you can’t plan for a lucky break, or the universe or providence or “synchronicity,” as Cameron likes to call it. All you can do is try to be ready for it if and when it comes. And it seems that, based on the experience of mostly highly educated middle-class people who are my sample group, the break does come, though rarely on the expected timeline or in the expected form.

While I sort of believe that this shake-the-apple-tree-and-sooner-or-later-you-will-likely-get-an-orange principle is true, because it seems to bear out in the experiences of a lot of people I know, it feels inadequate to managing the economic uncertainties of freelancing. And while it might work for me, a person who is not experiencing immediate financial strain, to think about my work this way, I don’t feel at all comfortable suggesting that other people ought to. But then again, it’s a story that gives us a break from this other idea — that also seems inadequate — that we just have to be disciplined and grind and we’ll achieve some predetermined outcome.

I wonder if all of this is related to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s provocation in The Serviceberry that maybe we should stop thinking about society as a competition for scarce resources and start thinking about it as a place in which, if we share, we’ll all have enough. That abundance mindset is something that a lot of us, maybe all of us, have some power to effect, even if on a very small scale (which, as The Serviceberry emphasizes, is a scale that deeply matters). In any case, they are both stories, neither of which is necessarily a perfect reflection of reality, but it is interesting to think about which stories we use to frame our work, especially freelancing/contract work, and why.

So this is one of my ongoing wrestlings with The Artist’s Way, which is probably ultimately a wrestling with what I think about God. I would be curious to hear how you freelancers out there think about your work, if anyone cares to share.

The Work This Week

• I found the Winslow Homer image above thanks to a helpful note from that offers a mini-guide to finding art that’s in the public domain. She’s suggesting these resources as an alternative to all of the terrible AI art with which people adorn their Substack posts, websites, parish calendars (see her other notes — awful stuff), etc. I appreciate them as an alternative to my slapdash photography. I commend her sources to you.

• As I’ve gotten back into work rhythms, I’ve decided that I would like to shoot for having two review assignments I’m actively working on at a time. I currently only have one outstanding review and thus need another one. I’ve pitched three publications over the last week, and I have one more pitch in the works. (I want to read the book first, but before that, I want to finish this other book before I follow up on one of the aforementioned pitches.) Maybe I’ll end up with a windfall of assignments, in which case I’ll have to stop pitching, but I am trying to aim high and assume I’ll get some rejections.

• This is not directly related to book reviewing, but I have officially hung out my shingle as an academic writing and non-fiction book editor. I say “officially” because I sent out an announcement email and made a post on LinkedIn, and boy oh boy has LinkedIn been weird. I have had multiple strangers (not all of them bots) messaging me for advice for how to start an editorial freelancing business and other strangers encouraging me in my new endeavor. I don’t really get it. But I am excited, and if you have a nonfiction book project that you’d like some help with, you should check out my website and let me know if you think you might like to work together.

• Again, this is not really related to reviewing, but my work on the novel project has ground to a halt. With my shorter work days, I’m undecided about whether and how to prioritize that writing. Interestingly, a couple of my friends from the writing Discord have also had major slow-downs with their fiction writing this summer, and I feel really strongly that I want them to keep going with their novel projects, so if anything, it’ll probably be my investment in them that gets me back to work. And wouldn’t that be wonderful?

The novel WIP as of 8/20/26: 39,483

2026 Rejection Count: 14/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

We have three winners for August: Fabrications by Zachary Mason took fiction by one vote: the new Susanna Clarke story and Claudia Gray’s rendition of Jane Austen’s uncompleted manuscript, The Watsons, were a close tie for second. The nonfiction vote was split between Christian Environmental Stewardship: Rediscovering Place, Practice, and Virtue by Samuel Shephard and T. Adam Van Wart and They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful: A Palestinian Memoir by Elena Dudum.

Here was the full line-up for August, in case you missed it last week.

I’ve already requested a review copy of Fabrications, a novel that treats AIs as central characters, and am ITCHING to get my hands on it. I am going to pitch the review to a legacy publication but would really like to read it first. Sometimes I feel like I can pitch reviews based on the blurbs provided by a publisher, but sometimes, like with this one, I suspect a couple of the big newspapers / magazines would be into the book but am pretty sure they won’t respond to the pitch unless I have a really good take on it. And I don’t have a really good take because I really don’t know what it’s about, or even what it’s like, on some pretty basic levels. (What is the point of view, for instance?) So stay tuned, I guess.

I think Christian Century might be interested in either of the nonfiction titles, so I might pitch them as options to the editor there. I’ve not written for Sojourners before, but I might pitch them, too, since I think these titles might align with their interest in faith/religion and social justice.

Thanks so much to everyone who voted! You picked some good ones!

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The Work This Week Summer:

• I pitched four reviews and interviews this summer. I got ghosted for the author interview pieces, I think partly because the pitches were too close to the pub date, which is a real shame, because I’m pumped about the book the interview was supposed to feature: Spiritual Direction for Writers by Charlotte Donlon. Both of the review pitches seem like they’re going to be picked up, though. The first is a review of Liberal Arts by David McGlynn for the Common, which I’ve pretty much written and will be submitting a couple of weeks early. The Common is run out of Amherst and has a focus on books with a strong sense of place, and when I was reading about their mission, I thought McGlynn’s book would be a perfect fit. I’m really happy to be writing for them, and about a book that I loved so much. The second is another potential review for the Wall Street Journal. After the Skipping School review came out, the editor said to let him know if I had anything else I was interested in reviewing for them, so I did, and it sounds like they’re going to go for it. I’ll keep the title under wraps for now, partly because it feels a little tenuous, but it would be great to write for them again. And the book is a treat — yesterday it made me laugh so hard that I was leaking tears.

• I reached another new milestone this summer: targeted author phishing! Thanks to my book review in the Wall Street Journal, I am apparently an expert on education and was invited to participate as a featured author in the New Hampshire Book Festival. LOL. Gmail flagged this as the spam that it was (good job), but it made me feel so weary of AI slop.

• I have two reviews that will hopefully be out soonish: one in the Washington Independent Review of Books and another in Christian Century. I’ll share them whenever they’re published.

• I have a couple of pitches I want to send out in addition to the ones I mentioned at the top, but I am suffering from a combination of not having time this summer to follow up on pitching all my poll winners and having included books in the polls with release dates that aren’t far enough out. For instance, I sat on Sherry Turkle’s book too long, so now we’re less than a month from it’s release date. I may see if WIROB wants a review of it, but especially given its buzzy big-5 nature, most places that would want to cover it will already have coverage of it lined up.

Other Updates:

• I read some great stuff this summer! And some middling stuff, if I’m honest, but I more or less enjoyed it all. Since Yesteryear, which is, I think, the last book I wrote about having read, I’ve made it through:

  

  • The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer. My grandma in Northern North Dakota would get juneberry pies in the summer. They were delicious. It was fun to learn a bit more about that berry, which I have never heard anyone else talk about! And more broadly, I found the book spiritually inspiring as a meditation on gifts. I typically feel kind of mixed when academics intentionally write out of their field, and I felt that way here. I think it is primarily meant to be a provocation of sorts, a reframing of what might be possible, and it seems like it has inspired a whole lot of interesting thought already and will likely inspire practical experiments in gift economies, which is beautiful. The ideas here definitely lean toward localism and keeping things at a human scale. I think this would be cool to read with a neighborhood group that is committed to practicing generous ways of living together.

    

  • Mere by Danielle Giles. I picked this up at Foyle’s in London because it was on a sale display and about nuns. I love a convent novel. But this was a horror covent novel, and pretty gritty. It’s set in Norfolk in the year 990, at a convent built on cursed land in the fens, and it’s so swampy and cold and foggy and miserable. The food sounds awful (a lot of eels, until there aren’t even any more of those). Everyone is so hungry. It was really well written, and some of the convent politics were pretty good, but oof! I left it in the UK with some friends of a friend.

    

  • The Garden Club Murders by Jonathan Whitelaw. I picked this up at a bookstore in Grasmere. I chose it partly because I was planning to buy something from the local crime fiction section, but mostly because I dropped it while looking at the back cover and damaged the spine a bit. It’s the fourth in a cozy murder mystery series (The Bingo Hall Murders) set in the Lake District with a mother-in-law/son-in-law duo.

    

  • Crocodilopolis, a novel by John Manuel Arias. This was a poll winner from June, I think. It’s releasing this month so I’m out of time to pitch a review, but I had started it a month or so ago and was really appreciating it at the sentence level. The book features erasure poetry, tons of references to ancient Egypt (which I never quite figured out but was really intrigued by), and this very wry narrative style that goes down so easily. But this book is so dark! It’s so heavy! There is a lot of interpersonal violence (and yes! someone does get fed to American crocodiles!). I am glad that I read it and am anticipating that I’ll be thinking about it for a while. I am trying to think of other books that treat subject matter that is almost unreadably heavy except for this distant, sort of comical narrator — does Kurt Vonnegut do that? Who am I thinking of?

    

  • The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals by Dorothy Wordsworth. I always feel a little silly touting classic literature. “Hey, turns out this thing that loads of people have read and have said is really good is indeed all it’s cracked up to be!” But I really loved these journals. Dorothy, sister to William Wordsworth, lived with him for much of their adult lives, and for three-ish years, roughly coinciding when he was working on Lyrical Ballads, she kept journals that document their life together. It’s a beautiful picture of creative friendship. They go on long walks in the rain and then are laid up in bed with head colds. Dorothy makes pies, does laundry, and routinely hoofs it to Ambleside (three and a half miles away) to get the mail. And sometimes there isn’t any! She was a nature writer in her own right in addition to doing loads of editorial work for her brother. Such a full and intentionally simple life. I listened to these on audio, and the narrator was fantastic. I anticipate rereading them.

Thanks very much for reading, and thanks again for voting. I appreciate you all!

Welcome to For Love or Money’s monthly book poll! Below, I have brief write-ups of twelve books I’m considering pitching reviews of soon. If you’re new here, the poll serves three purposes:

• It helps me to narrow down what books I will actually pitch. Having a short list of titles helps me to decide which publications to target and keeps me accountable for actually pitching reviews.

• The mini-pitches that I write for this poll give me something to start with when I’m drafting formal pitch emails to newspapers and magazines.

• It lets me share about a bunch of exciting books with you! I hope that some of these will end up on your TBR lists.

Without further ado, here are some titles (six nonfiction, six fiction) I’m considering for review pitches in August. These books have release dates coming up between late September and early December. Here’s a link to the Google poll where you can vote for as many titles as you’d like. I’ll share it again at the end. Voting closes on Wednesday, August 12.

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Nonfiction

Letters to Our Sons, collected by Stephen Graham and Orly Klein, out from Union Square & Co (Hachette) on 10/20/26

• Stephen Graham starred in the Netflix show Adolescence, which I didn’t watch because I’m not watching much tv these days unless it’s with my four-year-old or my teen, and I didn’t feel up to getting into this with either of them, for (obviously) different reasons. Even so, this collection of letters from fathers (some celebrities, some not) to sons is interesting to me because I am parenting a teen boy, and I both have opinions about how it should be done and often feel completely out of my depth. I am curious how this book is framed (they talk about “vulnerability” in the pitch copy) and executed. If they managed to get a wide variety of voices in the letters, this could be great. Or it might be heavily edited/curated to be sanitized or message-y in one direction or another, which would be disappointing but also maybe interesting as a reflection of how influential people are thinking about young men.

They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful: A Palestinian Memoir by Elena Dudum, out from Atria/One Signal Publishers (S&S) on 10/27/26

• Elena Dudum grew up in San Diego in a Palestinian, Eastern Orthodox family, the granddaughter of refugees. Her father drilled her on their family’s and nation’s history and educated her about ongoing politics — all of which became terribly real when they traveled to their ancestral homeland in Palestine. The book follows her wrestlings with identity, family, faith, and history.

• I’ve read a couple of Palestinian-American memoirs in the last year or so (Daughters of Palestine by Leyla K King and The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza) and have found them to be really (differently) good in two ways: first, I’ve learned a lot about histories and cultures I knew very little about, and second, they’ve been formally super interesting. In both of those books, to be Palestinian is to be a political question, a political provocation. It seems like a distinctly challenging perspective to write personal narrative from (i.e. being a human who is immediately glossed in politically polarized ways — in some cases written off as not actually existing at all), and I’ve found that these books are sticking with me because of how creatively they’re drawing from a range of sources (family archives, especially) to engage with contested histories and identities. And I’m always interested in religion, and I haven’t read anything about Orthodox Christians in Palestine. (Daughters of Palestine is about Palestinian Anglicans, who held a complexly privileged social position in the early-to-mid-twentieth century that King addresses with a lot of nuance; I imagine Orthodox Christians had a very different set of experiences.)

Christian Environmental Stewardship: Rediscovering Place, Practice, and Virtue by Samuel Shephard and T. Adam Van Wart, out from Eerdmans on 11/5/26

• Coauthored by an ecologist and a theologian, Christian Environmental Stewardship promises a mix of cross-disciplinary academic and personal writing that I tend to find really satisfying. (If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a dozen times: I think Eerdmans, at least of late, has been doing a really good job with this kind of crossover book.) I am a little wary of virtue ethics because of how I’ve seen the framework used to generate boring analysis of any number of literary texts (you can do it with Marxism, and you can do it with Alasdair MacIntyre!). The inclusion of “virtue” in the subtitle suggests to me that we’ll see that framework here, but hopefully in some inventive ways. I care a lot about place and the environment, and I really like practice- / process-oriented frameworks, and I trust the editors at Eerdmans, so I’m down to try this one.

• After an inspiring recent visit to Dove Cottage (the home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth), paired with reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard, Austin and I are trying to (re)commit to spending time outside and engaging with this (MOSTLY VERY HOT, VERY HUMID) place where we live (Florida, if you’re new here). From the blurb from Christian Environmental Stewardship, I think that spending time outdoors is a big part of this book’s ask, and I’d like to think more about that.

Between the River and the Railroad Tracks: A Memoir by Nicole R. Fleetwood, out from Little, Brown and Co. (Hachette) on 11/17/26

• This memoir combines personal narrative with the intergenerational histories of Black families in Hamilton, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. It’s an examination of race and culture in the Midwest after the great migration, and the author is an NYU professor whose Marking Time — a 2020 book about art made by incarcerated people in the US — was really well received.

• We have family in Hamilton, and I think of it as an almost exclusively White place. When I saw this book that talked about the Second Ward of Hamilton as a Black neighborhood, I checked multiple times to make sure this was the same Hamilton, Ohio. Indeed, it is. I’d love to learn more about the history of this place where I’ve spent a lot of time!

The Blue Hours: My Summers and Winter in Antarctica by Stephanie Krzywonos, out from Washington Square Press on 12/1/26

• Stephanie Krzywonos blends memoir, nature writing, and cultural history in this book on Antarctica, where she took a job in the wake of the loss of a friend. It’s about going somewhere dark and cold and extreme to grieve, and seeing what that place has to offer.

• Is Antarctica not inherently interesting? The publisher’s pitch for The Blue Hours reminded me of Wintering by Katherine May, a book that I didn’t especially love as I was reading it but that I still think about a lot, not least because it introduced me to the cold plunge. (I don’t go for a cold plunge myself, but I know people who do, bless ‘em.)

To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time: A Memoir by Matthew Salesses, out from Little, Brown and Co. (Hachette) on 12/1/26

• Matthew Salesses is a Korean American adoptee who’s written a couple of pretty well-known books, including Craft in the Real World, about fiction-writing. To Grieve is about losing his wife to cancer at a relatively young age, a loss that upends his sense of identity in complex ways.

• I am personally invested in learning from cross-racial adoptees, and this story sounds really powerful and distinctive in how it addresses how relationships shape ethnic identity. I’m not sure why so many of these nonfiction picks for this month are about grief and loss and family — maybe fall is when books on those subjects tend to launch? — or maybe it’s just me.

Fiction

Safe as Houses by Christine Poulson, out from Comma Press on 9/24/26

• Safe as Houses is a collection of unsettling domestic tales from veteran short story writer Christine Poulson. The story that they talk about in the publisher’s blurb involves a woman who has died but continues to receive piles of Amazon deliveries. This image just seems so right: mundane, haunting, creepy. I am so interested in how stuff — especially the everyday material stuff of our lives — has a kind of influence on how we live and the choices we make. I loved Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness for its treatment of objects (teapots, snow globes, refidgerator magnets) and am always looking for more like that. I think this book will be a treat.

• Late September is a little tight for a reviewing window, thought I doubt that this book is going to get a ton of attention and thus might be of interest to publications that put out reviews of books by indie presses (and they often don’t mind so much if they come a bit after the publication date). I know Comma Press because they’ve published the Refugee Tales collections of short stories, which I could write a whole peer reviewed journal about (and nearly did). I think they’re doing some really good work over at the press and was glad to have come across a list of indie publishers that included them that prompted me to check them out — they have a bigger list than I realized!

12 Women + Under a Volcano by Svava Jakobsdóttir, translated by Esja Alyssa Matich, out from Open Letter Books on 10/6/26

• These two stories are by a celebrated Icelandic writer (one published in the 1960s, the other in 1990) known for blending myth and contemporary women’s stories in sort of surreal narratives. I think it sounds experimental and great.

• I have so far not garnered a lot of interest for the titles in translation from Icelandic ladies that I’ve included in these polls, so maybe I don’t know how to sell them. But they beckon me! So I will keep including them.

• I’m confused as to why the title on the cover spells out twelve, but everywhere else I’m seeing this book’s title written out (including the publisher’s website) uses the numeric 12. If you know why, I’d love an explanation!

Peck & Peck: A Novel by Bonnie Garmus, out from Scribner (Simon & Schuster) on 10/13/26

• From the woman who wrote Lessons in Chemistry, a novel about a young man in New York in the 80s who lucks into a job with a prestigious poetry magazine, which is wracked by conflict between the titular Pecks (twin brothers).

• I’m sold on so many aspects of this set-up: a slightly nostalgic literary workplace drama, starring a poor English major who learns (I’m inferring here) just how capricious and petty the world of publishing can be. But will poetry ultimately save them all? Will the perfect line break or image or sound bring these warring egomaniacs together before their own malice tanks the legendary publication they’ve built together?

• I’m also pretty sure that there’s a romance with a student loan agent who is hounding him for payments. Such a fun enemies-to-lovers set-up!

The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City by Susanna Clarke, out from Bloomsbury Publishing on 10/20/26

• Susanna Clarke is maybe most famous now for Piranesi, an eerie, beautiful little book that was the first thing she’d published since Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004), a wildly popular brick of a fantasy novel with excellent Victorian vibes. The Bishop of Durham is something between a short story and a novella set 700 years before Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, in the same universe.

• Clarke is an impeccable prose writer. She has long dealt with chronic fatigue (she speaks about it a bit here), and I feel so grateful for everything she puts out. And if this wins, I’ll likely have to do a reread of Strange and Norrell — poor me.

Jane Austen’s The Watsons, as continued by Claudia Gray, out from Vintage (PRH) on 11/17/26

• Claudia Gray is the author of a popular detective series (starting with The Murder of Mr. Wickham) in which the grandchildren of some of Jane Austen’s beloved characters investigate crimes. On the strength of this series, Gray is writing and publishing The Watsons, one of Austen's manuscripts that remained unfinished at the time of her death. The hundred-ish pages of this novel of manners that Austen left sets her young heroine up to choose (although agency is complicated, isn’t it?) between the rich bachelor of the local gentry and the parish vicar. (I think she’s inclined to go for the priest; I’m into this.)

• I have a friend who writes really good Jane Austen fan fiction novels, which I’ve shared with family, who love them, and I’ve recently grown more attuned to this world of Austen riffs and rewrites. My new friend and fellow book reviewer from Collegeville, , has spoken well of Gray’s work, and I trust her judgment. I think this take on The Watsons sounds fun and will probably be well executed.

Fabrications by Zachary Mason, out from Grove Press on 12/1/26

• Fabrications imagines artificial intelligences as the central characters of a speculative fiction story, and they sound wonderfully weird: they can do a lot, and they are programmed to do good for people, but they are unbendingly “literal” and immortal and utterly other from the humans they work for. I think this sounds SO GOOD. There could be another version of this book where AIs are so determined (corrupted?) by corporate interests that they become like something out of a version of Demolition Man where everything is a Taco Bell, or an ad for Taco Bell, or they’re tools in the franchise war that leads to everything becoming a Taco Bell or Taco Bell product. This book seems to be interested instead in questions of what AI can be, philosophically speaking and (of course!) what humans are.

• The publisher’s list of comparable authors for this title is so enticing to me: Kazuo Ishiguro, Karen Russell, David Mitchell — I love the precise level of weirdness in each of these authors’ speculative fiction and am very thoroughly sold on the possibilities for Fabrications (also, great title!).

Again: here’s a link to the Google poll where you can vote for as many titles as you want. Voting closes on Wednesday, August 12. Thanks so much for weighing in!

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and you’ll support my book habit. Cheers!

The Big Deal Review (BDR) I’ve been talking about for MONTHS has finally come out! I reviewed Dixie Dillon Lane’s Skipping School for the Wall Street Journal. (If you’re at all interested in homeschooling just as a thing, not necessarily in doing it yourself, both the review and the book are worth checking out.) The author is involved in several publications on and off Substack, including Hearth & Field and Front Porch Republic. You can find links to a bunch of her stuff here.

I have promised that For Love or Money would present granular content about book reviewing, and so I thought I’d write a newsletter outlining about how this one came to be. Buckle up for a play-by-play! Or come back next week for the August book poll; that’s fine, too.

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The Pitch

About a year ago, I first pitched the WSJ books editor, David Propson, with a review of a self-help business book called Smart Careers. He replied pretty quickly asking me to pitch it again in a month, as the release date was too far out at that point for him to know if they’d want coverage. I followed up in a month, didn’t hear anything back, followed up again, didn’t hear anything back, and marked it as a rejection-by-ghosting.

But it was really nice to actually hear back from an editor of a legacy publication after that initial email! And I knew, I think from the NBCC website, that the Journal mostly covers nonfiction, so when I had a stack of nonfiction poll winners in the spring, I decided to pitch him again, this time with short pitches for three titles that I thought might be interesting to WSJ readers: Skipping School, a philosophical-ish book on the future of higher ed, and a collection of essays by David Bentley Hart. (Of these, Skipping School was actually the only one that I’d included in a For Love or Money poll, I think, and if I remember rightly, every single person who voted marked it as one of the titles they were interested in: so Skipping School was a unanimous For Love or Money pick.)

I sent the pitch on March 23. For those curious about what it looked like, I led with this paragraph:

I am a former English professor (University of Tampa) and freelance writer whose book criticism has appeared in Full Stop, Kirkus, Plough Quarterly, On the Seawall, and World Literature Today, among others. I am a reading group leader with the Catherine Project and am on the steering committee of the Christian Poetics Initiative out of the Rivendell Institute at Yale University.

I think I mentioned CPI because of the David Bentley Hart book? Or maybe because I could mention Yale? I’m not quite sure why I mentioned the Catherine Project.

I didn’t hear back, so I sent a follow-up on April 6. On April 9, I got a message expressing interest in circling back regarding “the homeschooling book,” with a note that he’d need to follow up in a couple weeks, after a busy period.

It was at this point that I fully read the book. I think I had read the introduction and skimmed for the big picture when I got the review copy. I had thought it seemed promising, and I was glad when a slow, careful read showed it to be really good.

And on April 21, I got the assignment with a May 25 deadline, with the suggestion I look at weekday print reviews. (Please note: the decision to have the piece in the print paper was made before they had the review in hand. The night the review went live online, Austin mentioned that the WSJ covers homeschooling a lot. So I think my sense that readers of the Journal would be interested in this book was right, or at least aligned with what the editors think their readers are interested in.) I was surprised and very, very happy.

The Draft

Then I spent weeks laboring over this review.

First, the research: I went to my local public library and read two weeks worth of WSJ books coverage in the print newspapers they had in the racks. They typically only run one review a day, so it didn’t take long. The Journal might be the most conservative publication I’ve reviewed for, so I was curious what their books coverage looked like. The reviews were stylistically, thematically, and ideologically varied. There were a couple with more conservative takes than you’d be likely see in the Times, and nothing that seemed very politically correct (but also nothing that seemed politically incorrect), and there were several reviews that seemed like the kind of thing that I could write. I felt reassured.

Then: the writing.

This is by far the most challenging review I’ve ever written. Skipping School is a crossover book: it’s by an academic (an educational historian) and for academics, but with a broader audience in mind, too.

Good academic books like this one are dense. They contain loads of evidence, and they’re always a challenge to review. I reviewed another historical monograph (Sweet Home Feliciana by Rashuana Johnson) earlier this year, and it was also difficult, because there is just so much content! You have this problem of wanting to give an overview that’s accurate and comprehensive, but you also need to give readers a sense of the syntactical texture and details, which can be wide-ranging.

So length is maybe always a challenge when writing about academic books. But with Skipping School, it was extra hard, for a number of reasons:

• There are a lot of obstacles to researching homeschooling in the United States, and Lane addresses them repeatedly in her book. I found this endlessly interesting. There is a quantitative data problem, where we just don’t know how many people homeschool in this country, for a lot of complex reasons that Lane goes into. And many academic studies of homeschooling have been conducted by researchers who tend to be pretty critical of homeschooling, which can limit the kinds of qualitative data they get access to (and are interested in). Also, it was illegal, or at best a legal gray area, in many states for a long time, so homeschoolers weren’t eager to publicize just what exactly they were doing in ways that would make it into the historical record. All of these limitations are important context for her research and her findings, and in the first versions of the review, I had a really hard time using fewer than 300 of words (out of the 900 I’d been allotted) on the significance of her research problem in terms of such limitations.

• Lane uses a fabulous mix of methods, including legal history, extensive survey- and interview-based social research, and cultural analysis. The result is that she draws on a wide variety of evidence, and it was difficult to fit examples of all the kinds of work that she does into a 900-word review.

• Lane’s analysis is very nuanced — nuance is really the hallmark of the project — and it is difficult to reflect nuance in an economical word count! There is no easy beginning-middle-end story about homeschooling in the United States, and that makes for a really wonderful book, and for a challenging review prompt.

I wrote several too-long drafts of the review, which I sent to Austin as well as my friend Jack for help with line edits. I had to cut a lot of details that I really loved. Jack valiantly tried to reduce instances of the word “homeschool” and its variants (homeschooler, homeschooling), which nevertheless appear thirty-six times in the published version.

But I submitted a draft three days early, and late on the 25th, I got confirmation that the editor received it.

. . .

And then I spent several weeks waiting.

. . .

In mid-June, I was about to head into two weeks of travel, and the book had already been published, so I sent an email to the editor asking if I should be on the lookout for edits. He replied a few days later, suggesting I might hear something one of the following two Saturdays (one of which was the fourth of July — those poor WSJ editors, working on the fourth of July!).

So I was reassured that it hadn’t been killed.

. . .

A month after the sort of vague email, I still hadn’t heard anything. My friend Kristin texted me to ask about it. I determined to follow up the next day.

But then the next day, I got an email with line edits, from another editor!

Revising

The editing process was involved, and fast.

The initial line edits asked for some pretty significant clarification and elaborations over the weekend. (Received on a Friday, due the next Monday at noon). I asked about word count, and the editor said not to worry too much about going over, because he would have the best sense of what cuts will fit the space.

So I took him at his word and radically revised a section that had clearly led to him misreading of the legal history (and the rewrite was fun — I featured this really interesting 2008 case that I had cut from a previous iteration).

I also added a handful of definitions that they asked for. For instance: in one sentence where I mention a part of the book describing how some attitudes toward Catholic parochial schools changed after Vatican II, I was asked to “please add a (brief) explanation” of Vatican II. (I did my best, guys.)

I ended up sending a version that was something like 250 words over the word count, and he came back on the next business day with a trimmed down version to approve. I had my parents read it, who caught an error in the sentence about Vatican II, which had been significantly revised to make a stronger statement than I’d originally intended. I agonized for half an hour about whether to ask them to radically rewrite it, and opted instead to ask for a milder verb (“led to” instead of “caused”), since I already felt a little high maintenance.

The next day, that editor got back to me again with a few minor suggested changes from the fact checker. I countered one recommendation to hedge and signed off on two others (which had to do with dates — one was a typo, and one was to clarify whether something was a survey date vs a survey publication date).

Publication

The day after fact checking, it went up on the website! And on July 23, it appeared in print. SO FUN. I had to Google where to buy a print newspaper. My local Publix had one copy left (or maybe they only stock one a day? for whenever a local freelancer has a piece in it and wants a copy?), and I tore through the pages right there by the lottery kiosk to find my review. I did and I grinned and I cried and collected myself enough to pick up our Pub Subs.

Getting Paid

As a freelancer, I sometimes have to ask to get paid, and I sometimes don’t know what exactly the rate is until after the piece is out and I ask about compensation. (I really should probably ask about this if I have questions when I get an assignment.) The National Book Critics Circle has a very helpful freelancer spreadsheet for members, which outlines what different publications are looking for and what their rates are, so I was anticipating $400-$1000 for this piece. The most I’ve been paid for a piece before this was $300, so that range was quite exciting to me.

I didn’t inquire about compensation until after the piece was published (so, about a week ago). The editor told me it would probably be $700-800, and that I’d be hearing from yet another person from the Journal about details later.

Thanks for all who’ve beared with lots of vague references to the Big Deal Review the past few months! I have had very little time to pitch lately but am curious to see whether the WSJ byline helps to nudge open some doors.

Next week, look out for the August book poll, and keep an eye out later in August for an assemblage of other reading and writing updates.

I don’t think I’ve ever given anyone my business card, at least not since I was in elementary school and had a personalized stationary business called Personally Yours. As an adult, though, I’ve never given anyone my business card, despite my two institutions printing hundreds of them for me.

I’m not sure where I got this idea that networking involved — nay, required! — giving someone your business card, and also wearing a blazer, but I did think that, and so have long thought I was terrible at networking, and that I was severely disadvantaged by living in Texas and then in Florida, where it’s too hot to wear blazers 90% of the time.

But now that I’m living this more entrepreneurial life than I ever have before (exception: elementary school), I increasingly think I’m dispositionally inclined to network. When I took the StrengthsFinder(TM) inventory as an undergraduate, two of my top five results were “Input” (which means I like gathering stuff) and “Connectedness” (which means I tend to see things in relationship with other things, as a part of a whole, and look for connections). I really enjoy gathering new friends and learning about how they see themselves fitting (or not) into their social and work environments. (I think I love campus novels and convent/monastery novels as much as I do because they’re often about this individual-to-community dynamic.)

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I am still figuring out whether and how this term, “networking,” is helpful. What follows is a long story that I think exemplifies what networking looks like for me, though a lot of the story didn’t feel much like networking at the time. I’ll try for some analysis at the end.

A couple of years ago, when I was thinking about quitting my professor job, I had a phone call with one of my college besties. An editor herself, she said she thought I’d be good at developmental editing.

“But you have to work in NYC for a pittance for eight years to earn the right to do that!” I said.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said, “you could just do it.”

“Hmm,” I said.

A few months later, I remembered that I thought my friend Matt had once said that his aunt had worked for InterVarsity Press, or something. I had just read the chapter from Designing Your Life about informational interviews and asked him for an introduction.

Matt’s aunt and I had a lovely long call about an enormous range of things. We talked about editing (she was the founding editor at the Well), and we also discovered that we had both adopted older boys from foster care. She additionally recommended that I pitch the Well with a story about my weariness of seeing students lie a lot.

That conversation turned out to be crucial to my transition out of academia in two ways. First, I ended up pitching a piece to the Well that turned into a little series that was really rewarding to write. Their audience is predominantly Christian, and the publication is fairly pastoral, and until I wrote those pieces about feeling like I was losing my sense of vocation, I hadn’t written anything public-facing that engaged with faith since college. So that was a big shift, and a fairly uncomfortable one, for reasons I’ve touched on in at least one previous newsletter. But it has turned out since then that some of my first reviews landed in Christian publications. (I think I’ve written before that I was leading a session on building scholarly communities at a conference when I complained about having a hard time getting review pitches accepted; one of the participants was the books editor for Plough, who encouraged me to pitch her. That was my first paid review outside of Kirkus or.)

Second, several months after our original call, my friend’s aunt introduced me to another writer friend of hers named Sarah who was looking for a roommate for the Festival of Faith and Writing. As we were getting to know each other a bit, Sarah told me about the Collegeville Institute summer writing workshops. There was only one workshop that worked with my schedule that was still taking applications, so I applied, using the first piece from the Well series as my writing sample.

I ended up getting in. My Collegeville workshop was led by Katelyn Beaty, the primary acquisitions editor for Brazos, an imprint at Baker that publishes a wide range of Christian nonfiction titles, and the content was focused on nonfiction writing both online and in book form, but for “public” audiences (that is, not academics or specialists). (It was additionally pitched as being focused on Substack, and getting into the workshop was the impetus for starting this newsletter.)

In a one-on-one meeting at Collegeville, I mentioned to Katelyn my interest in developmental editing and my sense that it’s really difficult to break in. She mildly disagreed and suggested I could freelance. A couple of days later, after she had us do small group book pitch workshops and listened to me giving some other people feedback on their projects — one of my favorite things in the world to do — she encouraged me more emphatically to pursue freelancing as a developmental editor. Another workshop participant (with whom I had a long [networking?] conversation on the trail pictured above) introduced me over email to someone she knows who freelances as an academic editor, and that person sent me the link to sign up for a free three-session workshop on starting an academic editing or coaching business.

I haven’t had that many work hours lately, but I did listen to the three workshop sessions and used the (super practical!) guidance there to update my website with editing packages and to fill out my LinkedIn profile with a story about how I love helping people figure out how to structure and pitch their nonfiction writing projects.

And then when I talked about launching this new project during my book club meeting, a friend from grad school who is now a dissertation coach mentioned that she’s coaching a student who would probably love to turn his dissertation into a trade book. (Academics who want to write books for broader audiences is one of the niches I think I’d like to work in.) She will give him my info if he is interested in that, when he’s in a place to consider it.

I did not wear a blazer for a single one of these conversations, and I love thinking about them because of how “networking,” if that’s what this is, is such a long game filled with surprising new levels and quests, and I had little idea what would come of any of them. Networking has mostly meant showing up and being honest about what I’d like to do. “I’d love to do developmental editing, but I’m not sure whether I have adequate experience.” “I’m trying to place book reviews, but I can’t figure out how to get anything to stick.” And then it’s also meant asking people specific questions about their experience and sometimes acting on their advice. Often as a result of a conversation, I’ve been introduced to new people, which has been a joy, because these people have all been very interesting to talk to and especially because some of them have become my friends. I love having more friends, and I also gain a lot of satisfaction from a growing sense of connectedness within the wide world of publishing.

This newsletter ended up not being about the particulars of Collegeville as much as I thought it would be, but I want to recognize how these types of experiences — writing workshops and conferences — are so valuable, but not in ways that can be easily quantified. There’s the cathartic value of singing “Jesus Freak” at a spontaneous karaoke night with a half dozen people I’d known for three days, and the value of reading a new book from a new friend that stretched my understanding of what a memoir can do. And then there are the connections that lead to more connections that might eventually lead to clients.

I am really grateful to feel like I have a renewed sense of vocation. I’ve been able to do things that I love and am good at, or at least that I enjoy getting better at. Plus, I have great communities for different kinds of work: reading, reviewing, editing, writing both fiction and nonfiction.

And yet, in an entrepreneurial context, that sense of vocation introduces the “for love or money” problem, which feels thorny once people are involved. There remains that potentially weird dynamic underneath networking, the ulterior motive, which is money, or maybe fame. But as a gajillion people on the internet will tell you, long gone are the days of making money from writing. Writers are also teaching and editing, working on forestry teams, waiting tables — doing just about any profession you can imagine.

Exchanging money for services is such a workaday reality, but it is new territory for me. eBay has taught me some things that transfer to starting an editing business, but networking to try to get clients is not one of them. I am super grateful to the people in my Collegeville workshop who shared helpful details of their experiences of running one-woman businesses in which they wear many hats. So many hats. I’m looking to keep learning from them, and from others, and to that end, I’m revising my waffling about the Festival of Faith and Writing from a couple of months ago: I will keep going to conferences and workshops as I’m able.

Schedules being tight as they are, I’m not going to include an update round-up this week or next. But I intend to return to more book review-centric content next week! Thank you, as always, for reading: and a big thank you to all of my subscribers, plus a special extra thank you to my paid subscribers. I really appreciate your support!

I wrote a few weeks ago about how we were going to be foregoing regular childcare for about two months this summer. It turns out that I get a lot less writing done when I don’t have childcare! This should surprise no one, but I find it mildly to moderately distressing, depending on the day. I am realizing that I harbored a secret wish that, unable to write in my favorite morning hours, I would become a night writer, but again, surprising no one, I have not transformed into a person who writes late into the night. Instead, I am ready to fall asleep at 8:00 PM.

This is sort of a non sequitur, but I have been thinking a lot about this part of John Williams’s novel Stoner, when the main character, an English professor, has a preschool-aged daughter. His wife is dealing with some pretty serious mental illness, and he is in many ways the primary caregiver. He sets up a little desk in his office, and while he’s working at his big desk, the daughter sits and quietly draws, maybe looks at some books — does all the things he is doing, just the miniature, pre-literate version of them. And so they “work” together in his office for hours at a time. I don’t actually want my daughter to do that, but it is a compelling fantasy, and perhaps the least realistic part of the book?

Anyway, the next few newsletters will probably be relatively brief. But I did want to write a couple of things over the upcoming weeks about the workshop I participated in at the Collegeville Institute a few weeks ago.

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Since officially quitting my academic job last December, I’ve had a couple of moments when I’ve felt intense appreciation for the value of the position I left. One of those moments happened while I was in a session at Collegeville, listening to one of the academics in the workshop suggest that maybe we shouldn’t put any of our writing on the Internet at all. While in my academic job, it felt entirely possible to have a career in writing without being very concerned about audience or about making money from writing (except indirectly, insofar as publications meant higher merit raises; I did love getting merit raises). I think that it’s very important for academic jobs to exist where writing is supported somewhat outside of the market, so that there remain people who can think, “What if we just didn’t feed the content machine? What if we didn’t put our work on the Internet for it to be immediately scraped by AI? What might that world look like?” I think that academia is vital partly because it makes some types of refusal of the dominant forces of our age possible. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, one of our texts for the workshop (which is somehow even better/more important now than when it was first published in 2019), is a product of the types of refusal — and types of engagement with the world — made possible by the economic security of an academic job. Everyone should read it! (But: you might become a birdwatcher. You’ve been warned.)

So, at Collegeville, I really felt my appreciation of the work that the three academics in the workshop were doing, and how they were thinking beyond academic forms and audiences in ways that were not overdetermined by gig economy / content farm dynamics.

I also really felt my appreciation for the hustlers. In addition to the three academics, we had one person with a full-time job as an editor (Jen Sawyer at Busted Halo, who also has a great newsletter called Grace(ish)). The other five of us are making money from freelance writing, coaching, spiritual direction, Substack newsletters, organizing retreats, and selling stuff on eBay (me). One of us lives in an intentional community and has rent subsidized because she helps run a guest house.

This work of making money writing (mostly on the Internet) is hard and maybe always ethically compromised. We had some intense conversations over the course of the workshop: one person (an academic) expressed that they think LLMs are inherently evil on some level (some of the hustlers agreed), and another person (a hustler) insisted that they couldn’t run their business without Claude writing their marketing copy and functioning as their executive assistant. Another of the academics sent around the article “Substack Has a Nazi Problem” and questioned whether we could in good conscience, by asking for subscriptions, ask people to indirectly support the work (or at least the infrastructure that supports the work) of people spreading evil ideas.

These are tensions that I have to live with now, that I didn’t really have to think about even three years ago. At the moment, I don’t use LLMs for anything.* I do think they’re at least kind of evil, based as they are on widespread intellectual property theft and having as they do all kinds of negative effects on people’s relationships and thinking. I do use Substack, because trying to build a newsletter on an independent website (and one hosted by a company that probably also supports white supremacist content, if in more opaque ways that no one has felt compelled to write about in the Times lately) feels beyond me right now. (“But have you tried Claude?” I hear some of you asking me. “Claude could do it!”)

I don’t wish to be back in academia. But I am grateful for the space that it offers people — offered me — to think and write without the pressure to squeeze as much money as possible out of every idea, good, bad, or meh. That kind of space is really, really important right now.

*Sometime around the beginning of the year, I tried to use Gemini to analyze my reselling data in Google sheets, which it was HORRIBLE at, so I ended up doing it manually, as always. I don’t understand why/how it was so bad at following relatively straightforward prompts. I had to correct it over and over again — “I told you to look at A and B things in X range, but it seems like you only looked at some of the B things in Y range,” I said. [fifteen minutes later] “I’m sorry, my bad,” it computed back. “Here is what you originally asked for.” I don’t understand.

Updates / The Work This Week

• The hype got me, and I read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, which has been at or near the top of the fiction bestseller lists this summer. I thought I was going to hate it, but I actually found this narrator to be surprisingly believable, with a particular kind of faith that feels very American in its ambition and very pathological. I kind of pitied this person who doesn’t feel the things she is supposed to as a Christian woman and is so bad at performing those emotions AND YET is so ambitious that she figures out a way to do it for social media. She felt creepily plausible to me for the present-day part of the book. The one thing I didn’t buy is the swearing in her internal monologue. Her internal self-censorship should be stronger, I think. Also — the twist. I don’t think I believe the twist. But I’m sure the movie / miniseries / whatever Anne Hathaway has cooking will be well produced and will do really well.

• The Atlantic finally got back to me with a no on the Cloudthief review, which is sad but not a surprise given the book came out on Tuesday. I had unfortunate timing and kept catching the editor on vacation as we were emailing back and forth for weeks. I don’t think I’m going to write about the novel now, despite having worked a lot on my take, due to the aforementioned time constraints. I think I’d rather sleep and read some of my new review copies. I’m sorry you all aren’t going to get the evolutionary-drive-for-kids-as-the-surprising-response-to-climate-nihilism-in-this-very-smart-noir-novel piece I’d cooked up, but I hope there will be other good pieces coming. But this rejection means:

2026 Rejection Count: 13/50 (cue “Movin’ Right Along”)

• I’m glad that I have committed to this public performance of posting my word count for the novel, which made me feel somewhat obligated to write at least one hundred words today so that I’d have at least some movement on the progress bar since last time. I took my protagonist on a Shakespeare-themed tour of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, so now:

The novel WIP as of 7/16/26: 39,363

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

We have our first ever two-way tie for fiction!

Dams by Irene Solà, trans. Mara Faye Lethem, will be out from Graywolf on 11/3/26. Part of my pitch for this book: I love novels with a great sense of place, and this book seems to press deeply into characterizing a village in rural Spain. I especially love that the protagonist here is developing her sense of place through writing — sounds excellent.

Every Story Is a Love Story: A Novel by Imbolo Mbue, will be out from Random House on 10/6/2026. My pitch for this one: This book is about a man who is trying to figure out how to live with the grief having lost his wife, who was expecting twins, in a car accident. Then the woman responsible for these deaths reaches out to express her regret. Everyone in his community and family says to ignore this, but he decides to meet with her anyway. The novel explores possibilities for healing and forgiveness. One of the first things that drew me to this title was Imbolo Mbue, who is a Cameroonian author. His debut novel Behold the Dreamers was really well received. I am also pretty much always here for stories about healing that aren’t pat and overdetermined, and I think this might fit the bill.

And Artificial Intimacy left all the other nonfiction titles in the dust:

Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines by Sherry Turkle, will be out from Little, Brown and Company on 9/29/26. My pitch for this: Sherry Turkle is a sociologist at MIT who writes books for popular audience about human connection, loneliness, and technology. You might know her for Alone Together or Reclaiming Conversation. Artificial Intimacy addresses the phenomenon of people’s attachments to LLMs, which I find terrifying for all kinds of reasons, most especially because I have children who, I am worried, may grow up in a generation whose use of AI ChatBots will deeply impoverish their understanding of the human responsibilities we have to each other, and how that responsibility is integral to building the communities that help us to support each other and to feel less alone. Anyway: this book feels like potentially important if difficult reading.

The nonfiction runners up were My Disability is Divine: A Joyful Witness That Defies Ableist Nonsense by Amy Kenny and An American Girl: How a Billion-Dollar Doll and Its Unlikely Founder Changed Girlhood Forever by Amanda FitzSimons. I do pay close attention to the second- and third-place finishers, because I will sometimes pitch editors with a few titles at once and need a deeper pool, especially for nonfiction.

Thanks so much to everyone who voted! I appreciate you!

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The Work This Week (and the Week Before)

• My review of Checkmate by Ben Mezrich (a March poll winner) came out in the Washington Independent Review of Books in late June. TLDR: I’d maybe recommend the book if you’re really into professional chess drama. If not, I think you can probably skip it.

• I am still waiting on the Big Deal Review to be published. The editor has given me every indication that it will, any week now. I will keep writing about waiting for publication in these updates, because it is such a significant part of freelancing! I feel the waiting especially when I’m pitching new pieces, because I would LOVE to be able to include a clip from this publication.

• My review of Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right by sociologist Katie Gaddini is with Christian Century (not sure when it will be published), and the book is out now! If you’re interested in religion and American politics, I think you might learn a lot from Gaddini’s research. I certainly did.

• The day this newsletter goes out, my review of Jan Carson’s Few and Far Between is due to Washington Independent Review of Books. And I am grateful to have just received another assignment this week: a review for The Common that’s due in early September.

• I have one rejection-by-ghosting to add to the tally this week. I plan to recycle that pitch when I get a minute. And I’m in a protracted will they / won’t they situation with the Atlantic. (Oh, would that they will!)

Other things I’ve read lately:

• The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza. The Collegeville Institute workshop I attended a couple of weeks ago included a white elephant-style book exchange. I got The Hollow Half, my new friend Cassidy Klein’s contribution. Cassidy is a journalist based in Chicago, and earlier this year, she wrote a beautiful piece about a trip to the West Bank for her Substack newsletter. When I wasn’t doing Newsboys karaoke or watching dystopian movies, I spent my evenings at Collegeville reading The Hollow Half. Aziza is a Palestinian American journalist, and the book opens with her recovery in an eating disorder clinic and goes on to trace her healing, growth, and discoveries about herself and her family. The book is heavily footnoted with references to history, cultural theory, news, literary texts, and more, and Aziza engages extensively with Arabic and the limits of translation. And yet it’s first and foremost a very personal story of one young woman surviving in a world that, in many cases, would very much like to erase her. It’s a deeply impressive project, the result of a ton of self work and intellectual work. The Hollow Half contains just about every trigger you could think of, but (/and) I’d still encourage folks to consider reading it. Stories like Aziza’s are so important for asserting the humanity of the people involved in a conflict that can often feel impossibly abstract, at least from where I’m sitting.

• The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. Lerner is big in the lit fic world and is probably best known as a writer of autofiction (meaning he writes novels and stories that fictionalize stuff from his own life). He had a new novel out this past spring (Transcription). I initially put The Topeka School on my reading list because I thought that someone had talked about this as a campus novel, and . . . it’s not, really. What it is is one of the best (and only?) fictional explorations of youth and masculinity that I’ve read recently. As a parent of a teen boy, it made me feel powerless and hopeful in turns. And it was so good at a formal level. There is a Ben Lerner figure (called Adam) who shapes one narrative POV, but then there are other sections narrated from the perspective of his parents (who, in the novel, are both psychoanalysts at a place called the Foundation) and kids from his high school. I don’t think I’d recommend it unless you’re interested in psychoanalysis, high school debate, stories about growing up in the 1980s and ‘90s, and/or the possibilities for autofictional form. But if you are into one or more of those things, you might love it.

The novel WIP as of 7/9/26: 39,244

2026 Rejection Count: 12/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

Welcome to For Love or Money’s monthly book poll! Below, I have brief write-ups of twelve books I’m considering pitching reviews of soon. If you’re new here, the poll serves three purposes:

• It helps me to narrow down what books I will actually pitch. Having a short list of titles helps me to decide which publications to target and keeps me accountable for actually pitching reviews.

• The mini-pitches that I write for this poll give me something to start with when I’m drafting formal pitch emails to newspapers and magazines.

• It lets me share about a bunch of exciting books with you! I hope that some of these will end up on your TBR lists.

Without further ado, here are some titles (six nonfiction, six fiction) I’m considering for review pitches in July. These books have release dates coming up in September-November. Here’s a link to the Google poll where you can vote for as many titles as you’d like. I’ll share it again at the end. Voting closes on Wednesday, July 8.

Nonfiction

A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World by Robin Wigglesworth, out from Portfolio (PRH) on 9/22/26

• Do you know anything about the history of bonds? I don’t, but as soon as I saw this book, I realized that maybe I should learn? This book offers 416 pages (!) about bonds, and though I don’t know much about Financial Times journalist Robin Wigglesworth, he seems like a fine person to coax us through some boring economic stuff. The publisher’s copy and blurbs promise some juicy case studies spanning the hundreds of years that people have been using bonds to finance projects.

My Disability is Divine: A Joyful Witness That Defies Ableist Nonsense by Amy Kenny, out from Brazos Press on 9/26/26

• I remember a couple of times as an undergrad at Wheaton hearing people talk about a theology of disability that countered dominant (ableist) ways of thinking. It was intriguing, but they were just whispers here and there in a culture that often excluded differently abled people, and I didn’t make much of an effort to learn more. I’d love to dive into some more sustained theological thinking about bodies and ability.

• Amy Kenny founded and is now directing the Disability Cultural Center at Georgetown University. I think she has a PhD in literature; her first book was on Shakespeare. She also wrote My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church.

Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines by Sherry Turkle, out from Little, Brown and Company on 9/29/26

• Sherry Turkle is a sociologist at MIT who writes books for popular audience about human connection, loneliness, and technology. You might know her for Alone Together or Reclaiming Conversation. Artificial Intimacy addresses the phenomenon of people’s attachments to LLMs, which I find terrifying for all kinds of reasons, most especially because I have children who, I am worried, may grow up in a generation whose use of AI ChatBots will deeply impoverish their understanding of the human responsibilities we have to each other, and how that responsibility is integral to building the communities that help us to support each other and to feel less alone. Anyway: this book feels like potentially important if difficult reading.

An American Girl: How a Billion-Dollar Doll and Its Unlikely Founder Changed Girlhood Forever by Amanda FitzSimons, out from Atria (S&S) on 10/13/26

• I was so excited when I saw this title! American Girl was a major cultural touchstone for me as a kid. I received my Molly doll for Christmas when I was five or six and spent the next several years combing through the catalogs and made wishlists of outfits and furniture, which I would save up for. My best friend had the Kirsten doll and her beautiful hope chest. For part of elementary school, my favorite book was American Girl’s nonfiction title about making money (which they’ve reissued as A Smart Girl’s Guide: Money). I learned about child labor from the Samantha books and about America’s history of slavery from the Addy books. I sold all of my Barbies on eBay around when the Barbie movie was coming out, but Molly and all of her accessories are biding their time on the top shelf of my daughter’s closet.

• At least in the religious communities in which I grew up, the American Girl dolls and books were a major site of crossover with mainstream / secular culture. I know basically nothing about who started it and would love to learn more from this book.

River of Words: Joni Mitchell at the BBC: A life in interviews by Joni Mitchell and Tom Hagler, out from Welbeck on 10/20/26

• If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, it’s probably likely that you’ve seen me reference the Zadie Smith New Yorker essay “Some Notes on Attunement,” which is about (among other things) how Smith went from being a person who didn’t understand why Joni Mitchell was such a big deal to being someone who can’t listen to Blue without weeping. She offers this amazing portrait of Mitchell as a figure of contradictions herself, and I think River of Words foregrounds her complexity as a public figure. I’m intrigued.

Murmurs from the Hills: Rwandan Tales by Scholastique Mukasonga, trans. by Mark Polizzotti, out from Archipeligo Books on 11/10/2026

• I’m not actually sure if this title fits better in nonfiction or fiction: it’s a “genre-bending” blend of memoir, reflections on Mukasonga’s decades of previous work, myth, and short story. Scholastique Mukasonga worked for UNICEF early in her career before becoming an award-winning novelist and memoirist. She was born in Rwanda in the 1950s and has spent much of her adult life in France. She lost many family members during the genocide, and much of her writing since has reflected on that tragedy. This book, the publisher’s copy suggests, relies on ancient myth to imagine possibilities for a future Rwanda.

• This has been on my list for months — I think it sounds amazing. I haven’t read Mukasonga’s work and would love to.

Fiction

Sisters Take All: A Novel by Amelia Diane Coombs, out from Thomas & Mercer on 9/8/26

• This (murder?) mystery novel is about three sisters who meet up in Venice Beach for moral support when one of them, an influencer, is having a documentary film made about her life. The documentarian sounds like kind of a stalker (who may uncover some family secrets the sisters would rather stay hidden), and I’m 99% sure someone is going to end up dead.

• This novel gives BIG Ingrid Goes West vibes, which I just watched for the first time while I was at this workshop on public-facing Internet writing at the Collegeville Institute. In Ingrid Goes West, Aubrey Plaza plays a very ill young woman whose mom just passed away and who uses her inheritance to go to the LA to stalk and try to befriend an influencer she’s obsessed with.

The Radiance: A Novel by Ayad Akhtar, out from S&S Summit Books on 9/29/26

• The Radiance’s inciting incident is a hit-and-run. The victim, a writer who seems to work at a university, gets enmeshed with a colleague. It all sounds very vague and mysterious, which makes this a very difficult pitch. But the blurbs promise culture war dynamics and some explorations of Christianity and Islam, so I think this is probably squarely in my alley.

Every Story Is a Love Story: A Novel by Imbolo Mbue, out from Random House on 10/6/2026

• This book is about a man who is trying to figure out how to live with the grief having lost his wife, who was expecting twins, in a car accident. Then the woman responsible for these deaths reaches out to express her regret. Everyone in his community and family says to ignore this, but he decides to meet with her anyway. The novel explores possibilities for healing and forgiveness.

• One of the first things that drew me to this title was Imbolo Mbue, who is a Cameroonian author. His debut novel Behold the Dreamers was really well received. I am also pretty much always here for stories about healing that aren’t pat and overdetermined, and I think this might fit the bill.

Miss Wolcott’s Ghost: A Novel by Louise Penny, out from Minotaur Books on 10/20/26

• This is Louise Penny’s twenty-first Armand Gamache novel. I have read the first thirteen and mostly really enjoy this series of cozy murder mysteries set in the idyllic fictional village of Three Pines in Quebec, which can only be found by those who have been there before — and which has an astoundingly high violent crime rate.

• Here’s part of the publisher’s pitch for this book: “Gamache and his team are faced with tracking down not just the legend of Lost Nation, but a lost ship, lost documents belong to an eccentric Victorian botanist, and a mysterious plant not seen in a century, that might save, or take, countless lives.” Sounds a little silly, very messy (it seems that Clara Morrow, a recurring character, will be implicated in a crime), and sure to be charming.

• I’ve never reviewed a book in a long series like this, and I think it sounds like a fun challenge. If Miss Wolcott’s Ghost wins the poll, I guess I’ll have to indulge in months of catching up on whose been murdered in the meantime by reading books 14-20 — a real hardship.

Theodoros by Mircea Cărtărescu, trans. by Sean Cotter, out from Deep Vellum on 10/26/26 Fiction, second person, epic, Romania

• Theodoros is an epic novel narrated in the second person by archangels who tell the story of a man, born a servant, who wrests his way to power. It’s over six hundred pages (!!) and is populated by what sounds like a carnivalesque mash-up of historical and literary characters (King Solomon and Queen Victoria are both name-dropped in the publisher’s blurb).

• Mircea Cărtărescu is a prominent Romanian writer who has been publishing at least since the early 1990s, and this sounds like such a LITERARY project. I am sure there is tons of political subtext, much of which might go over my head, but I would nonetheless love to dig into it.

Dams by Irene Solà, trans. Mara Faye Lethem, out from Graywolf on 11/3/26 Fiction, writing, community, identity

• I wouldn’t describe Graywolf’s list as heartwarming, but this novel sounds like it might be. It’s a story told in two layers: the first is a narrative of a young woman who returns to her community after studying in London, and the second is the stories that she’s writing about her community — about the young man who steals her gold earrings, about the catfish who swallows the earrings, about more young men who catch the catfish trying to retrieve the earrings, etc. It sounds pretty quiet, but pretty much everything I’ve read from Graywolf recently delivers some kind of gut-punch or gasp-inducing turn or builds a strong sense of dread or anticipation, and I’d anticipate that there is something rich about the atmosphere developed in this book.

• I love novels with a great sense of place, and this book seems to press deeply into characterizing a village in rural Spain. I especially love that the protagonist here is developing her sense of place through writing — sounds excellent.

Again: here’s a link to the Google poll where you can vote for as many titles as you want. Voting closes on Wednesday, July 8.

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Since I was a kid, nothing has made me think about my mortality more than all of the books I will never have time to read. At the moment when I was old enough to do the math about how many books I would feasibly be able to read in my lifetime and realized what a tiny fraction that was of the books I wanted to read, I felt an immediate rush of panic that I did my best to push back down. I couldn’t accept that limitation and just had to pretend it wasn’t there. Even if I had all of eternity to read all the books that make it through the purgatorial fire (which I pray will burn up all the AI slop along with the wood, hay, straw), people very possibly would keep writing more. I’d never get to the end of them.

I recently got an unsolicited review copy in the mail of the book John Berger: From Life by Tom Overton. I don’t get a whole lot of books I don’t ask for, though that may change if and as I keep writing book reviews. I’m sure I received this one because I’d requested a copy of one of John Berger’s novels that was being reissued this summer from the same publisher (Verso). Standing in the kitchen while Austin made dinner and my daughter was preoccupied (probably with opening our other mail), I read the first couple of pages of Overton’s book, which were beautiful. I’m guessing it’s a good book, well worth reading. It made me really sad, because I think I will die before I would make time to read the rest of it, and because I may or may not ever read any of John Berger’s work again, which means I may never really spend time again with his particular, fruitful approach to visual culture.

The flip side, of course, is that my life is enriched by many other books. If I do reach a point in life where I’m receiving a lot more review copies, I’ll probably get more calloused about passing on them. But for now, Tom Overton’s book about John Berger nudges me to remember my death. I am trying to be grateful for that.

The Work This Week

• I’m largely in a holding pattern with reviews, waiting for publications to come out (my piece on Checkmate will be coming on Monday!), working on a couple of assignments due in the first half of July, and hoping to hear back on a couple of pitches. After July 10, my editorial calendar is currently wide open.

• I heard from my friend Sarah, who let me know that we had book reviews that appeared next to each other in Plough. I hadn’t seen the print issue, and this made me so happy. Sarah and I were English majors at Wheaton together, and it’s been such a delight to see how our paths keep crossing at odd moments. She reviewed Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch, which sounds like some wonderful historical fiction. I can’t decide if I’m going wait for the sequel to be published before I read it. Unresolved series hold such potential for heartbreak.

• I am writing these updates on the way to the Collegeville Institute, where I’ll be participating in a workshop, led by Katelyn Beaty, with other nonfiction writers over a long weekend. I love this kind of thing, getting together with other nerds to talk about reading and writing, and I’m expecting to make at least nine new friends. It will also be a return to St John’s campus, where I had a really wonderful final conference with my Lilly Graduate Fellows cohort approximately ten years ago. It such a gift to have this kind of space – and I’m so thankful to one of my newer writing friends for encouraging me to apply.

• This isn’t related to reviewing, exactly, but I recently had a four-hour flight and decided to try to turn it into a mini writing retreat. I alternated between reading a few pages (or more, if so moved) of a novel and writing 100 words (or more, if so moved) in my own novel project. I was also tending to my youngest, so there were expected interruptions. The idea was 100% inspired by Charlotte Donlon’s Spiritual Direction for Writers. I think she has an entire book about retreats that I’d like to read, and Spiritual Direction for Writers had loads of ideas for scheduling mini retreats a few hours long that work with whatever constraints (time, space) you might have. On that flight, I ended up writing over 1400 words and spent time thinking about the bigger picture fiction project. And I read a lot, too. A smashing success.

A long note about a thing I read:

• The Last Year of the War by Shirley Nelson. Guys. I can’t believe I’d never heard of Shirley Nelson or this book before a month ago when some saintly person here on Substack mentioned it. It was published in 1978 (Harper & Row) and is about a girl attending a fictionalized version of Moody Bible Institute (Calvary Bible Institute in the novel) in the academic year of 1944-45. I think I may have mentioned McKenzie Watson-Fore’s piece about coverage of the buzzy tradwife novel Yesteryear. She makes the point that a lot of writers (and publishers) today have a very difficult time taking religious belief seriously, and because most Christian publishers have a very particular range of what they’re willing to take on, you just don’t get much literature (especially not fiction) that treats religious faith/doubt or Christian institutions with nuance. The Last Year of the War does, and it gets deep into how the protagonist, Jo, wrestles with challenging theological questions; into her prayer life (and the prayer lives of her floor mates – moving, awful, hilarious in turns); and into the ways the legalism (and hypocrisy) of her institutional culture shapes her daily life. One of the major plot lines involves a young man who aggressively stalks the protagonist. The administrators at the school respond to this in horrifying ways, going so far as to suggest that Jo’s resistance to his attentions and repulsion are a sign of her resisting God. (The only reason she is talking with the administrators is that he trespasses into what is supposed to be a women-only space, and Jo is held responsible for his behavior.) No one helps her set or enforce any boundaries with this kid. It is extremely toxic (criminal, maybe?) and also so believable. But despite the profound desolation she experiences, and the failures of so many of the people around her, Nelson gives Jo moments of love and connection: with a compassionate professor, with a friend from back home, and even, sometimes, with God. I don’t think it’s a perfect novel, but I absolutely loved it, and I thought it did a remarkable job of exploring doubt and faith, and especially how so many students at institutions like this are burdened with impossible levels of anxiety. I had several moments of recognition from my own experience at a Christian liberal arts college – stumbling on a couple making out in the piano room, hearing someone shout “Man on the floor!” when a plumber or AC guy had to come onto our girls’ hall outside of the designated hours when we were allowed male visitors, seeing references to martyred missionary alumni everywhere in day-to-day campus life, singing hymns and CCM hits morning noon and night. I was surprised by how much cultural similarity I saw between this 1940s Bible school and my twenty-first century undergraduate experience. I read somewhere that, on the strength of this novel, Nelson got a fellowship at Yaddo. (!!!) It’s hard to imagine a major press publishing a book like this now (surely it would be considered too niche) or today’s literary establishment recognizing writing like this with one of the most prestigious residencies out there. In any case, she wrote two other novels over the course of her career that I’m also planning to read. I was sad to learn that she died in 2022. I would have loved to talk to her.

The novel WIP as of 6/18/26: 36,472

2026 Rejection Count: 11/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

This week marks the end of full-time childcare for our youngest, a newly minted four-year-old. I was reflecting on how grateful I’ve been for all the time I’ve had in this first year of freelancing. I’ve been able to read a lot, to write a lot, and to spend a lot of time talking to other people about reading and writing. I feel like I have recovered a strong a sense of my vocation. I am still using a lot of my administrative and teaching skills in facilitating various groups, places where I’ve found far more generative communities than I experienced in my college classrooms. I am not making very much money — like, not even 20% of my salary as a professor, and with having to pay for health insurance on the marketplace, it’s meant significant lifestyle changes for us. At this point, I’d say the autonomy I/we have in the day-to-day has been worth the sacrifice.

But losing full-time childcare is one of the biggest lifestyle changes we’ll have made. My kids will go back to school in mid-August, but as I look ahead to the next seven-ish weeks, all kinds of worries are cropping up about who I will be when I am not reading and writing as much. My Artist’s Way group is currently in a chapter that addresses how crabby and stunted we can get when we don’t have adequate solitude. (Incidentally, Robert Foster’s Freedom of Simplicity, which I convinced my house church to read together this summer, makes a sort of parallel point about the importance of solitude to spiritual equanimity.) I don’t want to be crabby! And based on past experience, I will get very crabby if I’m not careful about asking for help in preserving space for quiet and aloneness. Beyond that, I am worried, too, with a school day that is going to end several hours earlier than daycare, what will have to fall by the wayside longer term.

But as these fears have bubbled up, so have memories of conversations I had with a friend last summer and fall as I was preparing to resign from my professor job and was dealing with spurts of existential angst. I said then that, rather than letting myself be consumed with trying to explain what the heck I was doing (both to myself and to other people, who were often pretty confused about why anyone would choose to quit being a professor), I was trying to focus on doing the verbs I had quit for: running, reading, writing, reselling, and . . . relating? (I never came up with a better verb for the social parts of my life/work; it’s fine.) “Do the verb” was my mantra for a while.

I know that for the next few weeks, and for the following season of sending our youngest to an elementary school (sob), doing the verbs will look different. We’ll be on the proverbial road a lot, and when we’re not, we’ll have our daughter home with us, first for whole days, then just for long afternoons. But at the risk of being unbearably corny, I am going to try to just keep doing some of the verbs, with modifications. I’m planning, for example, not to make many new eBay listings (so, less reselling). But I am planning to add a new verb, drawing, even though it doesn’t fit with my alliterative scheme. My daughter is very verbal and interested in letters and reading (wonder why), and I want us both to spend some time working on our visual art. And I will run less and walk more because it’s hot, y’all.

I am also going to try not to fall into the virtue trap (another Julia Cameron-ism) of taking things on that feel noble (like ALL THE CHILDCARE) when Austin has clearly asked multiple times when he should plan to block off his schedule so that I have time to work. I just need to take him up on that.

I also need to acknowledge that he will be doing most of the childcare, with the help of some family, for the better part of a week while I’m at a monastery in Minnesota for a writing workshop at the Collegeville Institute. A friend is also going to help us out with our youngest for several hours so Austin can have sessions while I’m gone. So, really, it’s only six weeks of less writing: and look at all of this time that’s there, if I’m just willing to see it, and to ask.

N.B. Robert Graves was a mere 34 years old when he wrote Goodbye to All That!

The Work This Week

I emailed my friend Tony, a great book critic, about the etiquette of talking about forthcoming reviews, or reviews-in-process, and he reassured me that it’s okay to name specifics books and publications, especially if I’m comfortable writing about pieces that get killed. So strap in for some details.

Reviews-in-process:

• My review of Trash! by Simon Pare-Poupart is finally live on Plough’s website! That book was a hoot, if a little crass. I recommend it.

• I finished a draft of my review of Katie Gaddini’s Esther’s Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right for Christian Century. It’s a fascinating project that sort of (though not entirely) tries to be neutral and to report on conservative women on their own terms while also having a clearly progressive perspective. Despite growing up in conservative spaces and always being interested in politics, I personally recognized very little of what I saw in this book, probably because the last ten years, I just haven’t been in these politicized conservative Christian spheres she’s written about. Things have changed a lot. But one part of the book that really captured me was about Sarah Palin. For a lot of people, Sarah Palin was and is a joke, period. When I first saw this iconic Tina Fey and Amy Poehler SNL sketch many years after it first aired, it sort of sunk in just how much of a joke she was. (I simultaneously thought the bit was really funny and wanted to shrivel up and die of shame.) But when I was eighteen and headed to vote in my first-ever election, Palin was Girl Power. I simultaneously believed that it was my job in romantic relationships to wait (very demure) to be pursued by a man AND I slapped a kid during calculus class at my private Christian school for saying something misogynistic. (I’m 99% sure my teacher saw the latter and pretended she hadn’t.) As Gaddini argues, Sarah Palin made space for a new kind of feminism in the Republican Party, a feminism that might have its contradictions, but a kind of feminism none the less. I felt this. My parents, who to my knowledge have never ever put a bumper sticker on a car, let me put a groovy pink flower emblazoned with the phrase PALIN POWER on the rear window of the Land Cruiser. So I am grateful to Gaddini for capturing that moment as something more than a joke, and in fact as a really important shift in how young Christian conservative women started imagining their own political futures. Those couple of paragraphs, which did not mock Palin at all and instead captured how some people took her very seriously, probably did more than anything else to persuade me of the merits of Gaddini’s project. While there is a place for skewering politicians, it’s not a great way to try to understand your political opponents who have attachments to those figures. Given our current climate, I think Gaddini does a pretty amazing job of setting her own stuff aside to really try to understand the women of the Christian right.

• Last week I talked about how an editor at the Atlantic had replied to my pitch for a review of Cloudthief (poll winner for May) asking for a stronger take. I sent it and then heard back again saying that they liked the new angle, but that I needed to write a shorter version of it for them to share with their wider editorial team. I sent it off and now, again, I wait!

• I am hoping to do a print interview with Charlotte Donlon focused on her forthcoming book, Spiritual Direction for Writers. I’ve been in touch both with Charlotte and with her publicist, who suggested a couple of places she thought might be good to pitch, one of which I never would have thought of on my own, and which seems like a fantastic fit. I think trying to get that interview placed will be my last new reviewing project before our family time ramps up.

Other things:

• Reading deprivation week in my Artist’s Way course ended on Tuesday, and I’ve started reading a couple of new books, including Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth, which I’m reading partly to get a sense of his work beyond Cloudthief. It’s about the history of how a shared understanding of climate change across a broad swath of US (and international) scientific and political groups in the late 1970s/early ‘80s gave way to . . . what we have now. I’ll plan to say more about it once I’ve finished it, but it’s wonderfully written.

• Our birthday present to our daughter was a video game: Princess Peach Showtime (Nintendo Switch). It’s been really fun learning how to play together.

• My friend Matt translated (ish) a short poem by Rilke, which begins: “Put out my eyes; I see you all the same.” Matt is a great apophatic writer, I think, and this poem is such a brilliant expression of that. I don’t think of Rilke as writing in that vein, and this piece gave me something new from each of them.

• Happy Juneteenth! I’ll be spending some time today revisiting Frederick Douglass’s speech from 1952, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

The novel WIP as of 6/18/26: 34,801

2026 Rejection Count: 11/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

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Fiction

Crocodilopolis: A Novel by John Manuel Arias won the fiction category by one vote! Here was part of my write-up for it:

• I love this title. Crocodilopolis is about an ex-politician named Seth Oreamundo who is stuck in DC, banished from his home Costa Rica thanks to a conniving brother who (I gather) somehow threw Seth under the bus. (They descend from a wealthy and corrupt political family, so at least one of them had it coming?) Seth is determined to murder his brother by feeding him to crocodiles in a river near their childhood home, a coffee plantation.

Rachel Cusk’s novel Life of M was a close second, and it’s really short. I’ll probably request review copies of both of them.

Nonfiction

We had a three-way tie between two books by academics and a political memoir.

The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value by Darren Hudson Hick, philosopher

Listening by Miriam Rasch, philosopher who also does media studies

Hot Seat — Hot City: The Austin Mayor’s Story by Steve Adler, former mayor of Austin

I will request review copies of them all and will do my best to include all of them in my pitches. I don’t think any of them were especially long, which means maybe I’ll get to read two or even all three!

Updates

Reviews-in-process:

• I think I have three reviews that are sitting with editors and awaiting publication this summer. I’m so looking forward to sharing those with you when they’re out!

• Per my last update, I pitched Cloudthief again, to a publication that felt ambitious. They were interested in the book (!) but wanted me to send them a stronger take on it. So I sent one, but the editor has been on vacation, and I am on pins and needles to see if they want it. I have spent so much time researching and writing about this book now, I probably need to just start drafting a piece on it, but…

• I’m really slowing writing a review (due in a few weeks) of a book about women involved in the Christian right in the US. I am finding it extremely difficult, I think mostly because it’s making me think a lot about my own identity and about how I’m writing the protagonist of my novel(s). And, as with other books by academics, it’s a wonderfully complex project that demands nuanced attention! My goal at this point is to not completely cramp up, so I’m basically shooting for fifty words a day on that. Ugh.

• I have one more full week of childcare this summer, and I’m not sure what writing is going to look like between then and when school starts back up in August. I will probably shoot for one more pitch.

Other things I’ve been up to:

• I read a review copy of Liberal Arts by David McGlynn, which is coming out this fall. I didn’t put it in a poll because it had several things going for it that meant I’d read it regardless: 1) I learned about it from a friend I made through my other friend’s aunt Marcia; apparently David McGlynn goes to Marcia’s church. Any friend of Marcia’s, etc. etc. 2) It’s a campus novel (the TITLE). 3) McGlynn is a professor at Lawrence, a liberal arts college (no religious affiliation) where one of my good friends from high school attended (my very generous aunt who lived in Chicago took me up to visit once when I was a student at Wheaton, and we went to the Houdini museum and ate caramel apples and massive quantities of pasta. And my aunt and I sang along to Frank Sinatra the entire four hours home). And then this book turned out to be — in addition to the classic college ensemble story with a ton of characters — a recovery novel, which was so powerful and made me cry. And I realized that I want more recovery fiction. And to have a recovery novel plus a campus novel was oh so good. I am crying again just thinking about it. And it was impeccably edited. The publicity person who sent me the review copy said McGlynn is open to (maybe even interested in?) interviews, and I am wondering about that.

• I had bronchitis for the better part of two weeks, which meant I had to cancel a bunch of things (including our 11-year anniversary date). Austin and I took the opportunity to finally learn this massive board game called Vantage that he got for his birthday or Christmas a while back, which is sort of like a gargantuan choose-your-own adventure book with dice mechanics. It’s a little addictive but also frustrating, in the same way that choose-your-own adventure books are: you make decisions but have no idea what the outcome is going to be until you’re in it, and a lot of times you end up dying in frustrating ways. For example: maybe you attack a powerful sentient anticipating conflict, but their response is “wow, I respect that,” and they join your party. Or maybe you heal a monster that you think will join your party in gratitude, but instead it steals your stuff. And then you die of cold exposure because you can’t get out of frozen tundra land. Plus the players’ story-lines are pretty independent of each other, so it can also become an exercise in patience. It made me think about narrative in some different ways, though, so that was cool.

• My Artist’s Way group is on the media fast week, which means I am not letting myself read any new books (or news or Substack newsletters, no tv or radio) for seven days. Not even two days in I’m feeling a little twitchy and dopamine-deprived, but I’ve made a lot of progress on a sweater that I was knitting for Austin for Christmas, which stalled out when I realized on December 23 that it was going to be too small for him. It will now be a sweater for me. I managed to finish most of the books I’d started before the fast — except for Spiritual Direction for Writers, which is so good. It’s really a beautiful book, but it makes me want to stop and pray or write in a journal every few chapters, so I am slow to get through it. As with McGlynn’s book, it’s hard to read with my professional hat on, because I’m so personally hooked by it!

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The novel WIP as of 6/11/26: 34,392

2026 Rejection Count: 11/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

Welcome to the book poll, a monthly post where I share a long list of books I’m considering pitching reviews of soon! If you’re new here, the poll serves three purposes:

• It helps me to narrow down what books I will actually pitch. I am currently trying to place book reviews in “traditional,” (mostly) paying outlets, like newspapers and magazines. Having a short list of a couple of titles helps me to decide which of those publications to target and keeps me accountable for actually pitching reviews.

• The mini-pitches that I write for this poll give me something to start with when I’m drafting formal pitch emails.

• It lets me share about a bunch of exciting books! I hope that some of these will end up on your TBR lists.

Without further ado, here are some titles (six fiction, six nonfiction) I’m considering for review pitches in June. All of these titles have August or September release dates. There’s a link to the Google poll where you can vote here, and I’ll also share it at the end.

Fiction

The Crossing of the Boars: A Novel by Zhang Guixing, translated by Christopher Rea and Julie M. Wang. Out from Columbia University Press on 8/25/26.

• The Crossing of the Boars is an epic historical novel about the Japanese invasion of Borneo during World War II. I’ve read that Zhang is well known for featuring animals in his fiction to explore the meeting of social, political, and ecological issues, and here the invasive boars and invading army end up having some resonances — seems like a really tricky thing to do well!

• Zhang Guixing has won lots of awards and has been a major figure in Chinese literature for decades. This novel (originally published in 2018) is the third to be released in English translation by Columbia UP. Zhang grew up in North Borneo, Malaysia in the 1950s and 60s and moved to Taiwan in the 1970s, where he’s spent most if not all of his writing career, from what I understand.

• I have read a vanishingly small amount of East Asian or Southeast Asian literature in translation, and nothing by Zhang. This book (over five hundred pages) promises immersion in some really good, challenging prose.

Crocodilopolis: A Novel by John Manuel Arias. Out from Bloomsbury Publishing on 8/25/26.

• I love this title. Crocodilopolis is about an ex-politician named Seth Oreamundo who is stuck in DC, banished from his home Costa Rica thanks to a conniving brother who (I gather) somehow threw Seth under the bus. (They descend from a wealthy and corrupt political family, so at least one of them had it coming?) Seth is determined to murder his brother by feeding him to crocodiles in a river near their childhood home, a coffee plantation.

• I think I’m primed for a political sibling rivalry because my family has been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the character who absolutely makes the show is crown prince Zuko of the evil Fire Nation, a country that has invaded all the other kingdoms just because they can. Zuko’s relationship with his manipulative sister Azula (and other family members) gives some real grit and substance to a war story that would otherwise be a very different, less balanced show.

• Back to Crocodilopolis: sibling rivalry! Coming to terms with your family’s checkered past! A fantastic cover! What’s not to love?

Life of M: A Novel by Rachel Cusk. Out from FSG on 8/25/26.

• Life of M is about a writer who follows a movie star (I think with permission from the movie star?) in an attempt to understand how appearance, beauty, glamour, value are negotiated in the world, in media, and in their own minds.

• In the hands of most other writers, this subject matter probably wouldn’t interest me very much. But Rachel Cusk writes some weird books. I loved her memoir of pregnancy and early motherhood, A Life’s Work, which might be the driest book about motherhood out there. It’s so dry. I found it very funny. I don’t know that I’d say I love her fiction, but it’s like she pins her characters in place so they squirm before us and struggle to acknowledge the truth (that is, they lie, but they think they aren’t lying, or they are trying hard to believe the lie). I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but she writes amazing characters and her settings are perfection, so I trust her to write a really, really good book about Hollywood.

• I hope that the “M” of the title is more or less based on EM-ma Stone. Right?? We love Emma Stone!

Jacaranda: A Novel by Gaël Faye, translated by Sarah Ardizzone. Out from Hogarth on 8/25/26.

• Jacaranda is about a boy, Milan, growing up in France. He sees the genocide of his mother’s homeland of Rwanda at a remove, but then a cousin comes to live with them while getting treatment for an injury (implied to be the result of ethnic violence). They become close, the cousin moves away, then Milan goes to visit a few years later — and all the while he is trying to make sense of who he is and where he fits in this very complex world.

• Gaël Faye is a Paris-based francophone rapper who wrote a novel based on his teen years in Burundi called Small Country (2016, English translation published in 2019) that won a lot of awards. This is his second novel, and a lot of the questions that it’s dealing with in relation to cultural memory, ethnic identity, trauma, and family are inspired by his own experiences.

• I just think this project sounds really good. I’d love to read it.

Our Life in the Forest by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston. Out from Transit Books on 9/1/26.

• A speculative fiction novel about organ farming (or at least its victims) at the end of the world (or something like it — the publisher’s blurb uses words like “dystopian” and “apocalyptic”), narrated from the perspective of a “donor” who has lost an eye and a kidney and is living in a “forest encampment.” There are clones involved. Not to spoil anything for people who haven’t read Kazuo Ishiguro’s stuff, but he is unsurprisingly cited as a comp author.

• POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR Ishiguro’s NEVER LET ME GO IN THIS BULLET POINT; SKIP IF YOU WANT Part of what interests me about this book is how closely aspects of it resemble Never Let Me Go, but so much of what is striking about Ishiguro’s book is the gradual revelation of how the dystopia works, and what is dystopic about it. And Cathy’s narration of her and Tommy’s story becomes her own masterwork — and that is the devastating epiphany of that book. Here, we already know from the back of the book that the narrator is writing a story she’ll never have time to reread, that she (I think? or someone close to her) is a clone, that her organs are being harvested (for some other higher class of people). So this book is doing something really different from Ishiguro’s, but with a lot of the same material.

• French author Marie Darrieussecq has written something like twenty books, most of them novels. I’ve never read any of her work and would be happy to start here! She was apparently a psychoanalyst at some point, so I might have the chance to use some of my Theory background to write about this one.

Boudoir by Sigrún Pálsdóttir, translated by Lytton Smith. Out from Open Letter Books on 9/8/26.

• Boudoir sounds like a quiet Icelandic coming-of-age story about a rural girl who grows up to work for an airline or to become an astronaut, or maybe to work for astronauts? The publisher’s copy is tantalizingly vague. She ends up “in the skies.” . . . But I’m pretty much always interested in reading about woman at work. And the title seems so strange for the description of what the story is about, evoking intimacy and privacy. I’m intrigued.

• Sigrún Pálsdóttir is a philosopher who won a major EU prize for her 2021 novel called History. A Mess. Someone called that book great for fans of the “nouveau roman,” a genre that I wrote a paper about in graduate school (which was mostly about how I loathed Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet, though I couldn’t quite explain why), so if the dreaminess is like Last Year at Marienbad (a Robbe-Grillet film that I also really disliked), then I might not like it. But maybe now I could better explain why! So if Boudoir is also in that tradition, that might make for a good review.

Nonfiction

Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail by Earl Swift. Out from Mariner Books on 8/25/26

• Earl Swift through-hiked the AT in 1990, when he befriended and set up camp with a couple for a spell. Shortly after they parted ways, the couple was murdered. Swift returned to the trail in 2024, partly to see if he could hack it as a sixty-something-year-old, and also to give space to the tragedy.

• I love hiking memoirs, especially about the Appalachian Trail. Jennifer Pharr Davis’s The Pursuit of Endurance and Scott Jurek’s North were important reads for me when I was finishing my PhD and looking to whatever was next. I don’t think I’ve ever stepped foot on any part of the AT, but I love reading about its terrain and culture, and I find long projects like this very satisfying to read about. It kinda scratches the same itch as some writing process books. I expect Swift’s book will be satisfying, too, with the additional benefits of age and a compelling central question.

The White Ribbon Army Reconsidered: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union after 150 Years, edited by Adam Chamberlain, Janet Olson, and Alixandra B. Yanus. Out from the University Press of Kansas on 8/25/26.

• I don’t know much about the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, other than that they were a massively influential social, religious, and political force during the era of the social gospel and beyond. I’d love to learn more, especially as context for some of the other books about religious women and contemporary politics I’m reading right now. This edited collection would give me 336 pages on it!

Hot Seat — Hot City: The Austin Mayor’s Story by Steve Adler. Out from Greenleaf Book Group Press on 8/25/26.

• Steve Adler was mayor of Austin, Texas from 2015-2023. I lived in Austin from 2013-2020, and I taught a bunch of classes in which I encouraged students to do research projects on local urban planning issues, so Steve Adler was a major figure of my time there. Adler’s political role was somewhat unique, too; he was a major progressive figure in Texas news, representing a very blue city, the capital city, in a predominantly red state. He frequently locked horns (lol) with the governor and the mostly conservative state legislature. So for a mayor, he was a pretty high profile figure. I think he probably has some great stories in here (along with some expected self-justification). I am going to guess: one Willie Nelson and two Matthew McConaughey references.

• I miss ATX so much sometimes. . . but I think I could read this without going into a tailspin.

Concrete by Stephen Parnell. Out from Bloomsbury Academic on 9/3/26.

• A micro-history of concrete! Bloomsbury has this “Object Lessons” series in which an academic does an interesting, relatively brief deep dive into a ubiquitous cultural object (like concrete). “Concrete and culture,” you say, with skepticism. “Oh yes, oh yes!” I say. I don’t know what the cultural history of concrete is, but I am game to hear what one guy — British architect Stephen Parnell, longtime editor of the Journal of Architecture — thinks it is.

The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value by Darren Hudson Hick. Out from Bloomsbury Academic on 9/17/26.

• It seems like everyone’s going analog these days, or at least is weary of streaming services and trying to re-amass the DVD collection they blithely donated to a thrift store ten years ago. Darren Hudson Hick, Philosopher at Furman University, is going to help us understand why. This is a short monograph, under 200 pages, that explores what our relationships to vinyl records and board games tells us about questions of value. Honestly, the description had me at “jigsaw puzzles.”

• The publisher's blurb for this book carries the faint aroma of WALTER BENJAMIN, my favorite member of the Frankfurt School, which was a bunch of cultural theorists working on questions about aesthetics, culture, media production and consumption, and class in the mid-twentieth century. Benjamin’s most famous essay is probably “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and this book had better have some things to say about social class and taste! If it doesn’t, I’ll have some things to say.

Listening by Miriam Rasch. Out from Columbia University Press on 9/29/26.

• In this slim book, interdisciplinary scholar Miriam Rasch examines listening from philosophical and personal perspectives. I love the idea of thinking about listening as a particular angle on the endless conversations I seem to encounter (online and in person) about attention. Rasch’s book contains four essays (chapters?) on technology, dialogue, witnessing, and listening to nonverbal sounds. These themes overlap with a workshop I’m participating in at the Collegeville Institute later this month, which is about challenges of writing short form nonfiction online, and again, I really love listening as a way of approaching conversations about the attention economy.

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Here’s the link to the poll to vote for your favorites. Can’t wait to see what you pick!

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books.

I have a bad cold this week and expect today’s newsletter to be a short one, and I won’t promise coherence.

My busiest reviewing month to date is effectively over.

I had four deadlines this month. I ended up submitting just three reviews that cover a total of four books (all non-fiction). I spent the better part of two weeks trying to write an academic review of a book by Makoto Fujimura that isn’t a scholarly monograph (a book I’ve been thinking about for at least six months!), only to conclude that I’m not sure it can be done. I’m waiting to hear back from the editor on what she’d like me to do, but that one may never go to print.

I also had my first assignment from a higher profile publication, and the book I was reviewing for them was challenging to cover within the word count because it was a rigorous academic project, and I ended up revising that review many more times than I typically do.

But I reviewed a high-drama narrative nonfiction book that read super quickly, and that review wrote itself. I sweated at a picnic table by my favorite coffee truck for a morning and plonked it all out on my keyboard, easy breezy.

The obvious answer to the question starting this post — how many books one person (me, in this case) might reasonably review in any given time — is that it depends, goshdarnit!

Thanks for reading. :)

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The Work This Week

Reviews-in-process:

• I am so relieved to have two reviews off my desk* since last week (*more accurately, table/couch).

• I finished reading Cloudthief, which had less ecoterrorism and more genetic disease than I was expecting. It’s got a very hardboiled/noir kind of narrator, which was such a funny mode for a climate journalist. The whole project is wry. The release date is very soon in book review time (less than two months away!), so I think I have time to pitch the review to one more place (one rejection already, yay) but will plan on writing about it for Medium if nothing else.

Other things I’m reading (and playing):

• I am nearly done with Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services—Notes of a Former Caseworker by Jessica Pryce. I wrote about this last week, but wanted to come back to it because the middle section, where Pryce writes about her experiences working as an investigator for CPS, is deeply vulnerable. It is very unusual to get this kind of account of CPS casework because of confidentiality concerns, and Pryce does such a good job of showing how parents often become the enemy in child welfare cases, and how the perpetrator / victim lens often does a disservice to both children and their families.

• The Crossroads Between Should and Must by Elle Luna. A friend lent this to me a while ago when I was deciding whether to leave my university job, and I’m just reading it now. Like any self-respecting self-help book, it’s a call to look hard at your priorities and your actual life and to try to better align those two things. It has a lot of illustrations by the author, who is a painter, and quotations from artists (many of which I recognized as quotes Julia Cameron includes in The Artist’s Way).

• Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. We have a Nintendo Switch, and I’ve been playing a lot this week when my brain can’t process words any more. I am currently trying to finish a series of quests where you follow leads for a newspaper, which require fighting a lot of monsters. So, just like real journalism. (I know this game is old news; I don’t care. I still haven’t beat it because it is HUGE, I have other responsibilities, and I somehow manage to do pretty much every task in the least efficient way possible. I could write a whole post about my pathetically slow march through TOTK.)

The novel WIP as of 5/28/26: 31,352

Rejection count for 2026: 11/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

A few months ago one of my fiction writing buddies over on the “Write & Revise” Discord asked me about how the relationship works between my fiction writing and book reviewing. I’ve been thinking about the question a lot. The answer wasn’t obvious to me then, and still isn’t.

But I can see that the content of the fiction I’m writing is increasingly shaping the books I’m seeking out to review. This week, I want to write about the origins of my fiction project and the interests that inform it as a way into describing some of my reviewing work.

To begin: I was first introduced to satirical campus novels by a therapist during my third year of graduate school.

I started therapy because I had pretty severe anxiety throughout my MA and PhD program, which manifested when attending classes, interacting with other grad students and faculty, and writing. Basically everything about graduate school made my heart race and my brain freeze up, especially for the first three or four years. (I couldn’t have articulated this at the time, but now it is so painfully obvious.) My husband was in training to become a mental health counselor and had colleagues who recommended this therapist who specialized in working with blocked musicians. (We were in Austin, Texas.) The therapist had an MFA in addition to her LPC certification and was well attuned to the institutional and social pressures of graduate school. At one point, when I was feeling very burdened by what felt like my daily missteps in relation to my classes, my committee, and administrative expectations, she suggested that I read Moo by Jane Smiley.

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Moo, whose title is taken from the affectionate nickname for Smiley’s fictional Midwestern U, hosts a riotous cast of faculty, students, administrators, animals, and various university-adjacent folk. It is absurd and so funny, structured by internecine conflict between the herbological biologists and the agriculture faculty and given additional interest by a series of creative writing assignments that a student takes in a horrifying direction, an economist who makes obscene amounts of money while barely doing his job, and the Provost’s administrative assistant who has been functionally running the university for decades.

I think my therapist hoped Moo’s satire might offer a model for finding some distance from the university context I was finding so suffocating. When I finally read it in my fourth or fifth year of graduate school, it mostly made me feel bitter. I had honed my hard edge of cynicism, which I think made me slightly more fashionable and also kind of helped me to internalize my failures less. (I’m not saying there aren’t better ways to cope — that’s just how I ended up doing it then.)

By the time I was a teaching professor in Florida, I was bringing this framework of the satirical campus novel to almost everything at work, so that when I went to a college meeting and one of the music faculty said something outrageous, I’d think, wow, what a great line of dialogue for a minor character. A couple of years into the job, I started carrying a notebook around for the express purpose of recording the shocking or sweet things students would do or say, and for mapping out the drama (oh, the drama) of department meetings.

This past fall, I was technically still an employee of my the university and starting a year of leave when I applied for a temp job that was going to start in early November. After I applied, I decided I would try to accumulate 50,000 words of academia stories by the start date. The job ended up not being a temp job and was not a fit, but I stuck with the deadline anyway. These stories were based on my experiences in graduate school and as a junior faculty member and are probably autofiction. Many of the stories did happen, or sort of happened, or were based on things I’d heard of happening or thought very well may have happened.

I officially resigned from my professor job in December. I was doing a lot of selling stuff on eBay and writing reviews and wanted to make sure I kept doing something with this pile of stories I’d written, so I started the Write & Revise Discord server. It’s a mercy I did, because within a week of starting those meet-ups, I realized that the stories I’d written were not a novel, that they needed a stronger protagonist, and that, for that protagonist to make any kind of sense, she had to go to college.

Remember that graduate school anxiety I talked about? There were a lot of reasons for it, but a really big one was that I came to the University of Texas as an evangelical Christian, and do you know what is possibly the least cool thing to be in a PhD program in English literature? An evangelical Christian. SO uncool. I had spent all of my education, pre-K through college, in evangelical Christian schools. I was really, really good at integrating faith and learning. I was also, to quote what one of my undergrad professors told me she wrote in my letters of recommendation (taking her word for this; I never read them), “magnanimous to a fault.” So the very last thing I wanted to do was look like a culture war-crusading jerk. Shortly after arriving at the University of Texas at Austin in 2013, I came to understand that most people outside of the evangelical church perceived the label as identifying a political category rather than a religious one. And remember, I’m magnanimous to a fault, so rather than trying to educate everyone about the Bebbington quadrilateral (IYKYK) and what evangelicalism really means, I thought it would be simpler to stick quietly to the creeds (Nicene or Apostles; I’m easy) and think about being some other kind of Christian — which kind, I wasn’t really sure, but probably not evangelical.

Before graduate school, I had no meaningful friendships with people who were not Christians. I was extremely bad at disagreeing with people I was close to on issues that felt spiritually significant (and everything felt spiritually significant). I read some Marx and de Beauvoir and Derrida in college and loved talking about that stuff “from a Christian perspective.” Some people at Wheaton had introduced me to progressive strains of Christianity that would be more legible to people I was taking graduate courses with. But, to make a long story short, graduate school signaled a new, very messy relationship between my university life as a young academic and my religious life as a church-going (mostly Anglican, if anyone cares) young adult.

In trying to manage this mess, I pretty effectively bracketed off many aspects of my undergraduate experience, which was saturated in evangelicalism. When I realized earlier this year that, to move forward with this fiction project, I needed to write about a version of my college-aged self, and her relationship with God and the Bible and politics and belief and gender, I physically recoiled from my computer. It felt too shameful to touch.

This was interesting.

I had already done all of this work to find people to write with for the Discord group, so I decided to just see if I could write through it anyway, to offer that girl some compassionate curiosity and see what would happen.

So now I am deep into thinking and reading again about faith, varieties of the American and global church and their relationships to politics, deconstruction (is that what it was?), in addition to my persistent questions that carried through graduate school about whatever the heck this political thing is that’s followed neoliberalism (my dissertation was about literary and cinematic fictions grappling with neoliberalism in London), localism and urban planning and city stuff, child welfare, higher education, creativity, running, and film. So I’m pitching reviews of books like Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Live Laugh Love because I know they will make me squirm (and because it won the poll, of course), and I think those are feelings that I need to be sitting with right now as I seek to learn what kind of writer and person I am in my post-academic life.

And I am also paying close attention to what kinds of campus fiction are coming out now. My friend Jack gave me Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, a book that I find to be basically perfect. It’s so funny and agonizing. I want to write the Wheaton version of that. (She went to Harvard, and I went to the Harvard of Christian schools, so . . . yeah.) And then I want to write two more novels, each set at (fictionalized versions of?) the other institutions where I spent the remaining years of my adult life: the University of Texas and the University of Tampa. (I am privately thinking of these books as the “the deconstruction trilogy”; less depressing ideas are welcome.) So that’s my ten-year plan. Mmmm, let’s make that a fifteen-year plan. Maybe twenty-five or thirty if I end up needing to go back to work full time.

If I am anticipating spending a decade or more of my life writing autofiction, it seems important to have something to balance that out and keep me looking outward in my writing life. Book reviewing seems like a good counterweight, and it’s something that I know how to do, more or less.

So that is one way that my fiction and criticism are meeting each other now. Thank you for the prompt, E.!

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The Work This Week

Current reviews-in-process:

• Y’all, I am still hanging onto my drafts of the three reviews due this month. After this newsletter goes out on Friday, I plan to submit the Big Deal review. I’m committed. I’m not sure if I’ll finish my review of Art Is this month, and the editor suggested I could potentially have the summer if I needed it. I’m finding it extremely challenging to write an academic book review of a book that doesn’t follow most conventions of an academic monograph.

• It looks like I’ll be writing a review for Christian Century this summer; yay!

Other things I’m reading:

• Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services—Notes of a Former Caseworker by Jessica Pryce. I am listening to this on audio. It’s brutal. I am a volunteer Guardian ad Litem, an ethically fraught role, and this book alternately makes me want to turn in my badge immediately and reassures me of the importance of doing advocacy for kids in foster care. Pryce worked as a CPI investigator in Florida and got permission from several of the families she worked with to share their stories in detail. I’m maybe 15-20% of the way in, and so far, I’ve been impressed by Pryce’s nuanced qualitative analysis of how the child welfare system often ends up hurting more than helping.

• Update on Morality Play: I mostly didn’t like the last act. :(

The novel WIP as of 5/21/26: 30,790

Rejection count for 2026: 10/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

I think I wrote fifteen hundred words on Wednesday about mentorship, partly fueled by a concern that the hollowing out of institutional spaces that allow for writing instruction (including in editor-writer relationships, not just in schools) is going to leave us with a generation trained in their craft by sloppy LLMs. What a world that would be. (Interestingly, religiously affiliated institutions that have access to Templeton or Lilly funding are doing some pretty amazing work in maintaining spaces for mentorship — I am thinking of the Christian Poetics Initiative out of the Rivendell Institute at Yale and the Collegeville Institute at St. Johns in MN. But they obviously aren’t accessible to everyone.)

That piece got very long and thorny and needs more revision than I have time for, so I decided instead to reflect on something for which I am very grateful: having people to work with.

When I quit my professor job, I wasn’t that worried about missing teaching, which had become a pretty demoralizing endeavor for me, but I was very sad about leaving my colleagues. I was at an institution that has hired a lot of teaching-line professors over the past decade and a bit, so there’s a large and vibrant community of early- and middle-career scholars and creative writers in our department. They’re so smart! And kind! I read a ton of their work, and they read a ton of mine. We talked about books and movies a lot. It was my favorite part of the job.

I am still friends with those people and still read some of their work, so things have actually not changed much, aside from the fact that I am not paid to do it, don’t have library access, and am not writing scholarship myself anymore. They still invited me to the weekly summer writing meet-ups. <3

But I miss out on the dozens of casual conversations I would regularly have with smart people. (I also no longer get to take notes on the unbelievable things people would say during meetings — pure gold for the campus novel trilogy I have percolating.) My workdays now are long and can be quite lonely.

So one of my New Year’s resolutions was “find coworkers,” or something like that.

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What follows is basically a catalog of people I am grateful to be working with and the places where I’ve found them. I’m not sure if this will be very interesting to anyone, but I would love to hear what other people’s writing communities look like, because other people are an integral part of my writing process, and working with others is one part of the writing process I wish people would talk about more. (I do also love reading about how people get themselves to sit themselves in front of the blank page and start writing something, but I have read that a gajillion times.)

As for my list: in January, I already had several good things going:

• Semi-regular calls with Kristin, my grad school friend with whom I’ve been writing for more than ten years now? Wow. Kristin asks me really good strategic questions AND gives amazing feedback on writing. I think that her friendship has done more to sustain my writing than perhaps anything else, except for maybe . . .

• My near-daily conversations with Austin about writing. He gives comments on all of my newsletters and most of my reviews and other pieces before I submit them, and I talk with him about writing problems pretty much whenever they come up, so, a lot.

• My Christian Poetics Initiative working group. Shout-out to one working group member and friend, Jack, who gave me line edits for my Big Deal review this week. I get great recommendations and endless inspiration from another member, Sarah (), who introduced me to the Catherine Project, which coordinates volunteer-led great books reading groups. The CPI stuff is very ad-hoc, and I’ll usually only connect with these people once every month or two (or three or four). But those friendships have lasted over years, and those people are my real readers.

• My Catherine Project Proust group (now on pause until September). This met weekly to talk about approximately fifty pages of Proust at a time. Reading Proust has been so good for my writing and thinking, and the people with whom I’ve encountered Proust are such serious and committed readers. Even though I mostly have not lived out my dream of being a college professor enjoying endless conversations about literature and movies with students who love them, my experience with the Catherine Project has convinced me that there is space in my life for sustained conversations about literature, and for great relationships born from those conversations. Leading that group has been work, even if it’s very joyful work. I think it’s been very good for mindfully exercising my attention.

These activities still left a lot of hours in the day when I had childcare and could work. (I’ve been selling stuff on eBay in addition to writing, but I only do that very part-time, too.) So I tried a couple of other things:

• I found three people from Reddit and the Catherine Project Discord to do virtual writing meet-ups during East Coast business (i.e., preschool) hours. We’re all seriously working on first novels (we run the range from commercial romantasy to some high-brow lit fic). We’ve grown a little bit, and now we have a couple of people working on nonfiction, too (one of whom I met because of the Festival of Faith & Writing). Three times a week, I meet for an hour and a half with at least one person from that group to work on my novel, which I knew I would probably give up on otherwise. Of those ninety minutes, we spend about an hour actually writing, and the rest of the time is goal-setting, problem solving, and knowledge sharing. Or just gabbing. It’s been great, and of course crosses over into other writing projects we’re doing and has been a real source of encouragement for reviewing, too.

• On the recommendation of a newish writing friend, I applied for a Collegeville Institute workshop about “publishing for the public,” which will be focused on online writing, especially writing for platforms like Substack. I ended up getting in (it’s in June), and the process of writing the application materials made me think that I should probably just start a Substack newsletter so that I kind of know what I’m talking about when I go to St. Johns. Substack has ended up being really fun, especially because I am finding other people who are writing in weird niches that I’m into. I’ve never been very online, so I’ve rarely had the “oh, there are my people! they exist on the Internet!” experience that I think a lot of people my age had, like, twelve years ago. But I’m having it now, so I guess you can welcome me to the twenty-first century.

• I tell basically everyone I know who is writing stuff that I will happily read it and comment on it. At some point I might run out of time to actually do this, but I am really enjoying it for now, especially while I’m still trying to figure out if I want to pursue paid editing or coaching work.

Is Substack a co-working space for me? Sort of, I think I am meeting people here and am also (re)connecting with other writer friends. It’s a networking space, at least. And my monthly polls have been a fun way to connect with friends and family about books. And having a weekly deadline for this newsletter has been mostly good, I think. It helps motivate me to pitch pieces. But something about the synchronous writing meet-up or phone call check-in does more for me. Exchanging feedback with people and talking about it makes me feel like a writer more than anything else does, so I’ll keep doing that pretty much forever, I think.

Summer and fall are bringing schedule changes for our kids that are going to mean significant changes for me. I am grateful to have had this year of self-employment? fun-employment? with full-time childcare to try out a lot of different things, and I think the synchronous writing meet-up is one of the things I’m most committed to carrying forward into what is likely to be a shorter writing workday.

Who are your writing co-workers? I’d love to hear about them.

The Work This Week

Current reviews-in-process:

• Of my four-ish reviews due in May (one self-imposed deadline, three assignments), things are moving along: one is out in the world, two are fully drafted and undergoing final revisions, and the last is well on its way to being a solid first draft. I have one other June deadline and could use some more assignments!

• I sent out two pitches last Thursday and immediately felt as though I’d just gone on a horribly difficult run. Pitching might be the hardest kind of writing that I’m doing these days! That or anxiously revising this Big Deal review; I’m not sure. I am hoping to pitch again this week so I can get that rejection count moving up.

Other things I’m reading:

• Morality Play by Barry Unsworth. A former UTampa colleague recommended this one to me. Steve reads a TON. He’s a Victorianist and also reads almost all of the Hugo nominees every year (I think he maybe skips the series category). He blogs about a book a week over here. Morality Play is narrated by a fourteenth-ish?-century runaway priest who ends up joining a troupe of traveling players on their way to do a series of Christmas performances. (If you’ve heard of the Everyman cycle, that’s their usual fare.) But they stop in a town where there’s just been a murder, and their leader, with an ambitious glint in his eye, suggests they make up their dire cash shortfall with a performance of the murder and its fallout. Our errant priest is very concerned about what will happen when they just start making stuff up, not based directly on the Bible or Christian tradition. But of course, this play is surely going to reveal things about the crime that the church, the landowners, and the law would rather leave buried. I’m about halfway in, and WOW this is so good! Unsworth was a Booker prize winner and had three additional books that made the long or short lists in other years.

• My friend and former colleague Cari Hovanec has a great review of Underlake by Erin L. McCoy in the LARB, in which I learned some things about 1960s and ‘70s damming projects that transformed communities across the South (including in Florida). The book sounds haunting and is making me think of Jan Carson’s Few and Far Between (one of my March poll winners), whose archipelago formed by a state-led drainage project is also doing some ghostly imaginative work, though against a backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The novel WIP as of 5/14/26: 28,683

Rejection count for 2026: 10/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

The May poll results are in, and I am so gratified to announce that we had clear winners in both fiction and nonfiction categories. And Cloudthief even got a vote over Spiritual Direction for Writers, ending the months-long reign of nonfiction. I’m not entirely sure where I’m going to pitch these reviews yet, or if I’ll manage to pull off an interview with Charlotte Donlon, but I look forward to immersing myself in both of these titles.

Thank you so much to everyone who voted! Astronaut! was a close second for fiction, and Carousel: An Essay on Seeing was just a couple of votes behind the lead for nonfiction.

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If you want to read more about the winners or the other books I was considering for reviews this month, you can find last week’s post here:

I’m especially excited to get into Donlon’s book as I’m preparing to start another The Artist’s Way group in a couple of weeks. My love for The Artist’s Way has been extensively documented on the Internet, especially on Medium. I mentioned in last week’s post that rumor has it Donlon has some issues with The Artist’s Way. If I interview her, I will confirm. And I will, of course, make every effort to read Spiritual Direction for Writers on its own terms, despite my being a Julia Cameron fangirl.

(Btw, our TAW group is at capacity, but I’m starting a waitlist in case people decide to bow out. You can read more about it here.)

The Work This (Couple) Week(s)

In reviewing: I am happy to report that I finally wrote about the running books. I am a little sad to report that the good (or are they?) people of Medium don’t seem especially interested in reading about obstacles in women’s racing! My editor featured it, but the people just aren’t clicking. Sometimes it’s nicer not to have access to the stats. I did get a kind email in response to the review from the publicists for This Is Not About Running, a book I recommend to anyone with a high-school aged child (especially girls) competing in pretty much any sport.

I’m working on four other reviews right now, all in varying stages of not-doneness. Two are assignments from the Washington Independent Review of Books, and I’m feeling great about both of those. One I owe to an academic journal, which means the review will be pretty formulaic. But the book is not a straightforward monograph, so I’m thinking it isn’t going to fit the formula very well. A challenge! And the last I am not saying anything specific about yet, because I am nervous. Three of these four are due this month.

I really need to start pitching again, which feels difficult given all of these outstanding assignments. But: I do want to have work a month from now; I am behind on pitching April’s winners; and I am very, very behind on my rejection goal. I hope next week I have at least one pitch to report.

Other things I’ve been reading:

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh. It’s a dark academia boarding school novel in which the main character is a 38-year-old head of the Department of Magic. She’s constantly marking papers and having administrative meetings while also being basically the only person on her campus capable of dealing with significant magical threats. I was ill for a couple of days last week and read it in between naps. I sort of foisted it on my book club and can’t wait to talk about it with them.

Art + Faith by Makoto Fujimura. I got this on audio for some background research for my review of Fujimura’s Art Is: A Journey into the Light. It’s really breathtaking. I’ll be impatiently nodding my head along to a part that goes “creation, fall, redemption, blah blah blah,” but then Fujimura will take this well-worn framework for thinking about Christian aesthetics and spin it in some new direction or apply it in a way I’ve never thought of before, and it’s very nourishing. He does have this extended metaphor about pipes that keeps throwing me off a little bit (I get what he’s going for, but pipes?). Aside from that, I’ve liked it so far. I have a vivid memory of watching an interview with Fujimura, I think in my first couple of years of grad school in Austin, where he talks about how he encounters people: “Jesus is in their bones,” he says. I remember thinking people who aren’t Christians would find this really off-putting, but then again, maybe they wouldn’t. Fujimura radiates deep respect for humans that comes from a strong theology of people being created in God’s image, and he has a vision of art’s unique ability to cut through all of the ideological crap out there (or even in here) and giving us new angles on life, new ways of moving in the world. I am maybe halfway through and unable to continue listening because I have overdue DVDs and am in library jail. This always happens to me. (Austin kindly dropped them off yesterday, so I should be able to resume Art + Faith soon. Thanks, pardner <3)

The novel WIP as of 5/7/26: 27,449

Rejection count for 2026: 10/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

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At least for now, I’ve decided to make all of my Substack content free, because I would love for lots of people to vote in these monthly polls to help me narrow down which books to pitch when I’m trying to place book reviews. And people who have been financially supporting me gave their blessing to expand voting privileges; thanks, y’all.

For those who might be seeing one of my long lists for the first time: I have a wide range of interests across fiction and non-fiction. (I also read some poetry, though I feel less qualified to write about it.) When it comes to picking books I might like to review, they’re often a little all over the place. I do have some persistent interests, like cultural histories of Christianity, ultra running memoirs, urban planning, and campus novels (especially satirical ones). But, like every other reader out there, I predictably end up with way more books I’m interested in than I will actually ever have time to read and write about.

The long list poll serves three purposes:

• It helps me to narrow down what books I will actually pitch. I am currently trying to place book reviews in “traditional,” (mostly) paying outlets, like newspapers and magazines. Having a short list of a couple of titles helps me to decide which of those publications to target and keeps me accountable for actually pitching reviews.

• The mini-pitches that I write for this poll give me something to start with when I’m drafting formal pitch emails.

• It lets me share about a bunch of exciting books! I hope that some of these will end up on your TBR lists. If the authors have Substacks that I can easily find, I’ll link to them. (I think only two of this month’s writers are on this platform.)

Without further ado, here are some titles (six fiction, six nonfiction) I’m considering for review pitches in May. Their publication dates range from July to September or October. There’s a link to the Google poll here, and I’ll also share it at the end.

Fiction

Cloudthief: A Novel by Nathaniel Rich, out from MCD on 7/14/2026

• A climate journalist and a con woman join forces to stage a heist — of data!

• What a fantastic title!

• I have yet to read anything set in a data center (part of this book is), and I think it has a lot of potential. The concept is making me think of Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8, in which activists are trying to free a bunch of broilers from a chicken farm, and I hope there is a similar level of texture to the setting here.

• Nathaniel Rich is a well-established novelist, a professor at Tulane, and generally a prolific guy across genres.

Astronaut!: A Novel by Oana Aristide, out from W. W. Norton on 7/14/2026

• Romania, 1989: A precocious girl and a daydreaming police detective team up to investigate a series of murders that the press — and, most likely, Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorial government — is blaming on a bear.

• Astronaut! promises to explore one of my favorite literary themes: everyday negotiations of complicity and resistance.

• Oana Aristide grew up in Romania and has wide-ranging experiences as a writer, economist, and hotelier. This is her second book.

Dèy : A Novel by Edwidge Danticat, out from Knopf on 8/25/2026

• A Miami realtor experiences a mall shooting. She doesn’t tell anyone she knows, but the experience jolts her into a reevaluation of her relationships to family and to her sense of home. (According to the publisher copy, Dèy is Creole for mourning.)

• Florida loves Edwidge Danticat, a prolific Haitian-American writer who has lived much of her life in Miami and has set much of her fiction there. As of 2023, she holds a position at Columbia: great for her, a little sad for us Floridians.

Dreams of Ayn Ara by Sara Abou Ghazal, translated by Katharine Halls, out from Feminist Press on 8/18/2026

• Dreams of Ayn Ara is a novel about the Palestinian diaspora in Europe that draws on both realism and surrealism to narrate the story of one family displaced by the 1948 Nakba. (I suspect based on the synopsis from the publisher that Facebook becomes some kind of magical portal.)

• Dreams of Ayn Ara is Sara Abou Ghazal’s debut novel. She’s on Substack, though not very active; that may change as the launch gets closer.

The Red Dress by Frank Huyler, out from Bellevue Literary Press on 10/6/2026

• Our protagonist, a divorcé named Nick, gets an offer to quit his yacht captain gig to work on the private island of a hyper-wealthy family, which means that he can spend more time with his daughter. The condition: that they wear special tech-y glasses so he doesn’t actually know for whom he’s working.

• This cover and the set-up make me think of the opening scene of Ex Machina.

• More complicity and resistance thematics, with the added complication of parenting.

• Frank Huyler is best known for his nonfiction about being a doctor, especially The Blood of Strangers. The Red Dress is his third novel.

Solace House: A Novel by Will Maclean, out from Grove Press on 10/13/2026

• Five college students get a summer work study job of cleaning out a Victorian mansion. Alex, the protagonist, gets really into the diaries of the former owner. I’m sure nothing is haunted. . .

• In the blurbs for this book, comps range from The Secret History to Ruth Ozeki to The Haunting of Hill House to David Mitchell. I like three of those a lot (never read Hill House) and am intrigued by the range. I would never think to put The Secret History and David Mitchell in the same sentence, though now that they are, I see some resonances, especially with Slade House.

• Will Maclean is a UK-based screenwriter (I didn’t recognize any of the stuff he’s worked on aside from Shaun the Sheep), and this is his second novel.

Nonfiction

Carousel: An Essay on Seeing by Sarah Minor, out from Yale University Press on 7/21/2026

• This book caught my eye because it seems to be responding to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a classic examination of visual aesthetics beloved of humanities grad students. Like Berger’s project, Sarah Minor’s Carousel incorporates visuals — the book’s schtick is that a professor is giving a lecture with slides.

• Carousel addresses the pressure and desire to see things, and the incredible range of content that is out there to be seen, and examines the limits of what can be seen as well as how seeing intersects with self-disclosure / being seen. All this to say, it sounds theoretical and idea-rich.

• Sarah Minor teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop and does a range of interdisciplinary projects.

Auroville: A City of Dreams by Katarzyna Boni, translated from the Polish by Mark Ordon, out from Open Letter on 7/28/2026

• Auroville is a utopian city in Tamil Nadu, India, founded in the 1960s by a woman named the Mother, who followed the teachings of yogi Sri Aurobindo. It has the capacity for 50,000 residents. Boni visited Auroville a couple of years before the pandemic and writes about its history and the current(ish) state of the project by way of interviews with residents.

• I found a bunch of things really interesting about this, the first being that I had never heard of Auroville! The structure at the center evokes EPCOT’s Spaceship Earth, and if you look at a map of the community, it’s designed in the shape of a galaxy. I recommend taking two minutes to look it up. It’s intriguing as a contemporary master-planned urban project with a kind of spiritual aim. (How did they fund this?) I like reading about utopias, and Boni’s approach seems to try to honor the people who are there now (that is, it isn’t just cynical in its evaluation of how it has and hasn’t met the original vision).

Welcome to Paradox City: A Critical History of Dallas as Told Through Its Architecture by Mark Lamster, out from La Reunion Publishing (Deep Vellum) on 8/4/2026

• This subtitle says everything I need to know! I’m an easy sell on this kind of history-of-an-urban-cityscape project, and I have enough of a personal connection to Dallas to feel invested in it particularly. My husband went to high school in a Dallas suburb, and we visited the city several times when my in-laws lived there.

• Mark Lamster, long-time architecture writer with the Dallas Morning News, was a finalist for an NBCC award for The Man in the Glass House, a biography of the architect Philip Johnson.

Born Worried by Jack Bender, out from Rare Bird Books on 8/11/2026

• Born Worried is a memoir from the lead director of Lost, who also worked on the Sopranos and lots of other projects you’d probably recognize. It is short, under two hundred pages, and promises lots of funny bits about anxiety. The publisher is giving David Sedaris and Jenny Lawson as comps for this, so my expectations are high.

Platforms: A Critical Introduction by Anne Helmond and Fernando van der Vlist, out from Polity on 8/11/2026

• Platforms is an introduction to the academic field of platform studies. I tend to freeze up when I think about how powerful digital platforms are. I used to talk about how easy it would have been for someone to convince me that digital technologies are basically magic — they’re so big and so effective at manipulating our behavior. All this to say, I think it would be good for me to face my fears (and ignorance) and to learn more about how people are seeking to understand the workings of social media, digital service platforms, and tools (including GenAI).

• I’ve long been interested in how the built environment contributes to social engineering, and platform studies seems an obvious choice for learning about social engineering via digital environments.

• If I ever end up writing about being an eBay seller, knowing more about platforms would be helpful background.

• The co-authors are professors in the fields of Media, Data and Society and Critical Data and AI, respectively. #digitalhumanities

Spiritual Direction for Writers: Everyday Rituals for Your Writing Life by Charlotte Donlon, out from Here Below (Eerdmans imprint) on 9/3/2026

• I survived graduate school in part by reading books like Spiritual Direction for Writers, books that offered compassionate, practical guidance for developing writing practices that can help you get writing projects done without completely losing yourself in the process. Think of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Mason Curry’s Daily Rituals, and Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. After getting through my PhD and starting a professor job, I finally did The Artist’s Way, perhaps the classic of this spiritual-self-help-for-artists genre, which I ended up loving so much that I’ve done the twelve-week “course” again and again, eventually with friends and some strangers from the Internet who’ve become friends. (Shameless plug: you can still sign up for my free virtual Artist’s Way group that starts May 19! You’ll just need to get the book.)

• When I was at the Festival of Faith and Writing, Charlotte Donlon’s name came up in a conversation about the summer Artist’s Way groups that I lead. Apparently, Donlon is not a fan of The Artist’s Way. I want to know why.

• I was already sent a review copy because I guess I am such an obvious target for this title. I’d potentially be interested in pitching an interview with Donlon, because I anticipate it would be really fun and would love to talk with her.

• Donlon is on Substack.

And here’s the link to the poll again. I’m looking forward to seeing what strikes your interest!

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books.

Last weekend, I went to the Festival of Faith and Writing, almost entirely on the recommendation of my friend’s aunt, who happens to be the former editor of an online publication called the Well (and who urged me to write what became a three-part series for them last spring). The Festival of Faith and Writing is a biannual conference held at Calvin University, and, having received an English degree from an evangelical college in the midwest, I’ve long been aware of it. But I’d never gone, partly because I didn’t really think of myself as a writer until well after finishing grad school (i.e., approximately two years ago), and while I like reading about religion and faith, I have little patience with attempts to silo those interests from a broader literary culture, which can be a tendency on the part of some (though certainly not all) Christian conference organizers. I think I was mostly wrong in this assessment of the FFW; I realize now that one of my favorite interviews with Zadie Smith was conducted by Calvin professor and poet Jane Zwart, most likely when Smith was a speaker at the Festival in 2016.

In any case, my friend’s aunt gently pushed me to go and matched me up with a roommate, and it was a rich three days of conversations and readings. (Thank you, Marcia.)

The keynotes were amazing (Robin Wall Kimmerer! Ross Gay!), but the best part of the conference for me was indulging in the most gratifying part of book reviewing — connecting with people who write and read books I care about.

I got to meet the authors of two of my favorite 2025 debuts. Kelly Foster Lundquist’s Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage is the only account I’ve read of someone with an evangelical background going to graduate school in English. The book is about many other things, too, but that part of it happened to resonate strongly with me, and I was glad to have the opportunity to thank her for writing about that particular educational experience with actual references to Judith Butler and Tennessee Williams (so much Tennessee Williams). I pitched reviews of Beard to several publications in the most targeted way I could think of — progressive Christian ones, Chicago ones — and had no success. But I loved it and was really grateful to meet the author. (I also learned that Beard was covered by People, so I think I got my targeting all wrong.)

I also got to meet Leyla King, whose Daughters of Palestine: A Memoir in Five Generations I reviewed for Plough last summer. (It was my first majorish byline, so I am sure I will be talking about that review until the day I die.) Meeting her was cool for a number of reasons, not least because she shared that she modeled her book on Maude by Donna Foley Mabry, which seems like the seed of an essay that I will probably never write but would enjoy reading if someone else wants to go with that.

The night after I met Leyla King, I met a fellow book reviewer at a mixer sponsored by Plough who shared that he read Daughters of Palestine after seeing my review. I nearly cried on the spot.

When I think about writing for love or money, the “love” takes many forms: the manifold pleasures of the reading and the writing themselves, or the stimulating challenge of meeting deadlines and rejection goals. But it also includes real, loving connections between humans.

Before this conference, if you were to ask me about the highlights of writing book reviews, I’d have named two that I think also illustrate love in this sense:

First, the pleasure of working with editors who make thoughtful suggestions and give the opportunity for substantive revision. The two times I’ve experienced this were both with publications that didn’t pay but that had high quality standards. I loved working with those editors, because I knew they’d really read my work. I felt seen. I also felt like they had in mind the best interests of myself and of our readers.

Second, hearing from the translator of one of the books I’d reviewed. She emailed to offer a correction on a bit of her bio that I’d taken from a site that apparently hosts a persistent error (and that’s why you triangulate everything, folks!), but she also expressed appreciation for how my review had understood the book on its own terms. (At least one major outlet with an early review had emphatically not done this, and it seemed unfair to me, especially for a debut. I said as much in my review.) The email felt like the most tremendous praise I could receive in that particular context, and I was really grateful for it.

And I’m grateful for all of this affirming human contact. Many people can read and write with great success in fairly solitary ways. When I’ve tried to do that, though, I’ve been at my most depressed and unhappy. My writing is also at its worst when I’m isolated. I try to build lots of social connections into my writing practices because I know I am more balanced and do better work that way.

But going to conferences is pricey. It cost about $800 for me to attend this one, and that was with using miles for my flights and eating a series of girl dinners comprised of Dots pretzels and Costco cashews I’d brought from home in Stasher bags. I learned a few things that I think will be useful and met some wonderful people. But I am not at all sure that, when 2028 rolls around, I would spend most of the money I made from a year of freelancing to do it again.

One question that lingers for me post-conference is what kinds of social connection would best sustain my review writing. This Substack is part of it. Participating in book clubs is another part of it, as is talking with friends about our current projects and sometimes exchanging work.

Talking with authors whose I really loved did make me interested in incorporating author interviews in my pitching rotation. But I’d need to learn a lot of new things to get started with that, and I am currently committed to writing five reviews, so I am slowing down on pitching anything until I get at least a couple of those submitted.

The Work This Week

Current reviews-in-process:

• I am really, really hoping to get my piece about two April running books out tomorrow. But I have more writing to do on it and don’t have a hard deadline, so I’m not making any promises.

• Many months ago, I told an academic journal that I would review Art Is by Makoto Fujimura for them, and that’s due in May. I read the book in the fall but am now reading some of Fujimura’s other work for background.

• I just got Checkmate by Ben Mezrich, which I’m excited to look at for the Washington Independent Review of Books. I will probably finally watch The Social Network, which I have never seen, because Mezrich is primarily famous for writing the book that it’s based on. #research

• I have another assignment that I am excited about, but it’s making me realize that I’m not really sure what the etiquette is around talking about reviews that are in the works! Especially under particular conditions, which I will leave vague. So I think I am just going to sit on news about this one until it’s in print, and I might be rethinking how I approach this in-process section of *The Work This Week*.

Other things I’m reading:

• I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones. I’ve had a variety of Stephen Graham Jones’s titles on my list for a long time, but Slasher is my first because my book club selected it, and because I will apparently never pick up horror on my own. I have little interest in this sub-genre in film or novel form and am doing the lightest of skims of most of the gory scenes, but the first-person narrator is keeping me very engaged with his analysis of the tropes of the genre and about how his journey as a slasher story antagonist responds to those tropes. That part is fun. And it’s set in a vividly realized West Texas town, which is also fun.

• My friend Kristin sent me two pieces this week that I want to pass on:

  • Heather Houser’s essay for the LA Review of Books about different kinds of “knowing” (smug, interested, intimate, etc.) in fiction about climate change. It’s not a straightforward taxonomy of types of knowing but sets up a really useful framework, I think, for thinking about how different books approach climate crisis. I anticipate citing it soon. (Heather taught at the University of Texas at Austin when I was a grad student and is now at the University of Antwerp.)

  • A series (“symposium”) in the Baffler on “The Profession That Does Not Exist” (i.e., writing). There are six essays about writers’ experiences of the relationship between writing and money. Most of them are pretty bleak, and all are illuminating. Substack later fed me an article by Emily Zipps that had data from a survey of debut authors published in 2025, which drove home the point (which I hope we all know by now!) that the vast majority of writers, even those publishing with the Big 5, cannot count on living off of book deals and royalties (should one ever be lucky enough to see any).

In other news:

• I still have space in the Artist’s Way group I’m organizing for the summer. We’ll meet on (most) Tuesdays from 8-9 PM Eastern from May 19-August 18. More info here. Registration is open if you or someone you know would like to join. You’re more than welcome!

The novel WIP as of 4/23/26: 24,594

Rejection count for 2026: 9/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)

I came to Medium fairly late, near the end of 2023. In preparing to write this, I learned that Medium was started in 2012 by Evan Williams, a co-founder of both Blogger and Twitter. His idea was to develop a space that was like Twitter but that allowed for longer posts and that would hopefully promote the production high(er) quality writing.

By the time I started writing on Medium, it hosted plenty of junk content, just like everywhere else. When I told people I was starting to write there, I often described the dominant vibe as grift-y. But many people were writing great pieces there, and it appealed to me at the time for a host of reasons.

Until the fall of 2023, I had pretty much exclusively published academic work. Everything that I wrote felt high stakes. It was stressful. I was interested in learning some other forms, and Medium seemed like a low-risk place to blog or write essays. I didn’t have to manage my own website, and there was a built-in audience supported by internal site features and great SEO. Also, no one I knew was writing over there, so I felt like I could probably be pretty anonymous. I paid the $50 annual partner program fee with the goal of making that money back within the next year, and I started writing. (I am not going to write about how you make money on Medium because I honestly don’t really understand it. They are continually tinkering with how they pay writers.)

I wrote in my inaugural post of this Substack newsletter about how Julia Cameron served as the inspiration for the name of For Love or Money. I was reading Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way (TAW) when I decided to sign up for Medium. (Aside: in my last couple years as an English professor, I was reading TAW three times a year. I love that book, and you should join my free summer group! Details below.) TAW guides its readers through taking the pressure off so that they can just let themselves practice whatever creative thing they want to do, whether that’s writing, ceramics, film-making, sewing, cooking, dance, etc.. One chapter lauds the value of “filling the form,” which basically means practicing consistently without concern for results. (Now that I think of it, the form-filling mindset is highly compatible with rejection goals.)

In learning how to write online, Medium was my first place to “fill the form.” I can’t remember what my original goals were. Maybe I published a piece every week, or every other week. I wrote pieces on “surviving daycare sick days” and writing pedagogy and whatever else I wanted to. It was really fun.

I also discovered the joys of writing book and film reviews over there.

Shortly after I joined Medium, I found a pub called Counter Arts that had a monthly prompt for its film section and sent them a piece recommending Force Majeure as a December palate cleanser when you can’t stand any more sappy holiday movies. Thus began what has become a very supportive relationship with a couple of their editors. (Thanks, Sadie and Reece!) I made $1.16. :)

I am really grateful to Counter Arts in particular for being a place where I could practice writing book and film criticism. The first non-academic book I reviewed — that is, I requested and received an advance copy of a novel from the publisher so that I could review it around the time of its release — was Ali Smith’s Gliff. I was in contact with an editor at a medium-sized magazine who was considering my review because a friend introduced us, but I ended up being ghosted. I was excited about the book and had already written my piece on it, but by the time I realized the editor wasn’t interested (in hindsight, it wasn’t a good fit), Gliff’s publication date was months past. No other traditional outlet would be interested at that point.

So, I sent my review of Gliff to Counter Arts in June of last year. They recommended it for a boost — basically they nominated it to be once of the pieces Medium puts in front of more readers — and lots of people saw it, and some wrote thoughtful comments. It ended up being a really positive first book reviewing experience.

Having rejection goals works for me in part because I know I can always publish reviews on Medium. Even if I don’t have an assignment from a magazine or journal, I can always have work. Plenty of my pieces have fewer than ten readers. But it’s a place where I can fill the form.

Medium is also a place where I send things I would never dream of publishing anywhere else. Last year, I wrote an analysis of KPop Demon Hunters using ideas from a 20th century group of Marxist cultural theorists / philosophers called the Frankfurt school. I would never in a million years have pitched that piece to Slate or Vulture because I didn’t feel like enough of an expert on animated film, K-Pop, OR Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to risk putting myself out there. But Counter Arts published it, it got boosted, and it accrued the best collection of comments of anything I’ve ever written. It was so fun.

I imagine that Substack is a low-stakes place for a lot of writers. For me, the subscription model makes me feel a need to work on curation and branding here. But I have profligate interests that always exceed that curation and branding stuff and need some other outlet. For that, I’m grateful to Medium.

I have a review of Martin Dugard’s The Long Run and Mary Cain’s This Is Not About Running that I’m hoping to send to my favorite running publication on Medium next week. I read the books too late to try to cover them in traditional reviewing outlets. And they aren’t an obvious pairing, but I wanted to write about them together. I’m not sure if I’ll pull off the piece, but Medium is a great place to try.

I’d love to hear if any of you readers have low-stakes places where you like to send or perform creative work!

The Work This Week

New review out now:

• On the Seawall published my review of City Like Water, a novel by Dorothy Tse, trans. by Natascha Bruce. This surrealist 100-page novella is packed with excellent city writing and is set in Hong Kong. If I were still teaching classes about metropolitan fiction, I would absolutely assign this.

Current reviews-in-process:

• Aside from the running books . . .

• I just started writing up my notes on Few and Far Between, one of the March poll winners that I’ll be covering for Washington Independent Review of Books. It’s about the remnants of a utopian community on a (fictional) Northern Irish archipelago formed during a (fictional) 20th-century drainage project. Lots to love here, including a wonderfully awkward brother-sister duo. I was expecting more of an ecological angle but instead enjoyed some unexpected supernatural bits.

In other news:

• I still have space in the Artist’s Way group I’m organizing for the summer. We’ll meet on (most) Tuesdays from 8-9 PM Eastern from May 19-August 18. More info here. Registration is open if you or someone you know would like to join. You’re more than welcome!

The novel WIP as of 4/16/26: 23,159

Rejection count for 2026: 9/50

A note: whenever possible, I use affiliate links from bookshop.org. If you order books from there using my link, your favorite indie bookstore can get a cut, and I will make a tiny amount of money so that I can buy more books. :)