Copywriting is a minimalist art, not only because of space considerations, but because if you have to explain the joke, it’s probably not that funny. But for every rule there’s an exception, as in the case of this tagline: “Honk if you want her to Com*” with the asterisk explaining that the giant blue vibrator in question is called a Com. If I were the creative director on this campaign I might have gone with “She’s Coming” and left it at that. And you know what? That’s because I’m a coward.

Five out of five pencils ✏️✏️✏️✏️✏️

I’m no prude, but I do admire the effort that goes into an artful double entendre, rather than the increasingly de rigueur approach of something like: “Don’t come in I’m 👉🏼👌🏼.” And the “tied up” / “tidy up” wordplay here—submitted by my dear friend Molly from her stay at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland, Oregon—is actually pretty artsy, no doubt the work of some stymied poetry grad living a double life as a corporate copywriter. Hang in there, li’l buddy.

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Our first-ever Spanish-language submission! This one, seen outside the Erotika sex shop in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa neighborhood is another tastefully cheeky tagline clocking in at an economical two words (!) which translates to “come, everybody!” It’s a lot funnier in Spanish because vénganse todos is the actual colloquial expression for telling people to gather ‘round. They say humor is the hardest thing to translate.

Four out of five pencils ✏️✏️✏️✏️

I have seen this ad a million times while getting off and on the New York City subway and I have yet to unlock its mysteries. Something about dating? Today I finally looked up the company in question and it turns out to be an “artificial intelligence-powered relationship mentoring app.” No surprise that the copy reflects the kind of nonsense you’d expect from the greatest disruptors of our generation, minds pickled for far too long in a brine of AI snake oil.

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This quote-unquote mural—seen in the godforsaken stretch of Williamsburg, Brooklyn that has come to make Times Square seem quaint—may be the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen. But the tagline’s pretty airtight, tying in elegantly to the concept of a “naked” potato chip with no Red #3 or whatever, in case you’re the kind of freak who eats Doritos and also pretends to treat your body like a temple.

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I had to shout out this Swiffer subway ad which, though not naughty in nature, is as visceral as anything on here. I am no germaphobe, but walking by this every day has turned me into a hardass about my shoes-off policy at home. Plus, it does the nudge and wink at New York identity without pandering, like so many other ads do when they try to appeal to the inflated egos of its residents.

Four out of five pencils ✏️✏️✏️✏️

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Missed the last few Copywriter’s Corners? See what scored five pencils here, here, and here.

Here’s what we know: At some point during the second decade of the twentieth century, the Barcelona publisher Editorial Maucci commissioned a series of anthologies from the Venezuelan poet and journalist Rafael Bolívar Coronado, which were to showcase exemplary poetry of the Americas, specifically Costa Rica, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Bolívar, who had moved to Spain a few years prior on a grant from the Venezuelan government, replied saying that, realistically, his expertise only extended to Costa Rican letters, but he could arrange for friends to cover the rest.

This is where it gets weird: He suggested one José Brissa, who had previously compiled an early anthology of Spanish poetry, to edit the Ecuadorian volume, which was later published under Brissa’s name, featuring the work of seventy poets. José Brissa was never informed of his participation in the project, because he never worked on it, and those seventy poets never existed. They were all Bolívar. So were the poets in the two volumes that emerged next, representing Costa Rica and Bolivia, which received glowing reviews in the press—reviews written, of course, by Bolívar himself, under the names of various invented literary critics.

The story of Bolívar, this real-life Bolaño legend who wrote in nearly every genre, under no less than 500 names, is catnip for a certain kind of archive nerd. And none more so than Lorena Alvarado, writer and director of Lost Chapters (2024), a literary detective tale about a young woman consumed by the mystery of Bolívar’s motives. The film—which won best feature at the International Film Festival in Monterrey, Mexico, and just completed a two-week run at the IFC Center in New York—follows the twenty-five-year-old Ena, who returns to her native Caracas from abroad to help care for her grandmother, whose memory is fading fast. It closely mirrors the director’s own life: her sister plays the protagonist, alongside her father and grandmother, who appear as themselves—real owners of a used bookstore that closed in the wake of Venezuela’s economic crisis.

Forced into early retirement, Ena’s father dives into his dream project: digging up and cataloguing literature for his Museum of Venezuelan Books (yes, that’s real too). While shelving never-ending boxes of dusty volumes in the family warehouse, dad tells Ena to keep an eye out for anything Venezuelan that could be an undiscovered gem for his collection. Jackpot: she opens a slim, early twentieth-century title to find a postcard from one aficionado to another, saying he has reason to suspect the name on its spine is in fact one of Rafael Bolívar Coronado’s many literary ghosts.

And they’re off. On a father-daughter moped tour of the many moth-bitten book stalls of Caracas, where they canvass fellow dealers—these greying guardians of the country’s literary memory—for anything else by this master of disguise that might be hiding in the stacks. Along the way, they spitball plot points for the ambitious debut novel Ena’s just hatched, about a woman on the tail of a long-dead, esoteric author.

Full of lush, teeming shots of the city’s public plazas, traffic-clogged arteries, and architectural icons, Lost Chapters is more of a photo essay in motion than a Savage Detectives-style journey into the underworld. But digging is almost never as eventful as all that, and the sun-dappled montages are a smart way to hold our attention without having to turn the story into a caper. They also make for an extremely convincing love letter to the city, often lingering on sumptuous works of public art in the background, like Mateo Manaure’s modernist mosaics for the University of Caracas.

Anyone who’s ever spent an afternoon inhaling dust and mold in some basement, hoping to unearth an object of value (sentimental or otherwise) amidst a sea of mass-market trash, will find a kindred spirit in the film’s protagonist. Lost Chapters is one of the truest depictions I’ve seen of the digging life, evoking the undeniably romantic appeal of surfing history’s currents on the hunt for some forgotten figure. It’s an appeal that persists not in spite of his obscurity but because of it, since you are joining the ranks of, like, three other people worldwide who even give a shit. And that makes him yours! All the benefits of joining a cult, and nobody telling you what to do.

Lost Chapters
Dir. Lorena Alvarado
2024

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If you’ve ever been bitten by the digging bug, you may enjoy my piece for Resident Advisor from way back in 2017, where I spent a few weeks as a fly on the wall at The Thing, the Brooklyn thrift store that’s home to hundreds of thousands of used vinyl records, uncategorized and on sale for two dollars each.

New subscribers may not know that, for most of my twenties, I was a full-time techno journalist, first at Vice Magazine and then at the British music site Resident Advisor. It was the coolest job a twenty-six-year-old could ask for: flying around the world to interview famous DJs, report investigative features with basically no word limit, and, of course, party for multiple days on end. I’ll still clock in for a shift at the club a few times a year, but at thirty-six the afterhours life increasingly offers diminishing returns—and I really need those last two brain cells.

I put all the hard-earned expertise from my past life to good use in this week’s review of the newly translated Superstars for The Nation. The 2000 cult novel, by French author Ann Scott, follows a lesbian DJ’s misadventures through the toxic milieu of Paris’s fin de siècle techno scene. It is raw, full of overextended metaphors and punk-rock peacocking, but the prose feels authentic as a record of a time when underground music wasn’t so depressingly professionalized. And Scott’s depiction of this world of lost misfits is instructive as a foil to the way people talk about rave culture these days—as a force for subcultural resistance bordering on activism. Superstars belongs to a different time, when most people’s concerns were, as Scott herself put it, that “the drugs were good, the music was good, the sex was good.”

I hope you will read, enjoy—and if you haven’t, subscribe to Separator for more posts on books that nobody else is covering.

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Every four years, the World Cup just kind of sneaks up on me. I’m the first to admit that I don’t know much about soccer—my sport was always baseball—but there’s always a small note of embarrassment at being so tuned out to something that means so much to so many. This is not a weird brag about how I’m not a sports guy, I promise! Because every four years, I find myself clutching my chest at the suspense as I cheer doggedly for whatever team I have decided I’m rooting for. I really do enjoy the sport, but I’ll never be a soccer fanatic. Not like that.

I became attuned to the impending World Cup slightly earlier than usual this year, in part because the country hosting it was my own, but also because I kept seeing people in my social circles sharing stuff about Golden Goal, a pop-up lit mag focused on the 2026 tournament, its past and present, and its many meanings across the globe. The folks at Golden Goal, unlike me, know ball. That’s evident in the wide-ranging perspectives on display, from the fanatic family duo of critic Merve Emre and her son dissecting their obsession with the star Turkish midfielder Arda Güler, to the novelist Francisco Goldman’s moving reflection on the unexpected joy of watching Mexican teen sensation Gilberto Mora excel at a sport so steeped in off-field corruption. Poets, novelists, essayists, and journalists all weighing in on a sport that, despite everything, brings the world to a stop for ninety-odd minutes at a time.

To get a sense of how this magical little capsule of literary sports love came to be, I spoke to Miguel Salazar, one of the mag’s editors (and, in his day job, a member of the editorial staff of the New York Times Book Review) about the ideas behind the magazine, soccer’s position in the post-liberal global order, and his favorite memories from Copas past.

—Separator editor Noah Hurowitz

This interview has been edited and condensed.

So much of the conversation around the World Cup, at least before the games actually begin, is around the politics of it. But you guys obviously saw a literary potential here too. What makes the World Cup such a rich ground for literature and writing?

I’ve approached Golden Goal as a way for me to get writing out there, or to solicit writing that I wanted to see out in the world. There’s so many countries in the World Cup that made me think: “oh man, I would love to understand the world from the point of view of someone from there or who was raised there.”

There are so many opportunities to really understand the world that are not necessarily political in the sense of writing about the politics of each country, but rather writing about national identity. Nationalism is so fraught, but the World Cup gives us this opportunity to engage with it in a way that feels thoughtful and celebratory without falling into jingoism. The most proud I’ve ever felt of being Colombian has been watching the national team play, if I’m being honest.

So I think like the literary potential there is having writers, whether they’re novelists, essayists, whoever, but the kind of people who can tap into the human side of that, and actually make sense of it on an emotional level in a way that feels not just articulate, but actually renders these emotions into words.

What does soccer have that other global sporting events maybe don’t?

It feels to me one of the few monoculture events we still have left. It brings people together in a way that very few other things do nowadays. I mean, you can see a refraction of society in sport, and that’s what makes it so beautiful. And I think that’s also what makes it so alluring to people.

But at the end of the day, it’s the world’s biggest sport. It’s a sport that kids play on the street.

This is the first World Cup that is truly, from start to finish, the work of FIFA president Gianni Infantino, to whom you devote plenty of well-deserved attention. One of the questions you wrestle with is how to use soccer to understand the world. What does the rise of Johnny Baby—with his money grabs, his lame-brained pleas for superficial peace, and his embrace of authoritarianism—tell us about the new global order?

We have a pretty great piece that touches on that that we ran a while back, by Steven Cohen, about the FIFA Peace Prize. I think that’s really emblematic of Gianni Infantino’s approach to being the FIFA president.

This isn’t the first time that the World Cup is being hosted by a wannabe authoritarian. I mean, it goes back to Mussolini in 1934 when Italy hosted, and he hijacked the World Cup and brought his own trophy to the final to award to the Italian team. And it goes back to 1978, in Argentina, when it was hosted by the junta, and to 2018, in Putin’s Russia.

But with Infantino, I mean he’s obviously identified the best ways to make money, and to just juice the competition for everything that it’s worth is by siding with authoritarians. Not necessarily because of a political affinity, but because it’s easier to just do whatever you want when you only have to deal with one guy, essentially, and when you don’t have to grapple with the messiness of democracy.

One commonality in most of the articles you’ve published is the clear fact that true soccer heads, like the people writing for the magazine, carry with them an encyclopedic reference of iconic moments in the sport, particularly for their team or their country. Gabriela Alemán opens her piece with a memory of a goal in 2001 that propelled Ecuador to its first World Cup. Merve Emre and her son, Aydın Berk Nakarado, write of a stunning kick from across the field by Turkish Real Madrid star Arda Güler. This kind of trivia is so central to soccer fandom that I had to ask: What are the moments you carry with you?

The first one I watched, the first one I was aware of, was 2002. I just remember seeing Ronaldo—the Brazilian Ronaldo—on TV with the Brazilian flag after winning the final, and my dad just glued to the television. I had never seen my dad so engrossed, and just not paying attention to anything else, and so I think that really struck me.

But I think my first major memory from the World Cup itself was in ’06, with Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt against Marco Materazzi in the final, which was one of the most iconic sports moments of all time.

It wasn’t just the aggression of the headbutt, but doing it in a final—it was his last game, the last game of his career! The game hadn’t been decided yet. It was still tied. I think it just blew my mind that that was something someone could do at such a moment. That’s the kind of thing that only the World Cup can deliver.

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This past spring, the Mexican publisher Gris Tormenta issued one of their popular, thematic anthologies—a series called Cinco Miradas (“Five Gazes”), which, as the name implies, feature five texts or excerpts on a given subject. This one, on the subject of the United States, was compiled by Mariana Enríquez, the Argentine superstar of punk-rock realist horror stories. In the accompanying essay, she admits that—as a good Latin American lefty—she knows how she’s supposed to feel about the US, but the first associations that pop into her head are an ambivalent mix: “Spanish moss, Mississippi mud, neon at night, the ruins of Detroit, the voices of Elvis and Diana Ross, Prince in the sky with diamonds, Hank Williams dead in the back seat of his car, Johnny Cash live at San Quentin, Michael Jackson’s abandoned Neverland theme park,” and so on (my translation).

And yet, upon visiting the US—the real US, not just coastal wealthy enclaves—its less savory aspects start to outweigh its allure. She describes one eye-opening Greyhound ride from Louisville to Nashville, which she took despite friends’ attempts to convince her otherwise. “Oh please, I’m from Latin America,” she protests. “What’s the worst that could happen?” Well, dear reader, her fellow passengers include an “addict mother with two sickly kids, a black guy who’d repeat ‘I lost my luggage’ on loop, three veterans of distinct wars, a young man with the word PSYCHO tattooed on his neck, a teenager in a dark suit who held forth like a precocious preacher, and a disabled man reading extreme pornography on his Kindle while covering his head with a sheet—he’d shake underneath it to scenes of violent necrophilia.”

Why are we like this? What circumstances account for the truly feral behavior on display here? How did our social fabric get so torn to shreds? Back in May I wrote an explainer (a mercifully concise one, if you ask me) on the 500-page Love and Death in the American Novel, the landmark work of literary criticism by Leslie Fiedler, which surveys 250 years of American letters to try and identify the root of this dysfunction. He advances a sweeping theory that our entire literary tradition, and our mass psychology more broadly, stems from our founders’ Puritan aversion to sex. And while it may have a few holes (as Becca Rothfeld argued recently in the New Yorker), it nonetheless put a name to a number of notions that have been gnawing at me.

This fear of sex, love, and ultimately, women, says Fiedler, accounts for our culture of infantilized loners, embodied in our great fictional types: Ishmael, Huckleberry Finn, and any number of cowboy outlaws. And as I argued in that essay, it also explains why so many Americans—like these male adventurers—have chosen to turn their back on civilization, especially the city, in favor of the so-called trad life, in which social relations outside the family are reduced to their absolute bare minimum.

Americans know Americans best, right? We are the preeminent experts on ourselves. Such is the logic of both liberal identity politics—which would have us believe, for instance, that men can’t write female characters—and right-wing nationalism, with its insistence on Americanness as something exceptional, something that can’t be learned or entered into. But what if I told you that Americans, despite our obsession with ourselves, actually aren’t especially reflective? That even those of us with aspirations towards enlightened self-awareness, who consider ourselves above the vulgar jingoism of Gas Guzzlers, Guns, and God—yes, even you, the kind of American who subscribes to this newsletter—are nonetheless so steeped in ideology that we can not see our eccentricities as anything but perfectly normal and natural.

You know who can? Our next-door neighbors, especially the Mexicans, who have been subject to American hegemony for as long as Mexico has existed, and who consume our media and culture with a mix of admiration, amazement, pity, and disgust—depending on which Mexican you ask, of course. And if you read any of Mexico’s literary giants writing on the subject, something starts to dawn on you: The quirks and complexes that constitute Americanness are actually just as pronounced, if not more so, among liberals and leftists, people who like to think it’s only cowboy types that “act American.”

The observational study of the American mind, in the vein of de Tocqueville, is a cottage genre of its own in Mexican lit. The finest specimen I’ve encountered is by José Agustín, the polarizing novelist, playwright, and public intellectual who died in 2024. The architect of a new wave of bad-boy rock-and-roll literature in the 1960s called la generación de la onda (“the wave generation”), Agustín’s oeuvre remains entirely untranslated—shocking, given his god-like status in Mexican letters, but also not, since the subjects he deals with through dark humor and satire are so specifically about Mexico, for Mexicans.

He turns his laser-beam wit to the subject of US life and culture in Ciudades Desiertas (“Deserted Cities”) from 1982, a romantic misadventure drawn from his time at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. The narrator Eligio, an insufferable know-it-all and an obvious self-deprecating avatar of the author, winds up in the “horizontal” little town of Arcadia in hot pursuit of his wife, the mercurial writer Susana, who accepted the Program’s invitation because she was sick of his shit and wanted to disappear. Eligio’s first impressions include many of the talking points you’d expect from a Mexico City elitist plopped down in the sticks: “When they make jokes about the dumb country bumpkins of the United States,” he narrates (my translation), “it’s always about the people from here”—a land of “shriveled, insipid corn cobs.”

But he also cuts to the bone with passing details that might at first seem inconsequential. After Eligio’s predictably tempestuous welcome, for instance, he awakens in Susana’s spartan dorm room squinting up at “curtains that did little to mitigate the light of day.” It’s not the first or second time I’ve heard a Mexican wonder why the hell we don’t put proper curtains on our windows—a symptom of our obsessive-compulsive early rising.

The culture shock comes hard and fast for the Program’s invitees, including Altagracia, the chainsmoking, Coltrane-loving Filipina; Hércules, the flamboyant Colombian dramaturg; Slawomir, the monosyllabic Pole with whom Susana eventually elopes; and representatives of a dozen other countries. They make the usual complaints, e.g. it’s boring and there’s no public transport (“they drive their car to the bathroom,” Susana quips), but the real disconnects are more deep-seated. Imagine, for instance, the experience of being a serious intellectual flown halfway ‘round the world and dropped into the Mickey Mouse, kid-glove culture of American higher education. On one riveting field trip through the storied sites of historic Arcadia, the Program’s director tries to lead the van full of eminences in a medley of school-bus songs. “That’s when we discovered the dark side of the Program,” Eligio muses. “It’s a daycare!”

Equally infantilizing is the we-are-the-world multiculturalism to which such a program is prone. On another outing, they are shepherded to a meet-and-greet with the Program’s elderly patrons where they are asked to dress folklorically and sing songs from their motherland. Hércules, drunk and egged on, gets up and starts singing a campy Spanish showtune, peeling off articles of clothing in front of the increasingly scandalized WASPs. Just as he reaches his pants zipper, the Program director, frantically applauding with a panicked smile on his face, thanks him and calls off the exercise.

But even the book’s self-styled sympathizers suffer from that fundamentally American, bipartisan distortion of the mind: what the kids these days call Main Character Syndrome. Eligio realizes this during his fling with an idealistic grad student, in a scene where he becomes increasingly drunk and hostile watching her friends argue over Ronald Reagan at a bar: “They said we were living on the edge of fascism, superfascism even, considering that the US is a superpower. These niños, Eligio thought. At the end of the day they still think this giant refrigerator they call home is the center of the world, and they can’t imagine it otherwise.”

“Dumb ass kids,” he continues. “Sure they’re nice enough, but they’re just so god damn gringo. Too uniform even down to their uniforms.”

Uniformity. An accusation made more interesting for flying in the face of the American notion that we’re a nation of rugged individualists. But it’s actually a common one—and one put forth with equally devastating elán by Jorge Ibargüengoitia, in his book-length travelogue, Viajes en la América Ignota (“Voyage Through America Unknown,” also untranslated). Ibargüengoitia, another late literary titan and perhaps Mexico’s funniest writer, may be more familiar to Anglo readers (though not by much). His best novel, The Dead Girls—an extremely dark comedy about two real-life, serial-killer sisters—was reissued in English in 2018, then turned into a Netflix series.

Viajes en la América Ignota, published in 1972, also narrates the author’s encounter with the liberal arts, during a teaching stint at a language-learning institute in California. The book is full of awkward dinner parties where the food is as lifeless as the conversation. Everyone is weird and anti-social, resulting in a constant stream of mishaps. When he finds himself invited to a colleague’s house (“we’ll call him Frankenstein, on account of his appearance and his mental agility”), the colleague makes the fatal mistake of opening the door and having the narrator enter first, unannounced. “I entered the abode at the moment when Mrs. Frankenstein was feeding Baby Frankenstein,” he writes. “She, sensing that somebody had entered, turned her head, and upon seeing a stranger, seemed to think that she’d come face-to-face with Jack the Ripper. The bowl fell from her hands, broke, and sent apple sauce flying. We were still staring at each other, paralyzed by terror, when Frankenstein entered to clarify the situation.”

But the really good stuff, when Ibargüengoitia digs into this idea of uniformity, comes when he lands in Washington, DC, where the streets are crawling with rats and people whom “the city’s founders would never have imagined in their wildest nightmares.” He, too, runs through the laundry list of standard objections: the breakfast options, for instance (“a pair of eggs, fried, scrambled, or boiled, served with something that isn’t meat strictly speaking, though it was at some point”). And the general lack of joie de vivre, especially among the city’s many internationals, who, “no matter to which caste they belong,” all have the same thing to say: “that they’d come to Washington out of necessity, leaving a better life behind.”

But what fixates him is this paradoxical existence of such severe dysfunction and disorder in a culture otherwise obsessed with order. Of note, of course, is the abundance of signs telling people what to do (walk, don’t walk, don’t smoke, keep off), and the docility with which pedestrians obey. But he’s also shocked, for instance, when the “seventy-two” traffic lights outside his hotel room go out, and he watches “twenty-five” transit police suddenly storm the busy intersection. “Not only were there twenty-five of them,” he writes, “but each one carried on their belt, on top of the whistle, a pistol, baton, handcuffs, canisters of tear gas and mace, and a telephone!”

“Order, which is one of the reasons why the United States has come to be the most prosperous country in the world,” he continues, “is also the reason why North Americans do so much tourism. Order is convenient, but incredibly boring. It affects one’s nerves to the extent that one ends up sleeping ten hours a night.”

But where do these proclivities come from? Álvaro Enrigue sets out, in part, to answer this question with Now I Surrender, from earlier this year, a genre-bending novel about the Apache Wars along the US-Mexico border that continues his decades-long exploration of the limits and possibilities of historical fiction. It jumps back and forth from the 1830s to now, blending gun-slinger drama with postmodern commentary and memoiristic passages about his life and travels in the US. And in doing so, it traces the American mindset to foundational myths that crystallized at this crucial juncture in the intertwined formation of both Mexico and the US.

I found the first-person stuff a little navel-gazing and tacked on, like he wanted to write a straight-up Western but couldn’t bring himself to cross the minefield of clichés. I admire the ambition, however, of trying to write a Western that is also a critical treatise on the Western. And the core storyline, which follows a young Mexican woman named Camila living in a frontier-town backwater, is full of spot-on social critique that throws both country’s hypocrisies into relief.

Following the death of her husband, the elderly rancher Don Leopoldo, Camila moves in with his son, an agronomist newly returned from a Massachusetts university where he absorbed the credo that “to worship God was to build wealth.” When the “ruminant scientist,” to Camila and the servants’ shock and awe, rolls into town with his gringa wife and two children, he leaps from the wagon coach and starts unloading the family’s luggage himself “without a word of greeting,” and the whole family marches in the door “like cattle.” Nobody in the town had ever seen a criollo—a white Mexican—carry anything, let alone three valises at once.

And the wife cooks—herself! Another exotic and unheard-of custom in a country which, then as now, has retained aspects of its feudal patronage system. The daughter of a Quaker dairy farmer, Mistress Prudence is a sort-of ur-figure that embodies the Mexican view of the American zealot, whose life is an “orgy of self-inflicted suffering in the name of Quaker thrift,” Enrigue writes. She is a spiritual ancestor to both the joyless, deprived worker drones we meet on Ibargüengoitia’s trip to Washington, DC, and to the liberal do-gooders of Agustín’s University of Iowa, who so badly need to be heroes that save the world. Uniting the two in one gesture, Enrigue describes the “rattlesnake-like relish” with which she denies her children sweets—a sign of both spiritual strength and a protest against sugar’s chattel-slave economy.

“I wonder whether I myself am cruel in my descriptions of white Protestants,” Enrigue writes, in one of the passages where he tears down the fourth wall. “To lift up one thing is to tear down another, and one must remain vigilant, I suppose.” I too am wary of my own myopia even in writing this, which I have tried to make into something more than a self-flagellating essay about why Americans are bad and Mexicans are good. That would be dishonest, a simple inversion of the same-old dialectic. What I’m trying to say is that there are plenty of Americans who might agree that something in this country is deeply broken, while still leaving unexamined their deep-seated “American-ness.” Sometimes you need an outside opinion, someone who, as these authors so uncannily do, can break the spell disguising the absurdity of things you thought were normal. Reading them yourself might be a good first step on the long road to recovery.

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Speaking of the border, I wrote a review for The Border Chronicle of the “Chicano gothic vampire epic” Filth Eaters, and about our 200-year literary love affair with the vampire genre. I hope you will read and enjoy.

City of Rats may be an indie bestseller, but you wouldn’t know it from the usual literary sites, not one of which has covered it since the English translation came out in March. But the 1979 novella, an absurdist animal fable by the late Argentine provocateur Copi, né Raúl Damonte Botana, has caused quite a stir on Goodreads, that all-powerful, though not exactly high-brow, reviews site. Three excerpts will suffice to sum up the sentiment:

“This could have been a surreal and amusing adventure, certainly gross and boundary-pushing in many ways,” wrote one reviewer. “But ultimately one or two pages did irreparable harm and soiled the story for me.”

“I want to preface this with I am not a prude,” wrote another. “But a fable is supposed to have a moral lesson, which there wasn’t.”

“I’m not subversive enough for this,” wrote a third.

Copi was unknown to English-language readers until just two years ago, when Inpatient Press—slogan: “we publish what others don’t”—published the English version of The Queens’ Ball, his equally unhinged crime novel set amid the extravagant gay underworld to which he belonged. Seizing on its runaway success, New Directions in the US and Vintage Classics in the UK followed suit with City of Rats, and now it’s found its way to the shelves of people—Americans—who don’t usually read this kind of thing.

While the Goodreads reviews in Spanish are generally favorable, these newly acquainted Anglos are clutching their pearls. They seemed to expect a whimsical romp à la Ratatouille, and were enjoying it fine until they got to that one scene. Hell, even I, who once gorged myself on shock-jock art films by the likes of Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, and John Waters, lost some of the color in my face. It’s the latest skirmish in that old culture war over whether it’s okay to depict extreme violence in fiction—and if so, how much; done to whom; and can it be read as condemnation or mere crass entertainment.

The book’s translator, Mexico City-based poet, illustrator, and short story writer Kit Schluter, has something to say on the subject: Écrite, la merde ne sent pas. “Shit in writing doesn’t stink.” He cited this line by Roland Barthes when we spoke on the phone last month—a visceral metaphor for the idea that however vile, they’re still just words on a page. As he argues in this, his first interview about the book, City of Rats suggests that it is fine, good in fact, to plumb humanity’s untold capacity for perversion and depravity: that we may learn something important even as we are entertained by the book’s taboo frisson.

But I’ve dwelt too long on the shock factor. City of Rats is also a wild and fanciful adventure that smuggles an incisive social critique, put forth from the perspective of the world’s most disenfranchised: animals living in the sewers and parks of Paris, who strike out in search of a far-off utopia. Dig in for an in-depth conversation on a book that, like much of Copi’s work, manages to be a bit of everything—adorable, disgusting, epic, psychedelic, joyous, wise, and terrible, all at once. And in only 140 pages.

How did you become aware of Copi’s work?

In December 2018, I went to Argentina for a poetry festival called the Festival Rural de Poesía de Lobos, outside of Buenos Aires. Every year, the organizers load up some 100 people on buses and head out to the middle of the countryside to read poems, hang out, and have a big barbecue. I was getting interested in Argentine and Uruguayan writing through friends in Mexico City—specifically in Felisberto Hernández and Mario Levrero. I realized I kept finding the same strange and delightful quality in all the Argentine fiction I was reading: an adventurousness and commitment to the imagination I hadn’t really seen anywhere else.

While I was down there, I asked the people I met for suggestions of the wildest literature in Argentina and Uruguay. Their answers included Copi, Osvaldo Lamborghini, Macedonio Fernández, and Marosa di Giorgio, among others. I read and enjoyed them all, but Copi was the one who stuck out to me most. I believe it was Pablo Katchadjian who told me about him first. You can feel a similar velocity of narration in both their books, especially in Pablo’s book, Gracias. That speed was one of the things I loved most about Copi.

Back then, I still had the energy to translate books without having a publisher yet. I translated most of The Queens’ Ball, his second novel, and sent it around. Every publisher except Mitch Anzoni at Inpatient Press turned it down because of the final scene, which contains extreme sexual violence against a child—though one isn’t sure if this actually occurs in the book, as the story spirals out into a mixture of dream and reality. Even so, it’s up there with the all-time greats of perversion. Especially since this was going to be Copi’s fiction debut in English, most publishers were hesitant to invite controversy. Mitch’s slogan at Inpatient is “we publish what others don’t,” and he certainly lived up to the motto with an enthusiasm I have appreciated.

That love of shock and scandal, which is gleeful in a way that feels almost Satanic, is a long-standing French tradition going back to writers like Bataille and the Marquis de Sade. City of Rats has that element too. Do you think there’s more to it than the shock factor, this carnivalesque inversion of what’s right and wrong?

I absolutely agree, although I think Copi’s case can be distinguished from that of Sade or Bataille. Sade is an odd example because his books are full of homosexuality and queerness—gay sex, homoerotic content all over the place—but they still feel “straight” in that the power dynamics are profoundly misogynistic, and men tend to hold the power. Bataille’s work feels more like explorations of good and evil, morality, universalized subjects like that.

In Copi, something else is going on, which puts him into a different class of thinkers. Most of his books are very explicitly queer, and Copi’s violence takes place in this context. It’s tongue-in-cheek and campy, however brutal certain scenes can be. His novels, like his plays and comics, essentially troll bourgeois sensibility.

City of Rats would be a funny first exposure to Copi, because this queerness isn’t immediately apparent, and if you aren’t aware of his sympathies or orientations, certain scenes meant to lampoon societal problems might come off as vulgar reaffirmations of them. Copi was no Bukowski, more of a John Waters. His artistic community was largely queer, full of cross-dressing and gender play, and this is an important underpinning to City of Rats with all its campy dress-up, which often feels like a wink at drag. Copi’s plays are full of travesti culture, which is a hard term to define in English. We don’t have a word for it: the literal translation would be “transvestite” or “crossdresser,” but there’s something far more innate about the word in Spanish.

I know that in Mexico, at least, travesti is a term people still use in an empowered, intentional way. It doesn’t carry the same prejudice.

Exactly. Writers like Camila Sosa Villada are using and claiming the term very deliberately. But in English it’s starting to catch on. Shook, the translator who did Mario Bellatín’s book, Kawabata, the Writer, the Travesti Philosopher, and the Fish, chose to keep the word as is, which I thought was a very interesting choice, to inject that empowered term into English. Kit Maude did the same in his translation of Sosa Villada’s Bad Girls. In any event, it sits somewhere between English’s “transvestite” and “trans.”

Back in Copi’s time, though, these terms didn’t exist in the same way, and moreover, queer culture was pushed more to the margins of legality than it is today. Copi filled his novels with these communities. In The Queens’ Ball, there’s a gang of travesti sex workers who commit both crimes and acts of love with glee, hysteria, and a caricatural sense of irony.

There’s a passage in The Queens’ Ball where Copi laments the state of medicine and science, and goes on to say that if science had been further along, he would have started hormonal treatments to transition when he was young. Keep in mind, this is in 1978. He regrets having a large Adam’s apple, body hair, and a beard he can’t get rid of. The Queens’ Ball is a love story about falling in love with someone who then chooses to transition—and in classic Copi fashion, it’s full of sloppy, contrary emotions as he watches his partner Pietro undergo these changes. It’s the kind of deeply messy tale that people don’t tend to write these days; but then again, I don’t think many were writing this kind of thing before Copi.

The characters in City of Rats are forced underground in an even more literal sense, into the sewers of Paris. That’s an interesting aspect of the anthropomorphic genre—a long tradition spanning from Animal Farm (1945) to Watership Down (1972), Redwall (1986), and Ratatouille (2007) of course. These animals are almost always an oppressed underclass.

When you set a story in the world of animals, the reader tends to expect a moral parable: the tortoise and the hare—two animals that embody (and trouble) their respective traits in order to teach you a lesson. Animal stories teach lessons, generally. So, you go into City of Rats expecting that, and then it swerves into completely different territory—almost an anti-moral tale—which makes it particularly disarming.

Your short story collection from 2024, Cartoons, is full of animals, too.

It has a lot of animals, and it also has objects, which can be used in a similar way. I like to use objects and animals because they’re a nice shortcut to symbolism. You call someone feline, you know exactly what it means. You say someone’s like a golden retriever, you know how that person is going to be. So you place a cat or a golden retriever in a story, and it’s easy to tell an emotional story by meeting or breaking the reader’s expectations about how these animals should behave or be treated.

Returning to Copi, though: the rat is a clear symbol of the lowest of the low in Parisian society. And the rats are joined by a cast of other characters who represent the most disenfranchised humans in all of Paris: you’ve got Mimile, the vagrant; the two-year-old orphan they find under a bridge; women freed from a mental institution; hordes of liberated prisoners. I feel like City of Rats is Copi code-switching from this queer society of sex workers and travestis to animals living under a bridge.

Not to give away the plot, but this is also a story about revolution. About the meek inheriting the earth. And that kind of rhymes with something like Animal Farm, but also in a different sense with His Name Was Death, the 1947 Mexican sci-fi novel you translated, about a man who realizes that mosquitoes are actually a hyper-intelligent race who rule the Earth.

In His Name Was Death, the mosquitoes are bloodsucking fascists looking to kill off ninety percent of humans, put the other ten percent in blood-tributary camps, and rule through force and disease. So the books offer two sides of a coin: His Name Was Death is about totalitarian rule and City of Rats is utopian—it’s about seeking freedom for the disenfranchised. They go on this quest across the ocean to found the City of Rats, a place where they can live happily. It’s like Noah’s Ark but it includes the entire underbelly of Paris.

The book’s narration has this amazing meta conceit, which is that it consists of letters from the rat protagonist, Gouri, addressed to his “master” Copi, who we are told then rendered them from ratspeak into human language. So it has all these fake translator’s notes that are actually just Copi joking around, as well as all these grammatical and linguistic quirks, since it’s supposed to be the voice of a rat trying to sound erudite. What was it like shepherding such an eccentric style into English?

One important thing is that the book opens with a note from Copi—as many of his novels do—which basically says: if you want writing that adheres to proper French grammar, look elsewhere. Copi was writing in his second language; his French is inflected a lot by Spanish. He’ll use Spanish idioms that don’t exist in French, and he loves run-on sentences, which contribute to that feeling of velocity, that speed I felt was very important to maintain in translation. With many other authors I’d cut sentences up, but given Copi’s opening note warning the reader that the language is not going to behave, it permitted me to translate in a way that appears more loose—but which was actually as neurotic and considerate of every comma, period, and semicolon as my approach to, say, Marcel Schwob.

As far as the voice of Gouri the rat, I was guided by the tale of how he enters Copi’s life: Copi is depressed, goes to a bar, sees this little rat baby on the street, picks him up, they have a drink together, everyone coos over the rat. They go back to Copi’s apartment, Copi falls asleep dead drunk, and he wakes up to Gouri lugging over a book to him from his library, poking him until he wakes up. Then Copi starts reading to him—and he eventually reads his entire library out loud: H.G. Wells and other greats of English literature, Spanish poetry. Gouri sees Copi as his teacher; he calls him cher maître, dear master, dear teacher.

I wanted Gouri’s voice in the letter to be a constant appeal to that vision he has of Copi, as if he were trying to impress his old teacher with his wisdom, but frequently falls flat. A comical voice that reflects how this rat thinks he’s a great reader, a grand intellect, but his descriptions of the world are totally at odds with reality. And there’s Copi, the translator of the letters, editing him for concision, cutting out passages he thinks are boring, ridiculous, or self-indulgent.

You mentioned that the Goodreads reviews are full of angry people who bought this book thinking it would be Ratatouille 2, not realizing it’s actually super fucked up.

I know it’s silly, but this has probably been my favorite thing to talk about lately: the plummeting rating and readers decrying how horrific the book is. I think they’re missing the sympathies of the book. I think one possible takeaway is that if society is going to achieve freedom, even murderers and pedophiles must be granted a certain freedom (a friend suggested this to me the other day)—not freedom to kill or abuse, but liberation from the social structures that drive people to kill and abuse in the first place. More of an abolitionist take. The characters in City of Rats move through a world that hates them and wants them dead. Mimile, the character guilty of the book’s worst transgressions, is executed by the French state; that’s noted in one of Copi’s translator notes, but for some readers that’s not enough.

This is a camp, utopian book—not a utopia for the “Good,” but for what is frequently deemed the “Bad”: it is for the absolutely disenfranchised, for people without money or freedom or upward mobility, for the mentally ill, the criminal, for the pests and vermin. I find it interesting that some of the most scandalized reactions seem to be coming from what might be perceived as a liberal progressive perspective, in which the characters must be defended as if they were real humans. But these are words on a page.

My favorite quote in the history of literature is Roland Barthes: Écrite, la merde ne sent pas—written, shit doesn’t stink. Shit in the real world is a different thing. This is one of those great old debates. It goes far back, and it relates to Sade especially, who to this day gets torn to shreds by people who believe his work inspires violence, as if the representation of violence were equivalent to perpetrating the violent act described. In France, you’re not legally allowed to display his books in bookshop windows. I think art exists on a separate plane, and should remain a free space to depict anything at all. Narration does not equal endorsement. And once we take away that freedom from the space of art, we’re already mid-slide down a very slippery slope.

Copi’s plays received some nasty reviews in his lifetime and scandalized people then. So it is fitting that he continues to scandalize certain people today, and as his translator, my responsibility is not to tone things down in fear of these reactions. When I first sent my translation in for evaluation by Copi’s brother, who runs the estate—an art historian twenty years younger than the author, who actually lived with him in Paris—he said something like: “The first thing I did was go straight to the end of The Queens’ Ball and read your translation of that scene, because I wanted to know if you were going to censor the scene. I was glad that you didn’t.”

Anyhow, I feel like I’ve focused a lot on violence and darkness, and what I love most about Copi is the balance—that all affects happen at once. There may be that nasty quality, but in the very same scene, there’s something extremely funny, something nostalgic, something over the top, something sad, something drenched in love. Especially in The Queens’ Ball, it all happens simultaneously. Copi’s novels are like a Möbius strip of every emotion. I don’t know any other writer who pulls that off.

For more background on Copi’s personal life, check out Federico Perelmuter’s excellent review of The Queens’ Ball for Southwest Review. And for more anthropomorphic animals, check out my 2021 Baffler essay on His Name Was Death, the 1947 Mexican sci-fi novel Kit translated, about one man’s encounter with fascist mosquitoes in the jungles of Chiapas. Or you can grab a copy of Kit’s short-story collection, Cartoons, which also has some wonderfully absurd barnyard tales.

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City of Rats
By Copi
Translated by Kit Schluter
New Directions
2026

My most unfortunate quirk, and I have many, is that I am incapable of napping unless I am at or near the beach. Maybe it’s the rhythm of the waves, the energy-sapping effect of the sun and the swims, or simply the respite from my paranoia that I owe somebody, somewhere, an email. So when I’m looking for a “beach read,” I tend to reach for books that feel like taking a nap: effortless, a little fanciful, but with a gravitational pull that, like a tuckered-out toddler in the car home, you are powerless to resist.

As subjective as that definition may be, it more or less fits all of the picks in this second edition of Separator’s beach read recs, selected by five friends of our humble newsletter: Noah Hurowitz, Separator editor and Intercept reporter; Kevin Lozano, my former Nation editor now at Bloomberg; Daniela Montenegro, buyer for my favorite bookstore, Viento Helado, in Xalapa, Mexico, where I live when I’m not in New York; José Luis Sabau, editor-in-chief of the excellent Mexico City-based literary journal Perpetuo; and Jennifer Wilson, New Yorker staff writer and book critic. I hope you’ll find something to put you in the beachside state-of-mind you seek.

—Max

The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn (1992–2012)

I found myself amused, for a time, by the social media trope of Boyfriend Reading About JFK’s Assassination at the Beach—mostly because that’s me. But last year when we recommended beach reads here on Separator, Max roundly rejected my pitch for Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, a 923-page auto-historical opus about the author’s kooky expat friend group fleeing Romania to Greece during World War II. I remain undeterred.

On a recent trip to the Korean spa, I dragged with me the collected Patrick Melrose novels—Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992), Some Hope (1994), Mothers Milk (2005), and At Last (2012)—Edward St. Aubyn’s masterpiece series of semi-autobiographical fiction, and found it to be the perfect companion for swanning about on day beds in between shvitzes. The individual books, more like long-ish sections within the collection rather than standalone novels, follow young Patrick from a childhood of horrifying abuse by his sadistic, aristocratically layabout father through a dizzying drug binge in 1980s New York and, in the final three books, Patrick’s attempts to wrestle with his relationship to his parents and to himself. We’re talking 800-plus pages of neurosis, amphetamine psychosis, and the rotting dregs of British high society, but boy is it a page-turner.

Noah Hurowitz, editor of Separator, reporter for the Intercept, and author of El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Drug Lord

Transcription by Ben Lerner (2026)

When I interviewed Ben Lerner for New York earlier this year, he joked that his new novel Transcription “wasn’t a fucking beach read.” I get what he means: a book about COVID, alienation, fatherhood, and smartphones is hardly the kind of work we associate with breezy, sunsoaked reading. But I’ve wondered in the weeks since the novel came out if it is indeed going to be this year’s book of the summer? On the unusually hot spring day I set out to write this blurb, I saw at least three people reading Lerner’s slim new novel on the G train (it clocks in at under 200 pages) and part of that has to do with it being a buzzy book of course.

Still, I’ll pitch it as something you’ll want to put in your beach bag or carry-on luggage: the summer, despite its connotations of relaxation, is a season I always associate with some amount of suffering, some amount of ennui. It’s too hot to form coherent thoughts; it never turns out the way you want it. Transcription, in this way, might give a different meaning to the desolation that pervades the summer. It’s an oddly emotional book, one that I can now honestly say brought tears to my eyes. In a way it’s too real—the sort of book you should want to read any season, but feels especially powerful as the sun is beating down on you.

Kevin Lozano, a writer and editor from Queens, New York

Penguin Island by Anatole France (1908), translated by Arthur Wade Evans

The ideal beach read for me contains three things: something to laugh at (you are, after all, enjoying yourself under the sun), something to look forward to (i.e., it has to be interesting enough so you don’t willingly forget it back home), and something to ponder (you know, some moments where you let the book rest on your chest and look into the ocean in search for the meaning of life). Anatole France’s Penguin Island does all that. In a way, it’s a pity the book isn’t well known outside of obscure French literature professors—even if the author won the Nobel.

The book is a satire where an elderly priest arrives to—you guessed it—an island full of penguins. He confuses them with humans and proceeds to baptize them. Then, God and the angels do the only reasonable thing: they turn all the penguins into humans and let them live out their lives in peace. What follows is a creative reconstruction of human history from the Stone Age to the advent of the military-industrial complex. May you laugh between margaritas, carry it with you at all times, and ponder if you descend from an odd race of penguins in the end.

José Luis Sabau, editor-in-chief of the Mexico City-based literary journal Perpetuo

Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg (2026)

In April, I interviewed the writer Emma Copley Eisenberg on The New Yorker Radio Hour about her new short story collection, Fat Swim. It’s the perfect summer book, attuned to all the ways the warmer months make us hyperaware of our bodies and the cultural baggage that comes along with them (even more so in the era of Ozempic). This is a full meal of fiction, including some of the steamiest sex scenes I’ve come across in a while. As the grimy, oppressive moistness of summer unleashes itself, so too do other wetnesses. Dive in!

Jennifer Wilson, staff writer at The New Yorker

Rage by Sergio Bizzio (2004), translated by Amanda Hopkinson

A few years back, a friend told me, “Read Rage, by Sergio Bizzio”—in that order: first the novel, then the author. And when I finally got around to it, I couldn’t stop reading Sergio Bizzio, in that order: first the author, then anything else he wrote that I could get my hands on. In his now classic novel, we follow close behind the construction worker José Maria—extremely close behind, I might add—who, after murdering his boss, takes refuge in the mansion where his girlfriend works. This great crime novel (summer’s always the ideal time for a crime novel) is an exacting portrayal of a specific era in Buenos Aires, and is a great entry point to one of the finest writers of contemporary Argentine literature. Read Rage, by Sergio Bizzio. Read Sergio Bizzio.

Daniela Montenegro, founder and buyer for Viento Helado, a bookstore in Xalapa, Mexico specializing in international and Latin American literature

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MORE beach reads, you say? Revisit our recs from this time last year courtesy of Andrew Ryce, Kit Schluter, Madeline Leung Coleman, and Vita Dadoo.

Long-time subscribers may notice that one name has appeared over and over in the pages of this newsletter: Stacey Levine. Her novel Mice 1961 was one of the first books I reviewed on Separator way back in June, when it caused a stir in the literary world as a Pulitzer finalist that almost nobody in the establishment seemed to have heard of. (It was also included in my best-of 2025 books list.)

And then another Levine book, her debut 1997 novel Dra—, provided the opening anecdote for my recent essay about unemployment. Now, I got the chance to explain in depth why I’m so obsessed with this absurdist genius and Seattle cult favorite in the form of a profile for Literary Hub, on the occasion of Mice 1961 getting picked up for wider reissue by the HarperCollins imprint Ecco.

Stacey is an underground legend with a long CV of whimsical side projects, including a spoken-word record for the era-defining Washington label Kill Rock Stars; a puppet opera scored by one-time Nirvana collaborator Lori Goldston; and a chapbook, available via PayPal directly on her home page, called JFK vs. Predator, an “illustrated short story that skewers the 1980s action/horror movie monster Predator while puzzlingly tracing Jackie Kennedy Onassis’ interior thoughts at an NBA game.”

But she's also a voracious and omnivorous reader, and we touched on the finer points of her defiantly anti-commercial writing style as well as the research process behind Mice 1961, which follows a day in the life of two reclusive sisters in an uncanny Floridian dimension at the height of Cold War hysteria. I hope you will read and enjoy.

Mice 1961
Published by Verse Chorus Press (2024)
Reissued by Ecco (2026)
Order your copy here

I recently watched the first episode of Neighbors, the A24 and HBO docuseries about neighborly disputes, which makes Judge Judy’s plaintiffs and defendants look like Care Bears. The episode follows a feud between two archetypal figures of the MAGA era: a QAnon truther who in 2016 moved his family to the Montana plains to raise horses, build a bunker, and ride out the impending plague/war/whatever; and a relative newcomer, a TikTok-famous blacksmith and standard-issue homesteader hoping to raise his many blonde children, presumably away from the influence of gender ideology et al.

Tensions arise. The blacksmith doesn’t like the QAnon guy’s horses stomping through his property, so he builds a gate across a formerly public road to keep them out. This draws into the fray a handful of neighbors with a longer tenure in the area, who are, naturally, armed to the teeth. About five minutes in, the narrative cuts to security cam footage of one of these veteran homesteaders chasing the new guy’s children down the dusty road in front of their home in a camouflaged war machine, only to emerge from his vehicle squealing, with the blood-curdling acrimony of someone who’s dead fucking serious, “I’ll shoot you dead, bitch!” That’s when I had to turn it off.

I am not easily disturbed, nor do I have illusions about humans’ capacity for cruelty. I watch horror films to drift off to sleep, counting axe murders like sheep. But where horror pivots on some rare event that interrupts the order of things—and provides the jolt of unreality I seek—I found the violence here unwatchable precisely because it is that order of things. In the news, on TikTok, when I look out my window at a fistfight over a parking spot, all I see are rage-blind Americans willing to annihilate themselves to deprive others of whatever they believe they’re owed.

Our nation’s view of itself, whether set against the log cabin or the cul-de-sac, has always been a solitary one: striving families barricaded into homes surrounded by hostiles. But now, as the bug-out bunker, off-grid commune, privatized gated community, even the cruise ship become the only places where we feel safe, the little sociality we have left—the human bonds that make life worth living—risks eroding altogether.

Neighbors have beef everywhere. But the sheer ill will and atomization that drive the conflict in a show like this—these are not the symptom of some universal human nature playing out in a cycle that inevitably runs its course. This isn’t “boys being boys,” and it isn’t normal. It represents an American idiosyncrasy, the result of a spiritual rot whose stink and rank pettiness is unmatched pretty much anywhere else in the world. The history of humanity is a history of evil, and even Americans can’t claim a monopoly on that. But the specific complexes that beset our national culture have led to a condition that is in fact singular, and whose seriousness can not be exaggerated, which is that of a yawning and abject loneliness.

How the hell did we get here? I have of late increasingly dedicated my work as a writer to this question. And amazingly, I found one of the most convincing explanations I’ve heard in Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler’s landmark 500-page work of literary criticism from 1960, newly reissued by NYRB. Charting the history of American narrative from the late 18^th century to the post-war period in which it emerged, the book is considered controversial for its sweeping and flamboyant statements, informed by Marxist and Freudian tendencies to boil everything down to class war or sexual repression. And while I am no expert in American lit—and therefore unprepared to confirm or deny the finer points—I detected no lies in the overall gist of Fiedler’s theory of American everything. It may not unlock every door to the hallways of our dark and twisted psyche, but by my count, it’s the closest thing we have to a skeleton key.

The Last of the Mohicans (1826). The Scarlet Letter (1850). Moby-Dick (1851). Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The Great Gatsby (1925). Absalom, Absalom! (1936). This is the canon according to Fiedler, books whose premise you may fuzzily recall from high school English. Though they may belong “in the children’s section of the library”— “their level of sentimentality that of a pre-adolescent,” he quips, he deems them Great Works often in spite of themselves. Compare their subject matter to that of early European touchstones—say, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Madame Bovary (1856), or Anna Karenina (1878)—and you may notice certain conspicuous absences: namely love, sex, and uh, women.

“In France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, even in England, spiritually so close to America, love in one form or another has remained the novel’s central theme,” he writes, “as necessary and as expected as battle in Homer or revenge in the Renaissance drama. But our great Romantic Unroman, our typical anti-novel, is the womanless Moby Dick.” What their plots do possess in droves, however, are men on the run, “harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid civilization,” he writes. And wherever they find their escape—“an island, a woods, the underworld, a mountain fastness”—it is invariably a place “where mothers do not come.”

Their predecessor, the European novel, emerged out of a specific set of circumstances, Fiedler explains: the rise of a middle class that was “Protestant, and urban, which is to say uncertain of its status and alienated from older folk literature”; the loosening of Church control and the increasing secularization of its values; and the emergence of a sexual division of labor which “left business to the male, the arts to the female.” What comes next, and this is the book’s most interesting conceptual coinage, is a social movement that spreads through this new feminized middle-class readership, though they may not have thought of it in such terms. Fiedler calls this the Sentimental Love Religion.

This sentimental tendency, if you’ll follow me through the weeds a bit longer, represented nothing less than a bourgeois uprising against Europe’s dying aristocratic class. The key advent of this form—with its new stock characters and plots—was that it transformed the medieval figure of the aristocratic knight from a sexy, virile hero into a depraved corrupter of women. (This figure has persisted as a pop-culture villain even into recent memory—think Bowser, or Lord Licorice from Candy Land.) And in his place, a new protagonist: the chaste middle-class girl who must resist his attempts at seduction, often with the help of a would-be lover who cannot actually sully her by consummating their love. This, Fiedler argues, enables the explosive popularity of a tragic suicidal figure like Goethe’s Young Werther (1774): “tears [become] the only orgasm possible to the languishing lover whose beloved is cut off from him.”

But something funny happens when the novel as a literary form starts to circulate in newly independent America, which is that even the suggestion of the possibility of seduction and violation of this pure, virginal heroine is deemed too racy for New England’s Puritan reading public. And without it, there is no struggle, no tension, no Oedipal tragedy available to the American author, no way to titillate a reading public for whom sexual passion was unspeakable.

Even Hawthorne, who wrote The Scarlet Letter—about a pregnant pilgrim woman ostracized for adultery—as a protest of Puritan social mores, can’t bring himself to describe the act itself, relegating it to events prior to the novel, “blurred by the amnesia of guilt.” But something had to drive the arc of American narrative, right? The solution: death. “As the thrill of seduction was expurgated from popular fiction and the threat of rape removed, death was more and more demanded,” Fiedler argues. Because “death, even in a form as shocking to Christian orthodoxy as self-murder, offends the bourgeois mind less than sex.”

Is it starting to click? Think about it: for the average American, the definition of liberty includes selling tools of mass murder at Walmart, but stops at the simple prospect of sexual self-expression. We churn out big-budget nuclear holocaust movies, but we’re hysterical about hearing the word “fuck” on the radio. This mindset, in many ways the same as it was in 200 years ago, accounts for the rise of our first homegrown literary movement, to which most of the works in Fiedler’s canon belong, one whose fundamental import is that, contrary to the European sentimental novel, it is a “fiction of terror rather than love”: the American gothic.

I will admit that, despite being a goth in high school, the term as a literary or artistic concept has always eluded me. For Fiedler, it is the projection of a guilt and anxiety that grew from secularization, and the existential instability it occasioned: “an inruption of darkness,” he writes, caused by “the spiritual isolation of the individual in a society where all communal systems of value collapsed or turned into meaningless clichés.” In the European tradition, this produced a set of demonic and macabre symbols (the haunted castle, the dungeon, the monster), which, when translated to a New World devoid of castles—or even any history the white man could make sense of—are remade against a backdrop of “heathen, unredeemed wilderness,” a world of outcasts where nothing is what it seems and threats lurk around every corner.

Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick’s Ishmael, and Natty Bumppo from Last of the Mohicans—the first hero of the nascent Western genre—are the ur-protagonists of the American gothic. These are Faustian figures, Fiedler argues, whose proverbial deal with the devil has granted them freedom to chase their boyish curiosity through the great unknown at the cost of their ties to any kind of community. Even love and romantic intimacy are foreclosed to these characters, save for the confused and innocent love they share with their sidekicks—typically non-white, two-dimensional foils who embody the fantasy of some wisdom untainted by civilization.

Fiedler traces this throughline as far as On the Road, a book about quote-unquote bad boys who are actually “conventional,” “law-fearing,” and “lonely middle-class fellows,” and which he didn’t seem to like very much. “The flight from sexuality led to a literature about children written for the consumption of adults,” he writes of the novel. “But the reading of that literature has turned those adults into their own inmost images of themselves into children.”

Everything that’s come after, Fiedler argues, rests on the twin pillars of gothicism (with its dark knights convinced that they alone can sense dark forces at work); and Protestant sentimentality (with its emphasis on “the personal nature of salvation”). Surely there must be blind spots in such a broad-strokes argument. For instance: how successful was this mass brainwashing effect on authors from outside the Anglo Protestant tradition? To which Fiedler responds that we’re all swimming in it whether we know it or not: “For better or worse, the children of Slavic peasants, of German revolutionaries and Jewish scholars are become alike heirs of a handful of Englishmen who settled New England.”

I will leave it to those better versed in American historiography to poke those holes, but I can say with my chest that Love and Death in the American Novel explains a lot about the unhappy Americans I see on TV nearly 70 years on: paranoid loners trying to get as far away from each other as possible; people for whom, like Hawthorne’s protagonist in The Scarlet Letter, “the whole community is revealed to him as hypocritical and evil.”

Love and Death in the American Novel
by Leslie A. Fiedler
NYRB Classics
April 2026

Whenever I have friends over for dinner, we inevitably end up listening to records in the living room, where I subject my captive audience to a show-and-tell session of highlights from my art book collection. I've accumulated some rare editions over the years, treasures that now sit on my shelf, lonely and increasingly sun-damaged. So I created this column as an excuse to pull them out and open them up for you, dear reader. Last time, I shared a round-up of precious art books about Mexico; this week, I'm wheeling out three of the strangest and most sumptuous book-objects in my collection, whose enigmatic blurring of form and content is a reminder that design can aspire to so much more than mere formatting.

Kitsch Encyclopedia
By Sara Cwynar
Published by Blonde Art Books
2014

I had no idea how valuable this was until I received an Instagram DM from a stranger—who somehow found me because I posted a photo of it years ago—offering to buy it off me for some ungodly sum. It cost me $30 and I’ve resisted selling it through moments of financial hardship. Compiled by the conceptual artist Sara Cwynar, whose films and installations conjure playful chains of association through the linkage of found photos, this project hijacks the encyclopedia format to explore the concept of kitsch—its social function as a “means through which complex human experience is distilled down to simple, sentimental motifs and ideas,” she writes. I cherish the book as a kind of mood board outlining the look and feel of kitsch as a moving visual target. But I also consult it often for quotes from thinkers who helped develop the term as a theoretical tool for understanding the relationship between imagery, power, and mass psychology, namely Milan Kundera, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes.

囍 Until Death Do Us Part 囍
By Thomas Sauvin
Published by Beijing Silvermine
2015

This one is a hit whenever I throw a party at my place—where, to some partygoers’ delight and others’ chagrin, I grant them the increasingly verboten thrill of being able to blast cigs indoors. Through the clouds of smoke, this conversation-starter is often passed hand-to-hand. Designed as a shockingly realistic facsimile of a cigarette pack, it’s a tiny found-photo book compiled by Thomas Sauvin as part of his Beijing Silvermine project, an archive of half a million negatives salvaged over the years from a Beijing recycling plant, which he combed through and turned into a series of books. This one, now on its seventh edition, documents the unexpected role cigarettes played in Chinese weddings during the ‘80s and ‘90s, which often featured smoking games involving tobacco bongs and other pulmonary party rituals where “love and death walk hand in hand,” as Sauvin puts it.

Holy Bible
By Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin
Published by MACK
2013

Another sort of trompe l’oeil facsimile, this legendary, controversial art book is a replica of the King James Bible with found-photo interventions overlaid by artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Not for the faint of art, the archive of images herein explores humanity’s darkest horrors—torture, war, abject poverty—which the photographers link to corresponding lines in the scripture. The project has been criticized as an overly general provocation about the evils of religion, but I appreciate it as an impressionistic view of how violence is baked into the founding myths of the Western world. Funny story about the signed copy you see here: it belongs to my wife Jimena (early subscribers may remember the introduction I wrote for her debut photo book) who, when it first came out, begged her manager at the time to bring her a copy from the Paris Photo fair—only for her manager to keep the damn thing herself! It took over a decade for Jime to finally get her hands on this one.

Want to ogle more art books from my archive? Check out the first column in this series, featuring three art books about Mexico.

In Dra—, the surreal debut novel by Stacey Levine, the book’s protagonist, newly of working age, receives a Kafkaesque letter from a nondescript agency called simply the Employment Office. The letter, she recalls, “first congratulated her for her desire to be employed, also stating that, though this letter was no guarantee, she might, with time and luck, land a good job, nothing promised, but that a decade hence she would surely look back at this frustrating period with a smile, at that point being deeply acquainted with the satisfactions of steady employment.”

And so she finds herself traveling the agency’s dim corridors, where, she has decided, she “would simply beg for a job.” Cracking open an office door, she is summoned by a woman who introduces herself as the Manager: “Beginning right now, you will depend completely on me to help you find one. Does that disturb you? It might. Yet, it’s so very common for us to depend on others for our jobs, or even for our sense of self, do you know what I mean?”

There are two options in the Manager’s file: “new jobs, never before offered to an employee; and both were excellent jobs, exciting too, as well as devastatingly lonely.” One is at a “remote encampment that dealt with the research and classification of dust”; the other is a “more centrally located site focused upon the monitoring and maintaining of a small water pump.”

“If you choose a worksite quickly,” the Manager continues, “you’ll be able to escape the burden of uncertainty, at least for a while. Oh, it’s always so good to choose—choosing is healthy for the entire body, the newscasters say; why, the very idea of choosing implies release.”

The book—which, incidentally, I’m reading for a forthcoming profile of the author (more on that later)—was published in 1997, nearly thirty years ago. And while today’s job seekers must trawl more internet byways than the hallways of such faceless institutions, the feelings it so uncannily evokes are timeless:

The absurdity of embarking on this great rite of passage, your entry into the working world, with all the ceremony of a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The indignity of smiling through the shit on your teeth at the kind-sounding notion of “depending on others” when what they actually mean is you’re completely at their mercy. The anxiety of trying to pitch yourself to some infinitely wiser and more experienced Manager, who is probably making note of how unwise and unprepared you are, stuttering as if on stage in a bad dream, naked, afraid, unable to remember the next line. But also... the excitement! The promise! Of facing a fork in the road that could lead you anywhere, maybe dead in a ditch—maybe the next president of the United States.

If anything, we feel all these things even more exquisitely as we enter an era where the word “precarious” has started to seem like an understatement. That much is clear from Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt. Out next month via progressive imprint OR Books, it’s a multi-genre anthology of essays, creative nonfiction, and zine-style book art compiled by Rachel Meade Smith, the writer and editor behind Words of Mouth, the widely circulated job listings newsletter for creative and adjacent fields. The book’s entries were culled from more than 1,100 pitches in response to an open call for musings and meditations on the subject of the job hunt. The result is a collection that, mercifully, goes beyond the impotence, injustice, and inadequacy felt by many of us in the ranks of the un- and underemployed, to ask how wage work can realistically square with the pursuit of a good and decent life.

According to my impeccable color-coded spreadsheet, I’ve applied to 63 jobs since 2020, when I graduated from journalism school into peak COVID pandemic. Those first couple years, I sought editorial roles at magazines, newspapers, and online platforms, and I got interviews, even some in person. One editor ghosted me after what I thought was a great Zoom interview, ignoring three of my follow-ups. Another sent me a laborious writing exercise, on a Saturday, to be completed by Monday, which I took as a red flag and bailed. One publisher of a certain progressive online art mag interrupted me mid-response to say I looked “bored” because I wasn’t making eye contact with the camera, and when I inquired about salary, asked if I’d even read the job description.

I wound up back at Columbia Journalism School as an admin, in a department with so few employees that I could go a whole day without speaking to anyone other than my boss. I ate lunch alone, and once received an evaluation saying my clothing was inappropriate, so I had to buy a new business casual uniform. I left a few weeks after October 7, 2023, when they locked down the campus and the institution began its spiral towards complete subservience to the Trump administration et al. My lifeline came in the form of an offer for an agency-style copywriting job that, thank god, promised to finally endow me with the skills and experience to make me a productive member of society.

That job ($75,000 with benefits) was cut to part-time hours after a year ($37,000, no benefits). Then, I received an email out of nowhere about a copyediting gig I’d applied to years prior, saying they needed to fill the position again. It is part time, but the hourly is excellent and it leaves me time to write this blog you’re reading now, while, of course, continuing to apply for full-time employment. I’m surviving on half of the income required to live well in New York, thanks to the generosity of my gainfully employed partner, plus pocket money from occasional articles for little magazines.

What I learned from Search Work is that much of my private turmoil, whether during periods of underemployment or while adjusting to full-time corporate life, is actually quite universal. In Jasper Nathaniel’s essay, he writes about the whiplash of living a double life as a tech consultant and a journalist covering settler violence in the West Bank. It opens with a harrowing fake-out:

I am on a Zoom call, discussing the growing sales infrastructure at the startup I consult for—how we’d supplemented HubSpot with ZoomInfo and Gong, giving us visibility into each stage of the funnel, the ability to leverage historical data to forecast at both the individual and team level, to plan the business accordingly—when I get a text from a source in Masafer Yatta: Yinon Levi had shot someone dead.

His apparent fluency in tech’s dystopian euphemisms only drives home how insignificant work can feel when your right hand is doing stuff that matters. Many of us with interests outside work, even those that aren’t life and death, experience a cleavage that feels even stranger and more dishonest when, as in Jasper’s case, the real you has values and beliefs that might get you fired. Watching people react with a deluge of Zoom heart emojis to a coworker’s bake sale fundraiser for victims of October 7, there’s a part of him that’s ready to be deemed unhireable. “Once this company fires me,” he writes, “I pray I won’t be able to find the next one.”

Most of us work to eat, pay rent, and receive medical care. But a job can also nourish our existential needs: to belong, to be seen for who we are, to learn, to grow, to help and be helped. My favorite piece in Search Work, Kasia Nikhamina’s essay about her first few jobs as a Columbia work-study student, is a reflection on the things that make having a job alright—rote and repetitive as it may be.

She recalls one paralegal gig fresh out of college which, though not glamorous, was a place where you didn’t have to hang up your soul at the door. There were “lunch picnics on the Astroturf field behind the office, birthday breakfasts, elaborate baked goods just because, mix CDs, dramatic readings of old wire transcripts and spam faxes, office olympics, and many, many inside jokes.” The bureaucratic details were annoying, sure, but they “were cancelled out by the fact that I laughed every single day.” Laughing, at work. Imagine that.

Helen Medynska’s contribution is a profile of three Ukrainian women looking for work, at home and in exile, after the full-scale Russian invasion. It’s a reminder that even in the most adverse situations (one woman accepts a job at a daycare because “the pay was decent and there was a bomb shelter inside”), seemingly immaterial considerations can still feel essential to survival. Or as Helen’s friend Olha remarked to her in the wake of such a world-shaking upheaval: “I am not who I was. But, damn, I don’t know yet who I’ll become.”

Search Work: A Collective Inquiry Into the Job Hunt
Edited by Rachel Meade Smith
OR Books
May 5, 2026

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While I have you: The Nation just published my essay on Bomarzo, the newly reissued 1962 novel by Argentine titan Manuel Mujica Lainez.

A little-known favorite of both Bolaño and Borges, it’s a strange biography of a 16th-century duke who, in an experimental twist that presaged Interview with the Vampire, chronicles his lifelong obsession with power from a place of immortality, roughly 400 years after the events of the novel take place. I hope you will read and join the cult of this mind-boggling book.

At some point the list became too unwieldy to use, so I wrote “Archive” over the old one and started a new one, where I try to include the source of inspiration or the person who suggested it. Now, when I go to log a new book, I have to scroll endlessly past the ones I want to read in order to get to the bottom. It may be a mess, but it’s my mess! And here, in no particular order, are a few recent and forthcoming titles that have raced to the top (or technically, the bottom).

Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage by Matthew Wolfe (June 23)

It amazes me how carelessly we use our phones these days. Not too long ago, I was at least tangentially involved in activist scenes during the later days of the so-called Green Scare, when the FBI classified “eco-terrorists” as the top domestic threat and sent informants to stitch up anyone they could. The (often justified) paranoia in some circles I frequented was such that it was common practice to take the battery out of our flip phones when discussing sensitive topics. The joke is that the surveillance we readily submit to now is far more sophisticated than what the feds were capable of back then.

That’s just to say that I have a personal interest in this book, in which journalist Matthew Wolfe explores the wave of radical environmental actions that swept the US—particularly western states—in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the overwhelming campaign of repression by federal law enforcement that followed.

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe (April 14)

Some books, like the one above, feel personal. For better or worse, I, unlike the young subject of Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest book, have never moved through the elite criminal underground of London posing as the son of an oligarch before dying a mysterious and violent death.

In spite of that, I am eagerly awaiting London Falling, which expands on a New Yorker story by Keefe that I devoured at the time of publication. Keefe is at his best when using a propulsive and personal core narrative to explore broader themes of how violence and structural neglect eat away at communities from West Virginia to New York’s Chinatown to Belfast. While you wait for London Falling to hit the shelves, I highly recommend checking out The Snakehead, his underrated 2009 book about Fujianese human smuggling networks.

Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History by Caroline Tracey (out today!)

My wife, roasting me for my taste in hard-boiled stories about drug lords and extremists, once joked that every title on my shelf sounds something like Hard Crime in the Upper Mountains. Well, sometimes you pick up a book not because it scratches your lifelong obsession, but because you can sense the contagious enthusiasm of an author writing about theirs.

Enter Salt Lakes by Caroline Tracey, whose writing about Mexico I’ve long admired, a journey to briny bodies of water across four continents that evokes the enigmatic beauty and precarity of these rare ecosystems. Pairing environmental reporting with probing memoir, Tracey’s diaristic narration and personal connection to the landscapes and life cycles that make up its subject matter give her work an emotional resonance not often found in science writing.

On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV) by Solvej Balle (April 14)

I devoured the first three books in Danish novelist Solvej Balle’s metaphysical detective series back in January. And the only thing worse than having to wait three months for this one, will likely be waiting who-knows-how-long for the last two entries in the seven-part serial.

The series, Balle’s magnum opus, pairs mystery with a dash of fantasy for a distinctive formula that’s roughly one part magical, three parts realism. Its heroine, Tara Selter, is cast out of time into a Groundhog Day–like existence and must reckon with her utter alienation from everyone she knew and loved before eventually setting out to figure out what the hell is going on. These books are a rare and stunning combination of “slow burn” and “impossible to put down.”

Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution by Anand Gopal (March 3)

The first time I read Anand Gopal’s first book, No Good Men Among the Living—a searing indictment of the US occupation of Afghanistan—I was so engrossed in its pages that I accidentally got on an A train going uptown instead of to Brooklyn. I only realized while pulling out of 59th Street, at which point I had no choice but to go express all the way to 125th Street in Harlem. It took me more than an hour out of my way, but hey, I got to read like, 100 pages. Time well spent.

So I had high hopes for his new one, a deep study of how the Syrian Revolution played out in the city of Manbij. This book, a process of extreme scholarly rigor resulting in an intimate, humane, and heartbreaking work of breathtaking depth and scope, far exceeded my expectations—not just for the book but for what can be accomplished in narrative nonfiction.

In Days of Love and Rage, Gopal explores the lives of a handful of men and women who took part in the initial revolt against the rule of Bashar al-Assad and follows them through the city’s liberation of itself, its experiments in radical direct democracy, the rise of ISIS, and the devastation wrought by the US-backed campaign to dislodge the Caliphate. More than perhaps any other work about the war—and I’ve read many—this book brilliantly illustrates the structural and material forces that play out on the ground, including the class divide that emerged among the city’s new leaders, and the failure of the dominant revolutionary factions to prevent landlords and traders from gouging the poor and displaced people of Manbij. Gopal accomplishes this not through dry analysis but by relating the experiences of everyday people. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s a masterpiece.

More book recs? Check out Max’s best-of 2025 picks or, if you’re looking ahead to finer climes, our list of beach reads recommended by friends of the blog.

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Putting aside the fact that I grew up in Boston and it definitely got old, I’ve chosen to engage this $7 million tourism campaign in good faith. The gist of the messaging is that Boston isn’t what you think it is, i.e. racist and old-fashioned (thus “old”). Problem is, anybody with a nose can smell that this is crisis PR to rehabilitate a toxic asset.

2 out 5 pencils: ✏️✏️

An elegantly economical way of saying: forget any of these at home and you’re fucked—you little fiend. 😜

5 out of 5 pencils: ✏️✏️✏️✏️✏️

They say you shouldn’t mix metaphors, but every rule has its exception. I love the synesthesia here, which captures the distinct potency of sound and its alchemical effect on the mind’s eye. This is one of those lines that surely felt like a “eureka.”

4 out of 5 pencils: ✏️✏️✏️✏️

(Laughing nervously) What the fuck?

0 out of 5 pencils for literal eugenics: ❌

Puns. So tempting, yet so often unsatisfactory. Why? Perhaps because when playing on phonetic or morphological similarities, copywriters often get so distracted being clever that they lose sight of whether it makes, uh, scents.

3 out of 5 pencils: ✏️✏️✏️

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Missed the last few Copywriter’s Corners? See what scored five pencils here and here.

I’m not saying I got there first—because I didn’t, and who cares—but I want to emphasize how quickly everything changed. Mexico City now has entire neighborhoods tailored to North Americans and Europeans, blocks packed with Airbnbs and Michelin-starred taco shops whose interiors are like portals to Greenpoint, Kreuzberg, or Dalston, with a Mexican twist, of course. That certain parts are overrun is old news. We’ve all read the New York Times’ ragebait headlines about US citizens “finding the American dream in Mexico.”

Where there is now an embarrassment of purpose-built tourist and expat hangouts, there was only one that I knew of back in 2014: La Legión Americana. I forget who brought me there, or if I went by myself, but it was a musty bar and burger joint operating out of—as the name implies—a former American Legion hall. The oldest of its kind outside the US, it had been founded by a group of World War I veterans about a century before, as a point of encounter for former and active US service personnel.

They still did patriotic stuff for vets every once in a while, but the actual bar had been taken over by gringo hipsters and was mostly known for DJ nights where you could smoke indoors. Come to think of it, I must have gone alone, because I didn’t know a soul that first week in the capital. I made my first friend—Florine, a fearless part-time waitress from small-town France—when I bummed a light from her on the packed little mezzanine above the dance floor. We ended up hatching a plan to take a third-class coach bus to Acapulco the following week.

In Gringos, the 1991 novel by True Grit author Charles Portis, the titular gringos have Shep’s In-Between Club. Shep’s, for short. Portis introduces the book’s ensemble cast of kooks and grifters during a deliciously topsy-turvy going-away party at the expat dive for two longtime residents of their adopted home of Mérida, the capital of Yucatán state and the peninsula’s largest city. Let me set the scene:

Peg and Vernon Crouch, the honorees, are holding court at a table full of well-wishers “taking feverish delight in their powers of speech.” Minim, a retired bowling pro who draws a meager income from publishing “short sports poems,” pauses the proceedings to recite verses he composed for the couple. Seated at the bar with a newspaper and a glass of Ron Castillo is Suarez, “an old communist who had fled Spain in 1939, only to become a fascist here in Mexico.” He corners the narrator, an ex-marine named Jimmy Burns, to share racist pseudoscience about the “great rising” he insists is near at hand. Nelms, the local lush, is going table to table complaining that Shep won’t let him pay by check, his lips “frosted with coarse grains of margarita salt.”

Mr. Nordstrom, who runs with a crew of petty criminals hustling Mesoamerican loot, waves Burns over to fence a crescent-shaped piece of engraved amber. Burns is a reformed tomb raider himself, a lone wolf living off odd jobs and transporting cargo through Mexico’s southern jungles, places inaccessible to all but the most well-equipped and adventurous couriers. The amber is a nice piece, he says, but he’s out of the game for good. We don’t encounter Nordstrom again until a few chapters later, when he’s seen in a jumpsuit sweeping Mérida’s central plaza along with the other jailbirds, having been busted in a sting for which the amber was bait.

Portis, who died in 2020—and whose relatively unsung oeuvre has since enjoyed a surge of interest—famously never gave interviews. But we know he lived on and off between his home in Arkansas and San Miguel de Allende, the now-ultra-gentrified colony for foreign retirees in central Mexico. Between the expat bubble he describes in Gringos and today’s frictionless world of remote workers with apps, the only thing the two generations have in common is they don’t really mix with Mexicans. These days, when you don’t even need passable Spanish to ask directions, haggle over taxi fare, or find a room to rent in town, it’s even easier to avoid them entirely.

The book is a time capsule from when it took gumption, and maybe a bit of insanity, for a gringo to shed the familiar comforts of home. Everyone’s either running away from something, as in Burns’s neighbors—a family from New Jersey who moved to “escape the blast from the coming nuclear war”—or desperately running toward something else. In a place like Mérida, the lingering trace of ancient civilizations attracts a motley spectrum of seekers, from bona fide Mayanists to New Agers and full-on wingnuts convinced that pyramids are UFO landing pads. What makes Gringos such a delight is that it’s not just a scene report from this long-lost weirdo world, but a genuine Heart of Darkness romp, which kicks off when a local UFOlogist goes missing and it falls to our reluctant hero, Jimmy Burns, to find him.

I ordered my copy—coincidentally, not even knowing where it took place—days before embarking on an adventure of my own, to the very same jungle where Burns’s journey leads him, in the sparsely populated lowlands of Guatemala, just across the Mexican border. Riding shotgun in a salvaged delivery van with his buddy Refugio, a wily scrap dealer and local muckety-muck, and his mentor of sorts, the gentleman adventurer “Doc” Richard Flandin, Burns winds his way south down the peninsula, following a tip that the missing man may be searching for the mythical, undiscovered City of Dawn. Groups of malnourished hippies have been spotted camping in the area (I’ll never unsee the young man “poking away at embedded ticks on his legs with the burning end of a cigarette”). Rumor has it they’re headed there too, for some kind of gathering.

I came at it from the other way: up from Guatemala City by plane to the city of Flores, then farther north by rental car, on a recent vacation with my wife and two friends. Our final destination was Uaxactún (pronounced wah-shak-toon), an ancient holy site so remote that it is the literal end of the road, home to a 2,000-year-old observatory that accurately marks the equinox and solstice paths of the sun. Nobody goes there because it’s an hour past the more famous, and already far-flung archaeological site Tikal on a treacherous packed-dirt road. The City of Dawn towards which Gringos’ arc bends, called Likín in Mayan, is a fictional composite with a striking resemblance: a pyramid topped by a T-shaped window that shines when it catches early morning rays.

Climbing the mossy steps of Uaxactún’s half-excavated temples furnished my mind’s eye with a backdrop for the hippie happening where the book’s finale takes place. Portis skewers these poor misguided kids, capturing their cosmic nonsense with hilarious fidelity: “A Scandinavian girl with hairy legs said, ‘I am not even listening to you. Your words have no more significance to me than the buzzing of flies. I am no longer hearing all these dead words floating around in the air.’”

I won’t spoil the ending, but suffice to say these hippies turn out to be more Mansonite psycho-killer than the flower power type, and by the time Burns finishes what he came to do, he swears he’s never taking another job in this jungle again. He and his stinking, mud-caked, mosquito-ravaged band of misfits stop to rest on the way home, in a village where the region’s largest river, the Usumacinta, filters into its tributary, the Tabí.

This was the last stop on our Guatemala trip, too, where we hired a boatman to ferry us to a swimming hole we’d heard of, a crater with water the color of a Bombay Sapphire bottle. Frequented by occasional vans of tour groups, it’s no secret, though if you’re driving west from the city, Google Maps will make you turn left into the chained-off entrance of a private ranch, but keep driving and you’ll see the faded sign that says Crater Azul. Proof that there is some mystery left in the world, app developers be damned.

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Gringos by Charles Portis
The Overlook Press
1991

You may have seen the meme: If English literature’s all about dying for honor, and French literature’s all about dying for love, then Russian literature’s all about, well, dying. People like to joke that Slavic stories are all about death, despair, and the dead-pan acceptance of an uncaring universe. In reality they’re just as much about life, vitality, and the elemental force that powers this big old blue and green rock: trees.

That’s the argument Sophie Pinkham makes in her new nonfiction book, The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires. The prolific Slavist is as well versed in art and literature as she is reporting on post-Soviet politics, having lived in Russia and Ukraine. In this book-length work of criticism, she marshals a library’s worth of novels, short stories, films, poetry, and folklore to chart the history of Russia and its empire, going all the way back to Baba Yaga. What these stories have in common is that they all, in one way or another, take place against the backdrop of trees. Much like the pivotal events in the region’s history—Sophie argues, convincingly and with literary élan—from the rise of Peter the Great to the invasion of Ukraine.

And the region’s writers were on the front lines for all of it. It may boggle American minds, in fact, the extent to which they not only narrated the struggle for Russia’s future, but in many ways decided it. From Pushkin onward, Slavic writers codified their politics in narrative form, using their prominence in this unusually literary culture to capture hearts and minds.

This was my favorite takeaway from The Oak and the Larch, and one of the many subjects touched upon in this in-depth interview with the author, who spoke to me from her home in Ithaca, New York, where she teaches at Cornell. The book—which you may have noticed on my best-of 2025 list—is out tomorrow, January 20, via Norton in the US and on January 29 in the UK, via William Collins.

This conversation has been edited for brevity.

I would love for you to tell me how the idea for this book was born. Were there other iterations of it before it became what it is now?

I had originally been thinking about doing a book that was more broadly about Russia and climate change, and was actually more oriented towards the future. But eventually it evolved into a project that was focused on the forest, and was actually oriented as much towards the past, including the quite deep past.

And I found myself thinking back to one of my first experiences in graduate school when I started doing a PhD in Slavic studies. I had to take this pro-seminar, this mandatory class for new grad students, where we read a story by Andrei Sinyavsky called “Tenants,” over and over, and then analyzed it in terms of different literary critical disciplines. And that story actually appears in the book.

It’s a very creepy and fantastical story about a communal apartment in the later Soviet Union that you gradually realize is tenanted not by human beings, but by different characters from Russian folklore who have been driven out of the natural world and are now kind of crammed into this unpleasant apartment, fighting with each other, casting spells on each other, maybe trying to kill each other, and so on. It’s very clever, very witty, and very powerful. The narrator is a leshii—a forest spirit, that’s one of the guiding themes of the book—and it showed how important the folklore of the forest remained even for urban Soviet intellectuals.

A lot of your work is more traditional politics reporting on the post-Soviet world. So it must have been nice for you to flex a different side, to talk about legend and folklore and storytelling, more so than just the nitty gritty of current events.

It was, absolutely. I enjoyed it a lot. That’s something that I’ve loved since childhood as a reader. And I feel as the pace of horrifying or alarming events seems to be ever accelerating, I think it simultaneously offers a lot of comfort and perspective and a deeper understanding of today’s crises when you take this much longer, deeper view.

You mentioned previously that it was complicated to write. What made it so?

I wanted the book to be something that was quite compact—it’s not an extraordinarily long book. I didn’t want to write something encyclopedic, and of course I wanted to write something that had some sense of narrative momentum, with one chapter unfolding from the next in a logical way. That was a really tricky but fascinating and exciting task from the perspective of writing narrative nonfiction.

The Russian forest is vast and the literature that has to do in some way with it is maybe even vaster, especially given the Russian penchant for “graphomania,” as it’s often called. My office was completely full of books, thousands of books from the library. And trying to, from all of those, bring out a through line that would be compelling to English-language readers was a challenge, but an exciting one.

I was struck by the parallels between the settler-colonial process in the US, and the one you describe in the Russian empire—as well as the differences. For instance, there are a lot of anecdotes about the acculturation of Russian settlers into Siberian indigenous culture, which you don’t hear about as much in the US context.

That is one of my favorite themes in the book as well, and I think something that really merits broader attention. I think there’s an issue with both Russian exceptionalism and American exceptionalism, and there are a lot of psychological barriers to understanding the strong similarities, which were conscious at the time. Not everyone remembers that there used to be Russian America, for example.

There are also a lot of climate similarities. The boreal forest is pretty similar. And then there was also this phenomenon, sort of in a mirror image, of one border of the region being settled by Europeans who then gradually started setting their sights on the large, unconquered, incredibly vast and rich unknown territory which, as we know, was certainly populated, albeit much more sparsely than the way Europeans tended to settle land.

And a really interesting thing that I think is almost completely unknown to Americans is that Russians explicitly modeled themselves on the American frontier myth in the 19th century. They were big consumers of, for example, frontier literature, authors like James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote The Last of the Mohicans, later made into a Daniel Day-Lewis film. The myth of the noble savage intoxicated them, and they started writing their own Siberian versions, conscious Siberian versions.

Your book is also about art, mostly literature, as a battleground where this nation-building project was fought over. You describe this ideological back-and-forth between environmentalists, imperialists, industrial socialists, and dissidents, who all used stories as a vehicle for their politics. Will there ever be a moment like that again?

One of the things that’s always drawn me to studying Russia is the extraordinary centrality of the arts, and particularly of literature, in Russian culture and later Soviet culture. There are few societies in the history of the world that have put art at the heart of society and also political processes in the way that particularly the USSR did. And that’s a whole story about censorship in the imperial period, which pushed political debates into literature—people learning to write between the lines and so on—and gave it a kind of exaggerated importance. But there are other threads as well.

The Soviet Union in particular viewed, in Stalin’s words, the writer as the engineer of the human soul. Art was central to the remaking of humankind. And that drew such a strong parallel between the idea that all of nature had to be subjugated to human needs. So then you see if the writer is the engineer of the human soul, and the human, or humanity at least, is going to completely tame nature, literature is going to play a central part in that taming.

But another reason that this project was inspiring to me is because it’s such an example of what an important role writers in particular, and also visual artists, play as advocates for the environment. A lot of the most important Russian and Soviet environmental movements were led by writers. There’s one writer, Leonid Leonov, who’s pretty unknown in the West but was one of the most powerful writers in the Soviet Union at that time, who more or less gave up his literary career to become a full-time forest advocate. I think there’s actually a very profound linkage between literature and the visual arts and nature. They’re portals into our understanding of nature, especially as city dwellers. I don’t think that has changed. And I think that it will have more and more importance in the future.

One of the other memorable sections for me was about the family discovered in the forests of Southern Siberia, who were uncontacted to the extent that the children had never seen bread.

This is the story of the Lykovs, a family of Old Believers—which was a sect of Orthodox Christians, many of whom retreated into the forest after a religious schism in the 17th century. But others continued farming alongside other Russians, like the Lykov family, who finally fled into the forest when the Bolsheviks came to power, and basically never came back. The children had never seen bread, they didn’t even know about World War II. They were accidentally discovered by geologists in the late 70s and became famous through Vasily Peskov’s book Lost in the Taiga. In Russia they became a focus of obsession because they seemed to represent the possibility of being immune to history, of hiding so deeply in the forest that you were in communion with nature and didn’t need anything from the outside world. They weren’t sent to the gulag, never had ration cards, never waited in line for bread.

And then the story took an interesting twist. All of them died except for one, Agafia Lykova, who is still alive, over 80, in the taiga. But she’s become this celebrity embodying the fantasy of living in complete independence with nature—except the province is spending a huge amount of money bringing her groceries by helicopter, she has an SOS button and a satellite phone, and a new house built by one of Russia’s biggest and most notorious businessmen, Oleg Deripaska. She’s become this kind of endangered species or pet. It really embodies this tension between the fantasy of total independence and the realities of living in the forest.

In your last book, Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine (2016), you talked about a nostalgic, New Age pagan strain that is very strong in the Slavic world.

Yeah, there are many different manifestations of it. There was actually one section of this current book that I ended up deleting that was about the Ringing Cedars or Anastasia movement—they have adherents actually all over Europe and some in America and elsewhere. But it’s this very dodgy writer who was a kind of post-Soviet con man, who wrote these ridiculous books about getting lost in the Siberian forest and meeting this beautiful naked girl who was living so in harmony with nature that she didn’t even need to wear clothes and the squirrels would give her food and she showed him the ringing cedar that had these magical properties. And he started selling these books which became very popular worldwide. And also, you know, selling the cedar necklaces that are supposed to keep you alive so you don’t need Western medicine, you have your cedar necklace and you drink your cedar juice, and so on.

But yeah, I think ultimately all of these fantasies boil down, on one hand, to nationalism or eco-nationalism. This is the land that gave birth to us. And since this land gave birth to us, this land can give us everything that we need to survive. And then also to the fantasy of remaining clear of politics. And that’s a big theme throughout my book, this dream of independence, which, you know, when you’ve gone through the Russian revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disasters of the 1990s, or the economic stresses of the 1990s, and now Putinism and the war in Ukraine, is understandable.

I would love to know a bit about how you pitched and sold this book. I don’t know if you encountered obstacles, whether it was anti-Russian sentiment, or if the concept of the book—given that it kind of defies genre—was hard to communicate, or if it was hard to find comparisons to other books.

There’s a big audience for books about forests now. I feel like a lot of my friends who are kind of urban intellectuals are not very aware of this market, but it is substantial. There are a lot of people now who are really interested in environmental history, in eco-criticism, and just anything that has to do with trees and nature, so that helped me. So yeah, people are interested in Russia, people are interested in ecology, and I think that the publishers were kind of excited by the combination of those because it’s quite novel and quite unfamiliar.

So you hit on something that’s in the zeitgeist.

Yeah. And you know, there is a lot of anger at Russia. It’s been a little bit complicated for me because I lived in Ukraine. I actually have spent more time living in Ukraine than in Russia. I have a lot of close Ukrainian friends and I sold the book before the full-scale invasion of Russia.

I think it might have been a bit more difficult if I had sold it after the full-scale invasion. I have been at pains to stress to people that it’s not a book about how Russia is great and perfect. I don’t know why I would ever have written that book, but this book certainly is not that, and a lot of it is about imperialism and imperial violence.

And how do you think of your responsibility or the burden of being one of a handful of public intellectuals covering the post-Soviet world for an English language audience? Do you find yourself reflecting on that?

I do. I mean, I’m flattered that you think that I’m so prominent that this burden is heavy upon my shoulders. But I think about it a lot in part because on one hand, there’s so much really interesting, really complex, really nuanced, really deeply knowledgeable research and writing going on about Russia, often for a very small audience. Of course, there are many brilliant intellectuals from the post-Soviet world thinking about Russia, thinking about Ukraine, thinking about the relationships between all of these places. But I think it’s unfortunate that some of the highest profile works about Russia for an English-language audience tend to rely so heavily on pretty simplistic, oftentimes clichéd narratives about Russia. Oftentimes, you know, borderline racist stereotypes about Russians.

I think that you can be intensely critical of Putin, of the complicity of many of Russia’s citizens in what Putin is doing, without falling back on ideas like, you know, “authoritarianism is in Russia’s DNA.” That’s outrageous and it’s offensive. And it’s also not interesting. So part of my project has been to try to write in a way that’s very accessible to more or less anyone but that is also moving as far as I can beyond these clichés that weigh down so much discourse about Russia and also about Ukraine, about the post-Soviet world.

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The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires
By Sophie Pinkham
Norton / William Collins
January 20 / January 29

If you’re in New York City this Thursday, January 22, Sophie will be in conversation at the Strand with another one of my favorite critics, The New Yorker’s Jennifer Wilson.

Bomarzo by Manuel Mujica Lainez, trans. Gregory Rabassa (1964)

This newly reissued historical novel by the undersung Argentine titan Manuel Mujica Lainez tells the story of a sixteenth-century Italian duke who, in an experimental twist that presaged Interview with the Vampire, chronicles his lifelong obsession with power from a place of immortality, roughly 400 years after the events of the novel take place. If that makes it sound like the kind of willfully difficult tome worshipped by self-satisfied “brodernists,” I assure you it is a gripping and adventurous read, as I argue in my forthcoming review for the Nation.

The Oak and the Larch by Sophie Pinkham (2026)

Out later this month, this work of book-length criticism by the vital chronicler of post-Soviet life argues that to chart the history of Russia and its empire, you must take a walk through its forests. Marshaling her impressive knowledge of Slavic literature and film, Pinkham connects a constellation of dots to show that the building block of culture and power across these lands—from the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the steppes of Central Asia—is trees all the way down.

Good & Evil & Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin, trans. Megan McDowell (2025)

Across the six lean stories in this collection by the Argentine master of spooky realism, the horror comes from realizing maybe you’re the monster. It inspired one of the more vulnerable pieces I’ve written, part-personal essay, part-review, where I concluded: “If you, like me, live in fear of the day you finally fuck up big time and ruin everything, these stories will not assuage those fears. But at least you’ll know you’re not alone.”

Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov, trans. Angela Rodel (2025)

The opening line in this tender nonfiction novel by Bulgarian star Georgi Gospodinov is a pitch-perfect distillation of what comes after: “My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.” I interviewed its English translator, Angela Rodel, the International Booker Prize winner who captured the essence of this book about finding language to understand and express grief—while shepherding it into another language.

The Suicides by Antonio di Benedetto, trans. Esther Allen (1969)

A depressed newspaper reporter—a womanizing anti-hero who spends his days drinking and driving around aimlessly—suddenly finds a reason to live when an anonymous envelope lands on his desk with three photographs of recent suicide deaths. As a reader with little patience for puzzling out impenetrable prose, this dark and conspiratorial detective story stretched my tolerance for enigmatic storytelling without losing me along the way.

Mice 1961 by Stacey Levine (2024)

This recent Pulitzer finalist that came out of nowhere—by a little-known author, and published by a tiny Oregon press—portrays a day in the life of two shut-in sisters trying to survive in a freakish, fun-house dimension of South Florida suburbia at the height of the Cold War. As I wrote in my Separator review of it back in June: “Levine’s rendering of our national culture isn’t exactly sinister—or even damning. It’s just straight-up surreal.”

Los Galgos, Los Galgos by Sara Gallardo (1968; untranslated)

“These strange happy people. Almost the same as people without a heart,” writes Sara Gallardo, the mid-century Argentine writer appearing in my best-of list for the second year, in her sprawling, borderline-melodrama Los Galgos, Los Galgos (The Greyhounds). Still awaiting English translation, it follows a tortured romance between two angsty reluctant adults estranged from their middle-class families, who decamp from Buenos Aires to role-play as cattle farmers. I love that it’s both an earnest tale of misunderstood lovers against the world and an incisive satire of the very same.

La Tumba by José Agustín (1964; untranslated)

The architect of a new wave of bad boy rock & roll literature in Mexico referred to as la generación de la onda, Agustín wrote this taut novella when he was only 19 years old. Following an insufferable, Holden Caulfield-type enfant terrible with aspirations of literary stardom, it captures the emptiness at the heart of the bourgeois family and the painful futility of trying to rebel against it.

Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew by Avi Shlaim (2023)

Part history, part memoir, this book by the Iraqi-Jewish Oxford historian Avi Shlaim inspired what is probably the best thing I wrote this year: about the realization that, as an impressionable child searching for a sense of belonging, I was brainwashed into loving a country that was, “for my intents and purposes, imaginary.”

Nana by Émile Zola, trans. Burton Rascoe (1880)

I’d been wanting to read this scandalous French classic ever since Namwali Serpell’s landmark 2022 essay in the New York Review of Books about the literary history of the Whore. I finally picked it up when I traded in books at the wonderful Leaves bookshop in Brooklyn, and the eponymous protagonist—a courtesan who upends the class structure of Second Empire Paris by steamrolling her way to fame and wealth—now lives rent-free in my head as one of the most vivid fictional characters I’ve encountered. Almost 150 years after it was published, I found myself blanching at some of its more licentious moments.

When I emailed Fernanda Melchor last week to share the link to part one of this interview, originally conducted for my 2022 New York Magazine profile of the Mexican novelist, I received an immediate auto-response:

Thank you for contacting me, but I’ve stopped using this email.

At the moment, I’m unable to give interviews (no exceptions), or to take part in virtual events (book clubs included) or to record any kind of media content. I also don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts or requests to write praises or blurbs, sorry. Maybe in the future :)

So I guess that makes this Q&A the last of its kind until… who knows when? Presumably when she emerges from writing jail with news of her highly anticipated next novel. So without further ado, let’s pick up where we left off in part one, which went deep on—among other things—her home state of Veracruz, whose characters, folklore, and often surreal violence form the basis for stories that are equally informed by her omnivorous diet of international literature and film.

This interview has been translated from Spanish and edited for brevity.

In the Veracruz depicted in your books, there’s often a strong presence of magic, legend, and superstition. What draws you to the supernatural?

It’s funny, because I don’t consider myself superstitious, but my husband would say I’m the most superstitious person in the world. But it’s a weird kind of superstition, like I don’t even realize it. When I’m walking down the street with my husband, and there’s a post on the sidewalk in our way, and we get separated by it, I have to say “bread and butter” in my head, in English specifically, because I read about it in English. And when I see a ladder on the street, I always walk under it, but it’s not like I don’t think about it.

And I scare easily. I can’t watch horror movies anymore because they terrify me. It’s not like I spend my life thinking about ghosts and my grandmother’s spirit looking down on me from the heavens, but I did grow up surrounded by all that. I grew up fascinated by folkloric horror stories, fairies and aliens and such. Or the chaneques, these goblins that live in the countryside, which are like the spirits of the forest that play tricks on humans. They make you lose your way, most of all.

But I’m kind of like Fox Mulder: I want to believe, but my life and the circumstances that raised me have made me into an unbeliever. That’s why I create characters that do believe. I mean, characters for whom those types of belief are important. There’s another thing that I like about folklore, about legends and supernatural horror, which is that they serve as powerful metaphors.

The legend of the Bloody Countess in Paradais [a colonial aristocrat killed as revenge for kidnapping and torturing enslaved boys and men in Veracruz], in reality is the Countess of Malibrán. But I positioned it the way it’s mixed up in my head, where it blends with other things unrelated to the original legend. For me it served to embody this figure of absolute terror towards the feminine, which is often what drives misogyny, no? We think that misogyny is hatred towards women, but misogyny is also terror of women. That primitive, even atavistic fear towards the power of women, of their reproductive capacity.

You’ve mentioned that your fascination with masculinity came in part from your family background.

My father had problems with addiction. He’s a very charming person, but you know, the drugs and alcohol always hit him hard. And my mother also has mental health issues. I mean, her diagnoses would shift along with the fashions of psychiatry. At one point she had depression, in another moment bipolar, in another it was borderline personality disorder. They’re not sure what she has. Theirs was a very explosive combination, very dependent, very toxic—it seemed sometimes like they lived just to mutually hurt each other, that they enjoyed it. So that was a pretty difficult thing to observe as a daughter.

And one of the things I grew up thinking, in part because of my family dynamic—but also because of the society I grew up in—was that being a woman wasn’t a very desirable fate, or a very interesting one. All the characters I would read or watch on television were men. All the people that had an interesting role in life were men, so for me it was very difficult to find female role models that had anything to do with my interests. Later on as a teenager I found more, like Clarice Starling from Silence of the Lambs and Dana Scully, role models who showed we could be scientific, intelligent, capable. Women of action who could catch killers, they were like superheroes. And on top of that, someone like Clarice Starling, for example, came from below, and I felt identified with that coming from a place like Veracruz, from a middle-class family. I don’t have intellectual parents or a family where anyone worked in the arts.

So yeah, ever since I was a girl, I associated all things feminine—my mom, above all—as something really awful. Ugh, get married, have kids. I saw how my mom would work and take care of the house at the same time, and it seemed like a shit deal. So I said, man if I’d been born a man it would be so much easier. And ever since I was very young I hated wearing dresses, so I grew up with the stigma of being a marimacho [tomboy]. I was the girl who hung out with the guys, like Eleven from Stranger Things, or Beverly Marsh from Stephen King’s novels. They were always a mystery to me, men. And on top of that I always felt closer to my mom than my dad. My relationship with him was always very distant and it was like a mystery to me how to get his attention, but his appreciation was always an important goal for me at some point in my life. I suppose that’s why I often turn my attention towards men.

Before you wrote fiction, you studied journalism. Early on, you won an award for your investigation of an incident where a man was burned alive by his fellow villagers for attempting to rape, and then murdering, a local woman. What was it like to report that out?

I was 19 years old, I was a baby, and I was starting my second year of university. I wanted to write crónica, and I realized if I wanted to write for the newspaper, I just had to start working as a journalist. In Mexico, journalism is something you learn by doing. Nobody teaches those tips in school, and I wanted to get out there and do it.

So in the newspaper La Jornada, one day I saw an open call for an essay about lynching. [In Mexico, vigilante executions occur in places where civilians feel that the state has responded inadequately to a perceived injustice.] And I remembered this one lynching that made a lot of noise in Veracruz because I think TV Azteca covered it, they showed a video of the incident, but I wasn’t even sure where it happened. So I told a friend of mine, who was older, that I wanted to investigate it, and he said I’m going to teach you, and I’ll go with you so you don’t have to go alone. Of course what the guy wanted was to sleep with me, right? But we did very good work.

So we went to look for the police file through various towns in southern Veracruz. In Mexico, finding a file isn’t easy. But we eventually found it in the town where the lynchers had been imprisoned, and we interviewed them, and did all this field work, and it was the first time I was confronted with this mountain of information that I had to turn into a crónica. And the people from the local ministry would warn us, like, be careful kids, don’t let the same thing that happened to those students in Canoa happen to you. [In 1968 in the nearby state of Puebla, a right-wing priest incited the murder of five visiting mountain climbers who were believed to be Communists].

So we were terrified the whole time, and these places were all very rustic—we had to take second-class buses on roads that were in super bad shape. And my friend, Agustín García is his name, he was a reporter for a radio station in Veracruz, he was two or three years older than me, and with him I learned that the details are what matter, so we’d talk to taxi drivers, and one taxi driver told us about a local musician who wrote a corrido about what happened. [Mexican corrido songs, as in American “outlaw country,” are often about real-life people and events.] The taxi driver took us to see the musician, and the musician sang us the corrido, and I recorded it, and from there emerged the chronicle of the “Corrido del quemado” (Ballad of the Man on Fire).

And what’s notable about this case is that the townspeople drew up a document. They condemned this person to death, and had created this document with like 180 signatures, mostly from women who had condemned him. And then when the Mexican state justice showed up, they said no, this isn’t how it’s done, so they arrested almost half the town, but in the end only imprisoned the three people who were the ones that tied him to a tree, threw gasoline on him and set him on fire. They were all directly related to the victim. And I found it terrifying but also fascinating and kind of beautiful, you know?

You’ve said your approach to writing small-town violence is inspired by American authors like Faulkner and Capote.

I grew up with American literature. The first novel I read was Tom Sawyer. And also one of the first things you learn in school when you’re a kid in Mexico is that “half of the United States used to be Mexico,” and you’re like, they robbed us! Anyways, we’ve always had a neighborly relationship, which can be confrontational like “pinches gringos” but there are also commonalities. And of course Mexicans consume film or music from everywhere, especially the middle class, but consumption is very centered on American things, on gringo things. And of course one of the biggest fantasies is that your books get translated and are read in the US.

I have many American influences. A writer like Cormac McCarthy is essential for what I do. I love what A.M. Homes does, for example, or Nabokov, who is Russian but of his works, the ones I like most, he wrote in English. Faulkner, of course, J.T. Leroy, Dennis Cooper. The writers who do the things I like most formally are either Americans or Argentines. I get a lot of sordidness from American literature, more than Mexican.

You were in the writer’s room for the Netflix drama Somos, about a civilian massacre by cartels in Allende, Mexico in 2011, caused in part by leaked information from the DEA. What was it like to write for TV?

I was hired to create the bible for the series—the concept, synopsis, character guide, main plot outlines. The deal was for me to participate in creating the bible and write a script for one episode. And we made the bible based on a report that Ginger Thompson wrote for ProPublica about the Allende case, which helped us extract outlines for the characters.

I had no television experience whatsoever—my only experience was writing a script in Communications school. I didn’t even have Netflix when I started working with Netflix. I kept waiting for them to give me a year’s membership, but I had to buy it myself. But I accepted because the screenwriter, James Schamus, said: “I want to adapt this story for the screen. You’ve been recommended because I’ve heard about you and they told me you’re good at telling oral stories.” Hurricane Season hadn’t even come out in English yet. “I need someone who can work in English, who can write in English at a technical level, and who knows violence in Mexico well. I want to make an anti-narco series.”

That sold me: a series about people, not cartels. Obviously there are criminal characters in the series, but if you notice, the fact that they’re narcos is the least important thing—it’s always about their problems, like you and me: lazy brothers, nosy girlfriends. They have their own internal problems and conflicts. And James gave us exercises to find characters and plots that represented those true stories but were different enough to not endanger the people who gave testimony and to not re-victimize them—to not have them see their story told traumatically on screen. So we needed creativity.

It was so fun. I loved that experience because it’s what you do alone when thinking about characters, but collectively, like a game. But what happened later was I was incapable of writing the script. I realized that type of writing wasn’t for me, because I work with details and language. For me, what’s important is how it’s told, and that type of script writing, where language is just a vehicle for images—I didn’t like it.

I told James I preferred to stay as a consultant, and that’s what I did on the series. I helped make the bible and then I reviewed all the scripts. I’d say: “That can’t happen in Mexico.” For example, they’d write: “In the morgue, they opened a drawer and pulled out the body in a bag.” I said no, in Mexico the bodies are right there—you walk into the morgue and the bodies are there, no refrigerators. They’re there naked, so put a sheet on them. That’s how it’ll work.

It seems like they wanted someone who could prevent the kinds of mischaracterizations and clichés that are common in Hollywood depictions of Mexico, like the famous sepia filter they put on everything.

Exactly. That’s what I was doing. But sometimes they still happen, because when the showrunner decides something goes, it doesn’t matter what you say. In Spanish it’s called the “tropicalization consultant.” That’s what I was. But this also happens in Mexico locally, because all the producers, directors, writers—they’re all from Mexico City. So now I watch things and say “a chilango [Mexico City resident] made that.”

Even with movies I love, like Tatiana Huezo’s Prayers for the Stolen, you can see how it’s an image of what upper-class people from Mexico City think about the southern part of the country. About the generic south—that movie could happen in Guerrero, Michoacán, Veracruz, or Tabasco. There’s no specificity. The dialogues don’t have that local flavor.

Would you say southern Mexico is poorly mapped in the grand scheme of national literature?

Yes, many successful southern writers end up in Mexico City. It’s very common. In Veracruz you have Sergio Galindo, Juan Vicente Melo, Sergio Pitol. They all studied in Mexico City and went elsewhere. Nobody stayed in Veracruz, or they returned when they were very old. Same with many poets from Tabasco and Chiapas.

Or there are many local writers who write about the south but don’t have that reach. They’re not read or published as extensively, largely because they’ve gone too much toward costumbrismo [an ambivalent term for work that focuses on regional ways of life]. They’re narratives with little interest for national literature.

I felt there was that debt. Rosario Castellanos from Chiapas lived her whole life in Mexico City, but she did write about Chiapas. She wrote about indigenous women, about indigenous beliefs and customs with ambitious narrative—she didn’t want to get stuck in the mere description of customs, but really tell stories. She did it well.

I personally felt the Port of Veracruz wasn’t represented. And when it was, it was always like José Emilio Pacheco’s El Principio del Placer—always the vision of a chilango going to Veracruz. Always the vision of someone going on vacation to Veracruz or partying in Veracruz, always seen through this lens of exoticism. I wanted to talk about it differently. Yes, there are things in the exotic imaginary that are true—the light in Veracruz, the richness of the land, the greenery, the fruits, the women, the happy demeanor. That’s there, it’s true. But there are other things too. It’s not just a postcard.

I imagine you’ve had to be mindful about avoiding these tropical clichés in your work, like the Veracruz carnival, which is this incredibly rowdy marathon party where people dance to traditional music until sunrise.

Yes, but at the same time you have to include them. In Hurricane Season there’s a carnival, but it’s seen from a more grotesque perspective. Veracruz has the slogan “The happiest carnival in the world” and it’s not true. In fact, it coincides with the hurricane season, so there’s often horrible weather. The wind is blowing you away while you’re trying to drink your beer. The people dancing in the comparsas have been dancing for four days—they look like the walking dead. You see the drunks, you see women getting harassed, all that sordid stuff. You see ladies elbowing their kids out of the way to catch stuff that’s thrown at them.

It’s not just the moments of joy and that almost advertising-like imagery that I care to write about. There’s another part, more real, which is that after carnival, that whole coastal area smells incredibly of piss. And there’s a melancholy to the carnival that’s never talked about. There’s an element of obligation, too. I’ve had friends who were exhausted and I’d tell them to go rest, but they’d say “we have to finish carnival”—as if it were something religious.

Which reminds me of a very interesting story about a carnival king. There’s always the queen and the rey feo or “ugly king”—though they don’t call him that anymore because it’s discriminatory, so now he’s the “king of joy.” Almost always the queen is a young, beautiful woman dressed as a queen. And the ugly king is usually a fat, old, ugly guy. The queen almost always comes from the middle- or upper-middle class, and the king is always some union leader—a taxi driver, butcher, merchant, from the docks.

There was a carnival king one year who had diabetes. He had bought new shoes. And keep in mind, the king has to dance his way down the whole parade route. It’s ten kilometers, sometimes two parades in one day. So you dance 20 kilometers one day, ten the next, 20 the next. Well, the guy ended up in a wheelchair with amputated legs because the irritation from his shoes caused sores that never healed, complicated by his diabetes. That’s the reality of carnival in Veracruz. That seems much more interesting to me than the clichés you see in the society pages or the government slogans on TV.

That’s a great story. But the guy proudly fulfilled his kingly duty as it should be done. How could a king not go out to dance? It would be an indignity. He had to do it.

I’m very, very excited to be back in everybody’s favorite little magazine, The Baffler, with an essay about José María Velasco, the 19th-century landscape painter who forever changed the way Mexico sees itself. It’s also about the landscape genre more broadly, often considered suspect for its history as a kind of blood-and-soil propaganda, co-opted by everyone from the Manifest Destiny movement to the Nazi Party.

I was thrilled when London’s National Gallery announced José María Velasco: A View of Mexico, the long-overdue traveling retrospective of this forgotten virtuoso, and then shocked when I saw it in Minneapolis to find they’d glossed over this history.

The essay, about the importance of holding two thoughts simultaneously, also starts with my best opening graph ever, if I do say so myself:

THEY SAY HE GAVE one gold imperial coin to each soldier in the firing squad. “Muchachos, aim well, aim right here,” he said, pointing at his chest. He wanted his mother to recognize him. The detail about the coins may be apocryphal, but we know from his funerary photo that the corpse of Maximilian I—Mexico’s short-lived Austrian emperor—went home with his head in one piece that summer of 1867. Well, except for the eyes.

I swear it ties back to the subject at hand. You’ll just have to find out how over at The Baffler. Thanks for reading.

Back in 2022 I had the pleasure of interviewing my favorite living author, Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor, for a profile in New York Magazine. We spoke on the occasion of the publication in English of her third novel, Paradais, translated by the equally illustrious Sophie Hughes for New Directions.

The profile covered a lot of ground, but it homed in on a recurring theme—maybe the recurring theme—in her crime-inspired novels: the fine line between fear and desire. More specifically, male fear of and desire toward women. She explores these murky contours across four books, including her ensemble-cast masterpiece Hurricane Season (2017), and the nonfiction collection This is Not Miami (2013).

All of Fernanda’s books are set in her home state of Veracruz, the coastal region where I’ve been visiting my wife’s family for the last ten years—and from where I write to you now. Stretching from the Gulf Coast to the lush Oaxaca highlands, Veracruz has a stunning patchwork of microclimates, a defiant local tradition of music and food, and a bloody twenty-year history of suffering at the hands of criminal organizations and cartoonishly evil politicians. (The former governor, Javier Duarte, allegedly allowed IV drips of distilled water to be administered to child cancer patients instead of chemotherapy so he could pocket the profit.)

Fernanda and I went deep on Veracruz and a whole other array of things that ended up on the cutting-room floor, as they do. But I got permission from my beloved New York editor, now staff writer, Madeline Leung Coleman, to publish the two-hour transcript as a two-part Q&A here on Separator. It starts with a rather unexpected aside: Prior to our interview, Fernanda had done oppo research and dug up some articles from my past life as a techno reporter, including one particularly unserious one I’d written for VICE about children’s gabber parties in the Netherlands.

This interview has been translated from Spanish and edited for brevity.

So I take it you’re a former raver, too.

Yeah, but techno these days seems kinda soft compared to the ‘90s, like all that gabber stuff that used to be super hardcore. I mean, I still like it but I can’t dance for twelve hours at a party anymore, not even if I take something, you know? Drugs don’t even do much for me anymore.

The raves in Veracruz used to happen at people’s beach houses, actually. And at ranches, too. There was a rave once at this abandoned property called Casa del Diablo, which is a setting that inspired the house of the Bloody Countess in Paradais. I remember it was a total bad trip with a ton of people. In the 2000s I’d hang with a crew of DJs, among other artists, slackers, druggies, a bit of everything. They’d throw these communal parties and hand out shrooms, so I had a trip or two. I even went to the Love Parade in Paris. But then I started focusing on college and writing, and I wasn’t as involved in that scene anymore.

Sounds like you were an adventurous teenager.

My teenage years were totally ‘90s, which was cool because it was the last death rattle of rock music, and techno. It was a different Veracruz. Of course there were still narcos, corruption, homicide, organized crime. But it doesn’t compare in the slightest to today.

In that era, it was still illegal to drink in public, but they couldn’t do anything about drinking on the boulevard because it was federal territory, so I’d spend whole nights sitting on the seawall with a thousand people on that stretch of beach, drinking, with the car stereo on and all the doors open. I had a very outdoor adolescence, with lots of road trips—we’d grab friends’ cars and drive to far-off beaches.

I always wanted to be a writer, but I hung out with a crew that skated, did graffiti, surfed—which is funny because in Veracruz the only time there are waves is during a hurricane. We used to go camping, spending every weekend on the beaches north of the city. We’d camp and take LSD, and we’d be out of it for two days, which is something you’d be crazy to do these days. The ‘90s, that was the last era of a certain kind of freedom. At two in the morning, I’d grab my last beer and make my way home walking. I’d never do that now.

And those areas where you used to go partying along the coast—they’re not far from the world of gated communities depicted in Paradais (2021).

When I was a kid, that whole area was called El Estero, just south of Boca del Río, and it was full of luxury houses. But more than that, they were weekend houses for people from Veracruz with money. My family was middle class, but my grandma had a business, so she had enough income for my brother and me to attend private school. I had classmates with real money, you know? People with pools at their houses, people who lived in mansions, whose parents owned hotels in Veracruz, for example.

So I got to know those environments, almost always as a visitor. You know, the classic thing of getting invited to a piñata party—I was one of those children who used to go to parties at places like Paradais, [the eponymous gated community where the book is set]. In fact, from about 2000 on, in those plots of land that are now called Riviera Veracruzana, that’s where I ended up going to raves, like on a deserted beach or in some little shack. Now those areas are packed with condominiums and gated communities that are totally closed to the public.

Your second novel, Hurricane Season, opens with a group of children stumbling upon a witch’s washed-up corpse, and works backwards to explore the way poverty and deprivation can warp people’s minds. Why did you choose to set your next novel, Paradais, on the other side of that class divide?

What I wanted to bring up was how we build these giant fences to protect ourselves from the violence in Mexico, which seems endemic but is in fact a global phenomenon. In Mexico it reaches scandalous levels, even grotesque or carnivalesque, due to specific conditions, but that violence is really happening on a global scale.

Like, the idea we have of narcos with the mustache and the cowboy hat, gold-encrusted pistols, as exclusively latino—I think that’s wrong. The truth is that the world’s most powerful narcos today have master’s degrees from Harvard.

I wanted to show that violence doesn’t belong to one social class, the same way it doesn’t belong to one nationality. It can break out anywhere. I’m acquainted with the dark side of Veracruz, the miserable side, I know it well. But I also wanted to show the other side, you know? Children’s birthday parties in luxury developments.

You started Paradais with an epigraph from José Emilio Pacheco’s Battles in the Desert (1980): “What will happen? Nothing will happen. Nothing could possibly happen. What will I do […] Fall in love knowing that all is lost and there is no hope.”

And both books, in their way, are about hormonal teenage boys who become obsessed with the older woman next door. Was Pacheco an inspiration for you?

When I first had the idea to write Paradais, back in 2016, I still hadn’t finished writing Hurricane Season. I was writing them both at the same time. And after the experience of working on Hurricane Season, when it came time to edit, it felt kind of chaotic because of the sheer length and emotional density of the prose. It’s a tough novel to read and was even tougher to write, and I ended up feeling devastated. So I said no, the next one has to be short.

So I started reading novellas, like homework for myself. I thought, how does one write a novella? So of course I picked up Battles in the Desert, which is one of the most widely read novels in Mexico, and people have a lot of love for it. I hadn’t read it until I started this process and it blew me away.

Most of all I loved that Pacheco line about hope. It got me thinking about how hope is the worst thing that can happen to us sometimes, because hope feeds obsession and compulsion. We think of hope as something beautiful, but it can also be something terrible, which is also something we can learn from José Donoso in his book Hell Has No Limits (1966), where there’s a character who says the worst thing is hope, because when something ends, it’s like a relief, but when it doesn’t end you’re left with hope and that’s horrifying. So I thought, how can hope become twisted? And that’s what happens in Paradais to Franco, who really thinks something will happen between him and his neighbor one day. He has faith, and that pulls him into a spiral of obsession and insanity.

The book follows two characters: there’s the horny, spoiled teen named Franco and then there’s his reluctant companion, Polo, a gardener at Paradais. And I was struck by how you were also able to evoke this other world where Polo comes from—like that shady roadside restaurant full of narcos eating deep-fried garnachas while waiting for their marching orders.

Well, sincerely those places have references in reality. We all know there are places in Mexico where, as soon as you arrive, there’s a kid taking note of your license plate and talking on a walkie-talkie. Outside the country, people get really freaked out when I mention that those things are a reality in Mexico.

There are places you can’t go without them knowing, places that are occupied by crime, occupied by this alternative authority that is the narco and organized crime—but even calling it the “narco” can be an oversimplification. That’s how the cartels work in Mexico: they take on certain functions of the State, which presents a set of problems I’m not even qualified to account for in depth. That’s why I switched from sociology to journalism in school.

But ever since I remember, I’ve been a story collector. I love talking to people, and I love hearing the stories they have to tell, and a big part of my job is going to Veracruz and listening to what people are saying, plain and simple. A million things worth writing come from that. They help fill in the gaps and pepper the narrative with the kinds of details I love writing. But of course there’s also imagination involved.

What those kids do to the taxi driver in Paradais—the whole kidnapping scene with Milton and what they force him to do, to initiate him into this sort of Den of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves—I heard that story from a friend I like to call the taxi psychologist. You know, the kind of person who gets into a taxi, asks the driver a single question, and then the guy just goes off. They go through life listening to stories. So this taxi driver told him about how he’d been kidnapped that way, but in real life he survived to tell the tale.

It’s hard work taking in all these stories. It’s hard work staying connected to and scared by the reality we live in Mexico, and it also means spending hours constructing these places in my mind. Like that setting in Paradais—that place serving garnachas in the middle of nowhere that I think of as the Den of Thieves—that came from another novel I started and couldn’t finish. And when I was creating it, I knew it had to have its own rules, its own architecture, its own set pieces, its characters—the older woman who’s in charge of all these guys, the diner lady who’s also a mob boss. I had to sit down and figure out what the interiors of such a place are like: what are its various rooms like, how many there are, how many guys live there, what their jobs are. I ended up having to write 120 pages of that other novel just for that location to appear in only like, 20 of them.

You’re clearly very good at listening, at being able to reproduce the voices of so many different types of people. Why do you think you developed that ability?

I’ve always liked language, and I’ve always been a big gossip. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always wanted to understand how things work, or wanted people to explain things to me. I was that classic nosy girl asking why, why, why—and sometimes not even to really know why, but because I liked hearing my mom tell me the same story over and over.

So yeah, it’s not like I have this especially musical ability. In school I played instruments, I know a bit of piano and flute, but it’s not so much sensitivity to sound as it is to language, to words. Honestly, when I write I worry a lot about how things sound, which ends up driving my translators crazy. Sometimes they ask, why do you say it like that, and I say, because I like how it sounds.

Working with your translators, did you have to let go of your controlling instincts? I imagine as someone for whom language and slang and the rhythm of your phrases is so important, you’d want some control but also not want to be hovering over everything.

I never thought this novel would be translated. It literally never crossed my mind. I wanted to do something in my idiom, a little homage to the variation of Spanish you hear in the southeast of Mexico. In novels you often hear Mexico City parlance, or that of the north. From the middle of the last century on there have been tons of worthwhile literary exports from northern Mexico. But the south, this whole region that connects Veracruz with Central America, is under-appreciated.

But I never thought my books would be translated, and I wouldn’t have been able to write them if I’d known they would be. Then it turned out they did want to translate them—and this time I signed for 37 languages, a shit-ton—the last ones being Croatian and Mandarin. I’m very possessive with my texts, and I don’t let them see the light of day until they’re ready, but with translations I try to keep my distance.

I don’t think I’ve even read a full version of one of my translated books. With the English version of Paradais, I read the first chapter and it seemed great. There are moments when my tone is more low-brow, or just more vulgar, and Sophie makes it less vulgar, but there are times where my tone is more moderate and she cranks up the vulgarity. For me the most important thing about a translation is that it’s readable.

Many of your stories are inspired by articles from Mexican crime tabloids, called nota roja, or from your own past reporting as a journalist. How do you know when you stumble across a headline that it’s worthy material for one of your own stories?

It’s always little details that catch my attention. But it’s really hard to do with the nota roja because it’s sensationalist journalism written with tons of clichés—racist stereotypes, classist, misogynistic ones. The journalism profession in Mexico is really precarious—there are people earning minimum wage doing journalism. So sometimes they’re not even witnesses to anything, they just rely on police reports. They show up at the office, get handed a file with someone’s statements, and write up a story. It’s kind of like a game of telephone—who said what, how—and I love that, you know? In this tangle of narratives where you don’t know what’s true and what’s a lie, a detail explodes out at you. And for me it always has to be a detail that’s more human than bloody.

For example in Hurricane Season what really caught my attention was the fact that the killer said he’d murdered the Witch because she was putting a curse on his wife. That statement for me was—boom! There’s a story behind this. Sure, we say “witchcraft” but what’s really interesting is how it points to the possibility of this weird love triangle. The fact that they found a rotting corpse with its throat cut—that’s the least of it. It’s the human detail.

I have this archive of PDFs I come across and read and save. These days it’s all digital but I also have folders and boxes full of torn-out newspapers. For example there was a case around 2012 of a guy who killed his girlfriend—burned her alive in her bed. And the guy said he killed her because she made fun of him, told him he was a loser and would never get a job, and I was like wow. That little sliver of humanity is terrible and full of hate, but there’s a story there of a real person with a history.

I fantasized for a long time about doing what Truman Capote did in In Cold Blood. But even now there’s a lot of speculation that Truman Capote exaggerated, that he even lied, that he embellished, that he fictionalized—there are lots of witnesses who say no, he didn’t even talk to us. So I’m not Truman Capote and I’ve always wondered, if you go to a person and ask them, why’d you do it? Why would that person tell me? Why would they? And I feel like getting to the truth through direct confrontation isn’t the right approach. What I wanted to do was something else, so I had to turn to fiction. It’s another way of telling the truth, simply.

Your nonfiction collection, This is Not Miami is in large part about the criminal underworld of Veracruz, which is especially vast because it’s one of Mexico’s busiest maritime ports. And I’m thinking of one story in particular, about the Dominican migrants who escape from the traffickers who’d abandoned them on a freight ship. How did that story come to you?

I have a friend named El Ojitos (“Little Eyes”), son of El Ojón (“Big Eye”), who’s a retired dockworker. The docks are typically very difficult spaces to enter, because you need accreditation, but through him I found people who could get me in. And they’re pretty inhospitable spaces, you know? Dock work can be rough, not just because of the heat in Veracruz but because they’re these huge sites that are very exposed to the elements, and they’re almost entirely male-dominated. So it was me, the vendor women who sell their wares, and the prostitutes they bring onto their boats—we were the only women that entered those spaces. Very few women work in the port system, and those few women are typically in the office. But this masculine world fascinated me.

A lot of times, you go to a cantina to meet some guy who’s gonna tell you a story, but meanwhile the guy’s friend is hitting on you because you’re a girl, and well, what are girls for? For hitting on. So there’s always a complicated negotiation of the fact of being a woman. And then of course there’s the fact that these are almost invariably places where drugs are being consumed.

For example, I wrote one story about the explosion of crack in Veracruz, which followed the arrival of the Zetas Cartel, which was the armed branch of the Gulf Cartel—and signaled the end of the era of the PRI party and the beginning of the PAN era, and the shifting power dynamics that implied with the drug cartels. But I’m not a journalist in the vein of, say, Diego Osorno to tell this whole story, so I wanted to tell just a little slice of how this played out in this neighborhood, in this house, where there’d be a shit-ton of people crammed in there doing coke, and how one of them figured out how to cook crack.

So I got to know them but I had to get super stoned when I went there, and down a few beers. These are places where you can’t take out a recording device. I’d go and hang out, then run to the bathroom to take notes, or I’d take notes in the car on my way out, and I’d stay there for half an hour writing down everything I remembered because you can’t do journalism any other way.

When people talk about your work, they use the term “humanize” a lot, especially when talking about your depictions of people who live on the margins. What does humanizing mean to you?

I like showing the whole spectrum of what the word “humanity” implies. When we talk about humanity, we almost always want to show the best side of human beings, the things that make us different from animals: we’re altruistic, heroic, capable of love and care, of these strong human links. But in that spectrum we have the other things that distinguish us from animals, which are cruelty, torture, envy, rage, hatred. I mean, animals can’t hate; they turn to violence out of necessity, and some of them possess the memory to remember things, but torture is an eminently human activity—the enjoyment of someone else’s pain.

So we can show that part of humanity, but that can also have two sides: We can show the vulnerable human side of people we consider evil, damaged, or violent, but we can also show the side that’s dirty, obscene, or rascally of people that we’d like to think of as perfect. The classic example: there’s been a lot of journalistic coverage of the mothers in Mexico searching for their disappeared children. They’re these women that, in the face of immense impunity and a total lack of accountability from the authorities, decided to go look for their children. But the representation is always of this grieving mother, self-sacrificing and heroic, and we lose the other dimension that these are otherwise women from the barrio like any other. Women capable of enjoyment, who can crush a few beers and dance perreo.

And I’m interested in showing the fully extended fan of what being human implies. It’s not only about showing the endearing side of a killer, but also about showing the unexpected sides of this old lady, the victim. The point of literature is that it teaches us there are no perfect victims, and there are no killers who are completely without pity. There’s no person that incarnates that absolute evil—I mean sure, there’s Hannibal Lecter, but life isn’t a choice between Superman and Hannibal Lecter.

There’s a lot of really twisted stuff in your books, sexual violence especially, which you explore in disturbing depth. Did you have to overcome any fear of giving form to the dark thoughts and images in your head?

The main fear I had was like, shit, everything in this book came out of my imagination. And part of the post-partum depression I get when I finish a book comes from the shame of knowing, like, finally everyone’s going to know how damaged I am. But hey, I don’t think I’m the only person with dark fantasies. I think the majority of human beings have these visions of vengeance, visions where the erotic mixes with things we wouldn’t dare to confess to.

It’s permissible these days to talk about sexuality, about kinks, right? But at the same time the discourse on social media, the public discourse, is always kind of innocuous. Like yeah, it’s my kink but it’s always consensual and gluten free. And we lose something there, because that’s part of what feeds eroticism. Taboos and fantasies don’t obey the dictates of a clean conscience. Desire doesn’t obey the dictates of morality, and in fact the less conscious we are of that, and the more we try to deny it, that’s when we’re really in trouble. In reality I’m the most vanilla person in the world despite what you may read in my books. A lot of people are taken aback when they meet me because they say I couldn’t imagine you to be such a friendly, smiling person, based on what I write.

Stay tuned for part two of our interview, out mid-December. For more Mexican literature check out my piece on Oficio de Alas, a lost gem of outlaw fiction I encountered on a trip to the Sonoran Desert.

Not anymore. According to the NYT, NYC employers added only 956 private-sector jobs in the first half of 2025. So yeah, shit is dark right now for everybody but the super-rich, who are earning and spending more than ever on things like $38 martinis and $1500-a-night hotels. We’re starting to see that reflected in the ads that clutter our subway commute, so for this edition of the Copywriter’s Corner—the column by the other Max Pearl, copywriter and brand strategist—we’re diving into the world of recession-indication advertising.

Brands love to nudge and wink like they know what New York is all about (see the disastrous Vitamin Water campaign from Copywriter’s Corner #1). These two ads—spotted on the 1 train and G train, respectively—demonstrate a new trend in “How do you do, fellow kids” marketing, playing on the fact that, for many of us, a single fucking slice of pizza now represents a prohibitive expense.

2 out of 5 pencils: ✏️✏️

I give this StreetEasy campaign five stars for sheer evil genius. Yes, the suburbs are lame, but no, New York is not the only place where you can lead a good and fulfilling life. Hopefully our new mayor will fulfill his promise to make it a more affordable city, but in the meantime, don’t let this psy-op fool you into thinking it’s the only thing that makes you interesting.

5 out of 5 pencils: ✏️✏️✏️✏️✏️

“Look like your apartment has windows.” New Yorkers—well, mostly middle-class transplants—have been romanticizing the rat-infested indignities of city life since the Beatniks. But the true bohemians left for Philadelphia a long time ago. Now instead of pretending to be poor, the cool thing is to pretend to be rich with this handy AI-powered photo and video editing app.

1 out of 5 pencils: ✏️

Look, I’m a firm believer that money can buy happiness. Secure the bag, etc. But the campaign for this exclusive dating app, marketed towards “goal diggers” looking to date within or above their tax bracket, seems to indicate a new kind of naked aspirationalism. Striving has always been in Americans’ DNA, but I liked when we at least pretended to have other “goals” in life.

2 out of 5 pencils: ✏️✏️

Yellowstone. The Grand Canyon. Monument Valley. Who can afford all that? The new “great American getaway” is… Pennsylvania? A perfect way to spend 14 hours in Labor Day traffic and be back at your desk on Tuesday without using any PTO.

2 out of 5 pencils: ✏️✏️

Missed the last couple Copywriter’s Corners? See what scored five pencils here and here.