You’ll have to read Marlon James’s new novel, The Disappearers, wearing asbestos gloves. The pages of this incomparable epic are fueled by desire and torched by rage.

The author, who won a Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings and then began a trilogy of mind-blowing African fantasies, has returned to Jamaica, his homeland, for what he’s calling his most personal novel.

The Disappearers is a story about living and dying, particularly dying, in the toxic homophobia of the late 20th century, when James was growing up in Kingston begging God to cleanse him. He doesn’t appear in the novel — “I am still lucky,” he quips, “never to have been one of the characters in a Marlon James novel” — but its spirit is informed by his own closeted life before he left the Caribbean. “Whether it was in a plane or a coffin,” he wrote in 2015, “I knew I had to get out of Jamaica.”

Out — and out of Jamaica — for years now, James has produced a book no less ambitious than Beloved, a novel to reckon with the ectoplasm of suffering and restore the presence of vanished people. Just as Toni Morrison’s classic shifted our understanding of the experience and legacy of slavery, so The Disappearers aspires to explode complacency and sear in the minds of readers the horrors of living in a world hostile to homosexuality.

I asked Marlon James, “What could fiction say about your experience of growing up gay in Jamaica that memoir couldn’t?”

This is an omnivorous novel, a book straining against its covers to contain the whole racial, economic, and political construction of sexual prohibitions imported from Britain and fermented in the Jamaican heat. But the length of The Disappearers — some 616 pages — is only its most obvious challenge. Far greater are the difficulties posed by its eclectic structure, its mercurial style, and its explicit content, an abiding issue of too-muchness that similarly freighted James’s previous novel, Moon Witch, Spider King.

If you know anything about The Disappearers before you start it — and you should — you know that it’s about a group of gay men brutally attacked by a mob. But like any Pearl Harbor story, this one delays that crisis as long as possible.

The first quarter of the novel presents a series of diary entries written by 18-year-old Eddy Porteous. Smart, sassy, and noticeably light-skinned, Eddy drops us right into rehearsals for a play, an adaptation of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, about prison sexual abuse. Their snobby director intends to “blow open the whole fragile myth of Jamaican male sexuality and homophobia,” but so few volunteers risk showing up that auditions are just a matter of handing out the six parts and badgering everyone to be quiet.

Although they’re all Black gay men, these amateur actors hail from diverse worlds, all fascinating to Eddy, who has endured a year of such inventive bullying that he’s decided to start over. Among the cast are a couple of office workers, a wealthy shipping owner, a young Asian-looking man who’s distractingly handsome, and Jordan Brown, who lives in his car and confesses that doing this play is better than spending “all summer being terrified of AIDS.” Each of them has negotiated his own precarious method of passing.

Eddy is the diary writer few are and every nosy reader craves, a genius at scene-setting with a playwright’s sensibility for dialogue. Trapped in a panopticon of relatives and schoolmates on the lookout for a limp wrist, a suspicious lilt, or an incriminating choice in music, he started this journal to unload all his forbidden thoughts, but it mostly looks outward. “This is an exercise,” he writes. “Watch, observe, report,” which is clearly the impulse behind this novel, too. The result is a portrait of a life titillated by erotic pleasures but teetering on the edge of peril.

Kingston is a culture obsessed with homosexuality — with identifying it, condemning it, and rooting it out. Stories in the news about anti-gay violence, even murder, press against Eddy’s lungs. “I don’t think about it a lot,” he claims, unconvincingly, “but people want to kill us. Us, I’m a part of an us that people just want to beat to death. Everybody wants to kill us.”

His involvement with the play provides a rare opportunity to talk frankly with other gay men, to commiserate, to joke, even sometimes to encourage each other — all conveyed in the sharp, snapping lines of Eddy’s journal. And through his entries we get to know these men, too, in their quirky, hopeful endurance.

That’s all shattered one night when men wielding pipes and cricket bats march into the rehearsal room and carve every stage direction onto the stripped bodies of these actors. The beating and torture of Jordan and his fellow volunteers make for a singularly shocking scene. One has his eyes gouged out. Another, raped with a tree branch, dies on the spot. I provide these few details only to make clear that this is one of the most graphic and disturbing novels I’ve ever read.

The men rehearsing Fortune and Men’s Eyes are people we’ve come to know and care about through Eddy’s diary, but his voice falls away just before the assault begins. Instead, we experience this atrocity through a ghastly collage of statements from the “blackjacks” themselves. Their fragmentary testimonies of righteous anger pour down the pages like lava. Brimming with confidence, thrilled by the fear they inspire, they mock, they condemn, they sing, and they quote the Bible while wailing away on their victims. “Kill a man with a high voice,” one of them shouts. “Kill a man who float when he walk. Kill a fish. Kill Boy George. Kill Rock Hudson. Kill a man in short-shorts. Kill a man with no girlfriend.”

It’s a lot — everything smeared with blood and viscera; the air filled with the sounds of breaking bones and unearthly screams. Even a couple of the blackjacks are stunned by their comrades’ savagery. You’ll finish this brief chapter grateful to have survived it.

It’s at this point that James makes one of several daring maneuvers. The Disappearers picks up six years later in the voice of Jordan Brown, the bookish actor Eddy was closest to. The competition is intense, but this section is the best thing James has ever written. It’s here, in Jordan’s narrative, winding hypnotically between exhaustion and outrage, self-loathing and fury, that we experience the corrosive effects of trauma in a country where anti-gay violence isn’t a crime; it’s “a national service.”

Together with Eddy, Jordan sets out to find some of their fellow actors who disappeared after the assault, at which point the book shifts into a kind of mystery novel. What’s fascinating, though, is how firmly the story resists a solution in favor of examining the meaning of this mystery. After all, “people go missing in Jamaica all the time and nobody will ever find them,” Jordan says. “Look at the many ways we vanish without a trace.” To be gay in a homophobic culture is to be regularly disappeared by AIDS or pious parents. To render oneself invisible is a survival tactic.

Across journal entries, letters, and recorded interviews, The Disappearers sometimes feels more committed to its narrators than to its readers. James allows the people who give voice to this long, multivalent story to speak in their own accents and patois, to follow their own erratic obsessions and fears, and even, sometimes, to venture beyond our comprehension. When one character says, “I am not even going to pretend to understand what that means,” I simply nodded in agreement.

That’s particularly true with Jordan. Disgusted with Christian hypocrisy and shattered by the violence rained down upon him, he hovers in a Hamlet-like state, torn between self-slaughter and revenge. How, he wonders, might the moral account be balanced by lashing out at everyone who’s ever hummed a homophobic song, recited Leviticus, thrown a burning tire around a gay boy’s neck, or gang-raped a lesbian? It’s a brilliant, terrifying act of imaginative spelunking into some of the darkest caves of the human psyche.

So, there’s no denying this is a monumental novel — already longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize — but is it a monument you want to climb? James’s commitment to erotic realism, to the mechanics of oral and anal sex, voluntary and violent, is total and relentless. For James, that explicitness is clearly an aesthetic and thematic choice. Inspired by the work of John Rechy, Jordan is exasperated with a world that demands gay men abjure promiscuity in favor of assuming a polite mirror image of straight domesticity. Fuck that, Jordan would say. The fluids are the message, and James won’t let us miss it.

But if there are plenty of sweaty moments of transgressive love, the novel is also an encyclopedia of abuse and degradation. I finished The Disappearers glad to have read it but equally glad to be done with it. To the extent that it’s a great novel, it’s also an ordeal.

What’s most surprising, given the book’s abiding terrors, is how James inches it erratically toward the light. Nothing can feel securely joyous in a novel that hoards so much suffering, that maps the taxonomy of hate with such precision, but the final two movements change both the tempo and the temperature of the story. The survival of a few characters and their eventual thriving arrive, by the end, like a desperate embrace.

Right now, somewhere in Texas, there’s a sweet high school senior being bullied to the brink of suicide. He’s unlikely to find this novel in his school library, but what if it could lead him through the valley of the shadow of death?

The Disappearers, by Marlon James (Riverhead, 616 pp., $32)

Previous review: Edwidge Danticat’s Dèy.
A mother survives a mass shooting but finds that the ordinary demands of life won’t wait.

Babies always sweep away the carefully laid plans of their parents. But our first child almost swept us away, too.

In the summer of 1989, Elissa was born with cerebral palsy.

I was working as an instructor at a small college where I made $24,000 a year. Because my health insurance didn’t cover my wife or any children, we had carefully saved up enough money to pay for prenatal appointments and the birth.

But we hadn’t counted on 10 days in the neonatal intensive care unit at more than $2,000 a day.

When we finally drove away from the hospital — so carefully, so slowly, so determined that nothing else would befall us — we headed into a life we could not fathom.

We also wandered into a bewildering maze of government paperwork.

Admittedly, we were exhausted and frightened, but isn’t everyone who turns in desperation to public aid?

As Dawn and I pawed our way through one byzantine form after another, we wondered, How does anybody ever figure all this out? What if we didn’t have college degrees or didn’t speak English? What if we had to work full time? What if we were sick?

Why — we screamed to the heavens — is this so damn time-consuming?

It’s taken me more than 35 years, but I’ve finally found the answer. It’s laid out in a new book by Annie Lowrey called The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time — and How to Fix It.

Lowrey, a staff writer at The Atlantic, examines “the levy of paperwork, effort, delay, and aggravation imposed on citizens in exchange for rights and benefits that are putatively theirs.”

The problem is not news to anyone who does their own taxes, tries to get a building permit, or applies for food stamps.

“Enrollment forms are written in impenetrable High Bureaucratese and are loaded up with fine print,” Lowrey writes. “Processes are arcane, timelines long, and outcomes uncertain… Such burdens are like kudzu, choking off the fruits and flowers of our commons.”

Americans spend some 12 billion hours a year filling out various government forms, which comes to about six mind-numbing workdays per person. We lose five times as much time dealing with government paperwork as folks in the U.K.

I long assumed that such irritations were just the inevitable effluent that runs off any large organization, but Lowrey claims that excess complexity is a strategy to achieve through obfuscation what can’t be reached by legislation.

She argues early on that this “whole situation is a product of decades of bipartisan design,” but the book that follows definitely glares hardest at Republicans “assigning paperwork as a form of punishment” and obsessing over the possibility of fraud.

Better a million people go hungry than one apocryphal welfare queen drive her pink Caddy to Whole Foods.

“Time taxes become subtle, powerful tools,” she writes. “They let politicians get what they want without attracting partisan heat and media attention.”

Hoping to cut what the state spends on children’s health insurance? Make the application form harder for parents to fill out — and make them do it every year.

Trump ran on promises of greater efficiency, but Lowrey takes a chainsaw to those promises and Musk’s DOGE program, which she argues has rendered the federal government even less capable of delivering necessary services, pushing more work and more frustration onto ordinary Americans.

Our long history of shame-based assistance — including our maniacal fixation on “the deserving poor” — puts the onus on people to prove they need help rather than on the government to provide it. And our system of federalism has created an incomprehensible mess of overlapping programs across the country.

That ideological strategy is aided by the government’s archaic software, which adds layers of complexity to many programs.

“The time tax serves as a hidden engine of American inequality,” Lowrey writes, “a regressive filter on every progressive policy we have.” Tragically — but deliberately — poor people and people of color pay the highest time tax.

It doesn’t have to be this way, she insists, though after 250 pages of hair-pulling madness, I’m not sure I can believe her.

But yes, some states have made real progress against procedural bloat. Michigan, for instance, managed to cut its public-assistance application form — originally a brain-crushing 18,000 words — by 80 percent.

That’s just one hopeful example among many. (A section on the glorious efficiencies of Estonia struck me as more inspiring than instructive, but it also demonstrates how wide a net the author casts in looking for solutions.)

Lowrey wants agencies to measure the time burdens they impose on people and then be required to reduce them. We also need more universal federal programs, instead of 50 slightly different ones that sprinkle sand into the gears of American lives.

And what if instead of building a wall of forms topped with barbed wire to ensure that no freeloader ever gets a piece of government cheese, the government “penalized states and cities for miring citizens in procedural sinkholes”?

This isn’t just the same old argument about cutting government. Indeed, Lowrey would radically expand government in order to make it work better for us.

It’s about time. Ours.◆

The rest of the newsletter follows below.

Books Go to the Movies:

• In The Dog Stars, Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin play a couple of rare survivors in a world ravaged by a pandemic. This post-apocalyptic film, opening today in theaters — take your Purell — is based on Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, which was written long before anybody thought Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might make it come true.

• For a vacation from that horror, try The Last Sunrise, now streaming on Prime Video, based on a romantic novel by Anna Todd. Maia Reficco stars as a young woman with a chronic illness who travels with her mother to a Spanish island in the Mediterranean, where she falls in love with a local fisherman, played by Fernando Lindez (trailer).

• Listen Up: The bookish travel podcast Strong Sense of Place launches its eighth season today. Hosts Melissa Joulwan and David Humphreys will be heading off to Denmark, Australia, South Korea, and even a couple of unconventional locales like “boarding school” and “Shenaniganery.” In every episode, Mel and Dave recommend five books that capture the place. Before Dawn, Madeline, and I went to Lisbon this summer, we all listened to and loved their episode about Portugal (listen).◆

A Complicated Woman

It turns out that Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie The Odyssey is just a Trojan horse to sneak translation into our lives. Emily Wilson is now everywhere!

Her 2017 version of The Odyssey shot up the bestseller list last month faster than fleet-footed Hermes. Then her fiery critique of the movie in the London Review of Books sparked a new Trojan War, and now she’s published an engaging collection of her reviews and essays titled Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature.

Many of these pieces are fascinating deep dives into the practice of translation, ancient and modern. “In the messy, wild world of human language,” Wilson writes, “words always come trailing a glorious cloud of connotations.”

A good English translator does far more than faithfully substitute an English synonym for a foreign word. The translator’s art involves conveying the sound of “the original’s linguistic music.”

As always, there’s nothing dusty about Wilson’s work. She’s just as likely to allude to Cardi B as to Aristophanes.

If your book club is tackling The Odyssey, make sure you include the final essay in this collection on your charcuterie board. And if you’re reading Maria Semple’s comic novel Go Gentle about a zany Stoic philosopher, pair it with Wilson’s wry essay “Chill Out With the Stoics.”

“Stoicism provides a great deal of useful guidance for life,” she writes, “even for those of us who are neither ancient Roman citizens nor entrepreneurs.”

As for the movie, Wilson is still offering good advice: “Samuel L. Jackson would make a great Odysseus.” (Sorry, Matt.)◆

Reese Redux

I want to follow up on last week’s item about Reese Witherspoon’s plan to adapt my book reviews into a TV series (Chasing Ron Charles).

Since I stopped responding to those solicitations, I’ve been contacted by Daniel Morgan, a dispute resolution specialist, who reminds me that “good communication is important in any creative project.”

(Fortunately, I just received a competing offer from Tom Ackerley, producer of the Barbie movie, so now I’ve got options.)

But seriously: After being asked to send thousands of dollars to an account at Lead Bank in Kansas City, I reached out to the bank and forwarded the email that included routing and account numbers.

Lead Bank Client Support sent back two notes saying, “Due to privacy and security regulations, Lead Bank does not verify account details. We recommend you exercise caution and advise against wiring funds to individuals or businesses unless you are confident in the validity of the account details and the transaction’s purpose.”

So much for client support.

Cheryl L. Davis, general counsel for the Authors Guild, tells me, “AI has made it much easier for these scammers to craft more plausible and appealing approaches to their potential victims. Impersonation scams are quite frequent.”

The Authors Guild is educating its members and has assisted the FBI in investigations of fraudulent publishing schemes. If you suspect an online solicitation is a scam, file a complaint with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.

“These types of scams can be particularly heartbreaking,” Davis says, “because they are aimed at people’s dreams.”

Buckle up. It’s not going to get better soon.

In an essay published this week, Bill Gates warned, “This would be the worst possible time for humans to lose their critical thinking skills. In an era of deepfakes and misinformation that can be tailored to you individually, the ability to tell what is true from what is not becomes an essential life skill.”◆

Kirkus Prize Finalists

Summer hasn’t even ended, but the year’s literary award season has already begun in America.

Getting the jump on the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the National Book Awards, and the Pulitzers, Kirkus announced its 18 finalists in three categories.

Here’s the fiction list:

• Kin, by Tayari Jones.

• This Is Where the Serpent Lives, by Daniyal Mueenuddin.

• Eating Ashes, written by Brenda Navarro and translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

• Luna, Phoenix, Queen, by Julie Orringer.

• John of John, by Douglas Stuart.

• Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead.

The nonfiction finalists are pictured above. You can find the finalists for young readers’ literature and information about the judges here.◆

Picture This

As an unemployed ink-stained wretch, I’m always looking for fresh career ideas, which is why I’m so enchanted with The Beginner’s Guide to Being a Wizard.

Here is exactly the clear advice I’ve been waiting for.

“You do not need to be tall or have a beard,” Keith Negley writes. “You don’t even need a pointy hat (although it helps).”

I just need a cloak (“A towel also works”), a stick (“Not too pokey”), and a place where no one is looking (“Stop looking”).

Negley’s deadpan parody of an HR administrator offering up increasingly ridiculous counsel will cast a spell of laughter over adults and little wizards.

Need help choosing an appropriate familiar? Consider all your options, from Cat (“classic, grumpy”) to Fish (“in a bowl”) to Gecko (“Not as smart as you’d think”).

Later pages set out the Wizard Rules, such as “If you accidentally turn the moon into a pie, you must share.”

Negley’s illustrations follow a child being instructed by a wizard who stores emergency cheese in his pointy hat.

Not everything goes as planned “because real wizards don’t always know the way. They wonder. They try.”

And if something goes wrong, you can always blame the Gecko.

This book is magic.◆

This Week’s Poem

Kelli Russell Agodon’s poetry achieves a mystical balance between timelessness and cutting-edge topicality. In her new collection, Accidental Devotions, she searches for love and spirituality in a world colonized by technology.

She can be witty even at the point of tears, as in the poem “Alexa, Why Am I Falling Apart?”

Late at night, she worries that she’s stuck in a place “where God’s checked out and ordering on DoorDash, putting the ringer on silent.”

Thirty-One Percent of US Adults Say They Are “Almost Constantly” Online While Sixty-One Percent of Americans Report Significant Feelings of Loneliness

It’s funny how someone can watch you
from a distance and think how easy
you have it — though they’ll never know you

   spent a year of crying. Who can see your tears
   behind a screen? Like wildfires, they burned
   past your front yard, but your photos appeared

filtered as if it was always golden hour, the blaze
against your cheeks. Today, you think
everyone is looking your direction

   except no one is, except your mom,
   because that’s what moms do
   — they see the heart they made

out in the wilderness and they watch
for hazards. I had a friend who said
she would be happy when her mother died

   because then she could finally live.
   When it happened, she curled up in a ball
   in my lap and said — I didn’t realize

what I had. Sometimes we believe the boxes
we’ve built around ourselves are real. Hers
was called Mom. And it wasn’t a box,

   but an invisible fence trying to save her
   from traffic. It’s funny how she watched
   her life from the center lane, focusing

on the stranger down the street — I wonder
if he likes my seaside roses, the wisteria
on my fence? Sometimes the home

   in our head has the worst view.
   We miss the ones who leave us love notes
   in our mailboxes, the ones who check

whether we made it home safe. We’re lost
in the false radiance of a screen
with no idea who loves us most.

Excerpted from “Accidental Devotions.” Copyright © 2026 by Kelli Russell Agodon. Published by Copper Canyon Press, 2026. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.◆

First Day of School

When the kids were little, we always insisted on a first day of school photo, even when we were running late, which was always, and we couldn’t find a backpack, and the shoes — NOT THOSE SHOES! — were all wrong, and the hair looked like a rat’s nest.

It’s a photo tradition I’ve never abandoned.

This week, Dawn started her twenty-second year of teaching 11th-grade English at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.

I loved teaching English — particularly the anxious thrill of the opening day. But I would have no idea how to do that anymore. Back in my Dark Ages, I just stood in front of the students and lectured, and they wrote stuff down. QED.

Nowadays, the classroom requires unfathomable technological savvy, psychological insight, and pedagogical creativity. When I hear my wife and younger daughter trading lesson plans, I have no idea what they’re talking about. But I envy them.◆

Clippings

• This week’s review is Edwidge Danticat’s Dèy, about a woman who survives a mass shooting but finds that the ordinary demands of life won’t wait (review).

• At the National Book Festival last weekend, Robert Newlen noted that he is now the longest-serving acting Librarian of Congress in American history.

• Dolly Parton, who died on Tuesday, was the founder of the Imagination Library, which has given away more than 330 million children’s books since its founding in 1995.◆

While I read Edwidge Danticat’s new novel about gun violence, six members of a family died by gunfire in Winfield, Kansas; another five were massacred near Lake City, Michigan.

It’s unlikely you heard much about these shootings. Held captive by the Supreme Court’s misreading of the Constitution and the deadly influence of the gun lobby, Americans routinely suffer such carnage. While thoughts and prayers are exchanged for campaign donations, politicians admonish mourners not to politicize the latest gun tragedy.

Indeed, so successful has that campaign been that even this mention of recent attacks and my brief characterization of our political impotence feel slightly hysterical, almost in bad taste. Enough with your editorial — get to the book!

Danticat must feel the same fury at this daily slaughter, but her novel Dèy is a gracious exercise in restraint, a story fueled by the tempered outrage that runs through so much of her fiction and nonfiction. She bears witness and, by the extraordinary empathy of her prose, makes us witnesses, too.

The first three of Dèy’s four sections are titled “Run,” “Hide,” and “F(l)ight,” a grim allusion to the advice American schoolchildren receive during active-shooter drills. The novel opens in early 2018, mid-rampage: “I dive to the restaurant floor as gunfire rips the air outside.” The narrator, a real estate agent named Magnolia, is shopping for her daughter’s birthday present at a mall when blasts echo through the building.

“Is this a mass grave?” asks a man sobbing next to her on the floor.

“Where else is left to run to now?” Magnolia wonders — a question that refers as much to the top floor of the Miami shopping mall as to this trapped nation.

But then sirens approach. Bland instructions blast over the PA system. A SWAT team shouts at the terrified diners to line up with their arms raised. Once outside, Magnolia breaks away from the group and runs barefoot to her car.

She tells no one what happened to her, even as the details dominate the news — nine injured, four dead, including the racist shooter. But Magnolia insists “the mall was one of many experiences I had that day.” She will remain “a woman determined to no longer give this event at the mall any space.”

The futility of that claim is enough to break your heart.

In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Danticat said she was inspired by her own frightening experience in 2017 when kids playing with the sound system in a Florida shopping mall created popping noises that sparked panic.

Dèy, which means “mourning” in Haitian Creole, takes place in the penumbra of those opening 10 pages. It’s a haunting feat of concision and elision. Still shaking from the trauma of what she experienced, Magnolia listens to her phone messages and gets right to work. A difficult client must be encouraged to accept an offer on her condo. Her mother, back in Haiti, is in the hospital, and Magnolia should comfort her and figure out what’s wrong. And then there’s the upcoming birthday party for her soon-to-be 10-year-old daughter, complicated by the fact that her partner recently moved out.

Life, in all its quotidian details, rushes along, completely uninterested in anyone’s trauma or near-death scrapes. The best Magnolia can do is press her palms to the floor of a condo she’s trying to sell. “There’s no stickiness here, no rattling chandelier, no gunfire, no mention of mass graves,” she thinks. “I remind myself to breathe slowly and steadily, matching each inhale to the shadows moving across the recessed lights.”

In the quiet sanctuary of Danticat’s prose, the complexity of Magnolia’s life gently unfurls. As usual, the author eschews certainty for the glimmer of implication, the indeterminate nature of so much real experience. Why, for instance, did Magnolia ask her devoted partner for a break? — a question much debated by everyone in her large, loving, obsessively gossipy family. How does the fear of her mother’s mental illness affect her own decisions? Can she facilitate the gentrification of Little Haiti while still mourning the neighborhood’s disappearance? None of these questions can be answered or ignored, even as Magnolia struggles to suppress the terror that still itches her skin.

I asked Edwidge Danticat, “What’s the greatest challenge of writing a novel about gun violence in America?”

If we didn’t all know the ghastly, repetitive details of these mass shootings, parts of Dèy would read like satire, which may be the point of Danticat’s matter-of-fact narration. How, she seems to ask, have we grown inured to such facile affirmations in the aftermath of each killing? What kind of nation would teach its youngest children this ditty to the tune of “Frère Jacques”?

Is your door locked?
Are your lights out?
Will you hide?
You will hide.

A persistent subplot, rumbling along offstage, concerns the violent collapse of civil order in Haiti, awash with American guns. Communicating with her parents and her half-brother largely by voice messages, Magnolia sees their imperiled lives as though she’s watching them through slats in a fence. Dèy never pushes the parallel, but the bloodshed spilling across the United States every week resonates with the violence ripping through her parents’ homeland, which the U.S. president dismisses as “a shithole country.”

And if you’re paying attention to the date, you may anticipate what’s about to happen on Feb. 14, 2018, in Parkland, Florida.

But this is determinedly not a thriller about mass shootings, details of which are laced so sparingly through these pages that you’ll taste the poison without being sickened by it. This is, instead, very much a novel about persisting, about remaining alive in a world that would have us be ghosts.◆

Dèy, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf, 256 pp., $30)

Previous review: Chang-rae Lee’s A Tender Age
In Lee’s most autobiographical novel, he explores the unbearable burdens of childhood.

It all started with Noah’s Ark.

For years — almost since before the Flood — I’ve been receiving emails intended for the Rev. Dr. Ron Charles, a biblical archaeologist and missionary who has written about his search for Noah’s Ark in Turkey.

My questions about that endeavor are 300 cubits long, but that’s beside the point. The real miracle is the gumption of publicists who tell me they understand Dr. Charles’s books so well that they can help me sell more copies.

Thus began my relationship with Reese Witherspoon.

In April, I got an invitation from Sofia Brown, who said she “partners with Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine.” Sofia really liked Dr. Charles’s Chasing Jesus, a chronological account of Jesus’ life.

“Your approach,” she wrote, “encourages readers to engage not only with the story itself but with the process of uncovering meaning, reconciling perspectives, and exploring the intersection of history and belief” — always nice to hear, even if it’s not your book.

She was offering me the chance to feature Chasing Jesus in her upcoming community reading challenge.

“Our community is drawn to works that inspire meaningful reflection and thoughtful discussion, particularly those that explore profound questions of identity,” which certainly seemed relevant in my case.

She signed off, “We believe,” which I believe because after explaining to Sofia that I’m not the author of Chasing Jesus, she invited me three more times. Her faith, it seems, is unshakable.

And then, lo and behold, Reese Witherspoon began writing to me.

She was fascinated with Dr. Charles’s The Search: A Historian’s Search for Historical Jesus.

“As I explored the book,” she wrote, “I couldn’t help but imagine how effectively its ideas could be translated into a visual documentary, historical drama, or educational series.”

Out of curiosity, I wrote back asking what the next steps would be, but after several rounds, I explained, “Just remember, I don’t really know anything about The Search, because I’m not Dr. Ron Charles; I’m Ron Charles, the former book critic for The Washington Post.”

What I’ve always admired about Reese Witherspoon is her persistence, and sure enough, she wasn’t about to let a little mistaken identity stand in the way of a promising Hollywood project.

“I sincerely apologize for the mix-up,” she wrote. “Since we have already started this conversation, I would still be very interested in learning more about your own writing and literary work.”

Finally!

“Do you think,” I asked her, “that a collection of my book reviews could be made into some kind of ensemble serial TV show?”

I was imagining something like White Lotus, but with quibbles.

“Yes, absolutely,” Reese Witherspoon replied. “Please send me the PDF or compiled collection of the book reviews you have in mind.”

After “going through the material very carefully,” she wrote back to me: “Dear Richard Russo...”

Hurt but unwilling to give up my dreams of television success, I explained that I was the book critic Ron Charles, not the novelist Richard Russo.

“I sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding,” she replied. “Your idea of developing your book reviews into an ensemble TV series is certainly something I would be interested in exploring further.” And then she signed off as Jackson Stephen.

When I asked about that strange name change, she wrote back, “I apologize for the confusion. I’m Reese Witherspoon, an award-winning American actress, producer, and media entrepreneur,” which is perfectly understandable because who among us hasn’t suddenly started using another person’s name?

Anywho, the time for me to connect with a Film Creative Documents Master had arrived!

Jackson Vill would help me explore turning my “book reviews into an ensemble television series.” The first step, he explained, is to “establish the series concept, its world, characters, story direction, episode potential, and overall presentation.”

Which he was eager to do as soon as I chose an editorial package and transferred $750, $1,500, or $2,500 to Sodiq Ajisefinni at Lead Bank in Kansas City, Mo., where most of the great TV shows are developed.

When I finally stopped responding, Jackson asked, “Are you there, Ron Charles?” which is just the sort of searching, existential question Reese Witherspoon loves to explore.

Check your local listings.◆

The rest of the newsletter follows below.

Books Go to the Movies

• The Magic Faraway Tree, starring Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy, has glimmered into theaters (trailer). The movie is an adaptation — and modernization — of Enid Blyton’s fantasy series, which began appearing in 1939, about three siblings who move with their parents to the countryside where they discover elves, gnomes, and a very capacious tree. Hurry up: Two sequels are already planned.

• Franz, directed by Agnieszka Holland, opens today in select theaters (trailer). The movie, in German and Czech with English subtitles, drifts through time, capturing the metamorphosis of Franz Kafka’s life from childhood to his death in 1924.

• Sunday evening on AMC+, the undead will rise again for The Vampire Lestat: One Night Only Live (trailer). The concert, filmed at New York City’s Beacon Theatre on June 2, features Sam Reid as Lestat singing songs composed for the AMC+ vampire series based on Anne Rice’s immortal novel.◆

Bookworms Unite!

The National Book Festival opens tomorrow in Washington with more than 80 novelists, poets, children’s-book writers, illustrators, and other cultural figures, including Martin Scorsese (full list).

The festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress, is a book clubber’s dream. In one day, you can hear Ann Patchett, Andrew Sean Greer, Tayari Jones, Tom Perrotta, Patrick Radden Keefe, Annette Gordon-Reed, Douglas Brinkley, Kai Bird, Beverly Gage, and so many others — all you have to do is figure out how to be in several different rooms at the same time (interactive schedule).

And by all means, bring the kids. They’ll love meeting Mac Barnett, Shannon Hale, Meg Cabot, and Rex Rocket, the Cosmic Wiener Dog.

But don’t just flock to the marquee names. A trusted friend tells me that every mystery-lover she’s directed to Tim Sullivan’s books goes “totally nuts” for them. The filmmaker and writer, who self-published his first two novels, will be at the festival to talk about “The Tailor,” the eighth detective novel in his DS George Cross series.

Poets are making an especially strong showing this year. Fresh off her role as both the muse and the murderer of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, translator Emily Wilson will appear with U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze. He’ll be discussing his recent book, Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry.

And I’ll be talking with Sasha Waters about her new documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World. She’ll present video clips of Oliver reading her work and conversations with people who knew her, including John Waters (trailer).

(Dept. of Small World: Yesterday morning, while eating French toast at 7a Foods on Martha’s Vineyard and shamelessly eavesdropping, as one does, I ended up meeting Allie Humenuk, a documentarian who shot additional footage for Waters’s film.)

The National Book Festival extravaganza at the Washington Convention Center — 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Aug. 22 — is open to the public, but remember: You must have a free ticket to enter (get them here).

Of course, most of you aren’t in the Washington area, but this is your festival, too. The Library will livestream events throughout the day, and eventually all the presentations will be on the Library’s website. C-SPAN’s Book TV will also broadcast live from the festival.

Tonight, if I make it back from Martha’s Vineyard in time, Dawn and I will be at the festival’s opening celebration in the Jefferson Building — cocktails, a dinner reception, and remarks from a few of the authors, including the hilarious Jenny Lawson. This will be my first year attending the hoity-toity soirée as an independent journalist. I’ll be stuffing extra canapés in the pockets of my polyblend black suit.

P.S. In 2014, the Park Service threw the annual book festival off the National Mall for fear it was harming the grass. This weekend, while readers amble around the Washington Convention Center with their totes, the National Mall will host the inaugural Freedom 250 Grand Prix IndyCar street race.◆

Picture This

When I was teaching at a small Christian college in the Midwest, Dawn and I invited some friends to a Kraft Mac & Cheese dinner party where we served bowls of Kraft Mac & Cheese from around the world — France, India, Argentina, etc.

Of course, each bowl was exactly the same, which we thought was terribly witty. But what can I say? It was a dry campus. The next most exciting event was the Sunday hymn sing.

Now I want to throw that party again and invite Michael Benner and Alison Hawkins. They’ve just published an exceedingly silly picture book about the origins of Mac & Cheese.

At the start, Mac is a friendly noodle in Pastaland who needs a friend. He sets off across the Sea of Snacks, but he can’t find anybody who appreciates his groan-worthy jokes.

What do lazy noodles do all day?
They lasagna couch and pasta time!

Meanwhile, in Quesoland, King Cheese was feeling provolonely. “This is aging me,” he sighs.

I don’t want to give anything away, but if you use your noodle, you’ll see where this is going.

Mac & Cheese will delight the budding punster in your family even more than a creamy bowl of you know what.

I can’t think of a single bit of cheesy wordplay left unuttered in this story. It’s not just great; it’s grated.◆

This Week’s Poem

The sly wit in Donna Masini’s new collection starts right there in the title, Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? She possesses an extraordinary gift for turning ordinary phrases and events in a light that illuminates their strange depth.

Beauty parlors, classrooms, a restaurant after hours — these are the everyday places Masini hangs out to explore “the democracy of grief.”

In one poem a woman “wonders / whether anyone uses the nylon sheath / that comes with a new umbrella,” and a moment later we look up to realize she’s talking about the “flimsy precarious parasol of thought” that keeps tragedy at bay.

Errands

I tried to ignore her, pleading old woman leaning on a tree guard
holding out a plate. I had no cash. It was hot. Late. So much to do.

Laundry, library, pharmacy, pet shop. I was lonely and limping,
my bags were tangled, and my friend had just died.

It was a sparrow — struggling, dust-brown, size-of-a-baby’s-hand
shudder of feather stuck to a glue trap.

Please, she said, help me. She was shielding the bird
the way you hold your hand around a lit candle. Never touch a bird,

I learned as a girl. I dropped the bags. I touched the bird,
the beating chest feathers, tried to peel the trap from its twiggy

leg, slowly, the way you ease a Band-Aid off. The bird — I barely saw it —
shot up, swooped up, up into the tree, onto the fire escape,

the pet store sign swinging above us, then — gone!
A residue of feather stuck to the trap. We saved her,

the woman said. She touched my arm. I’m almost blind, she said.
She must have heard the bird, felt for the sound under the parked car.

How long had she knelt there, waiting, between the tree guard
and parked car, how had she felt for it among the cigarette butts

and gutter trash? How had she heard it above the racket of traffic:
Honeycrisps and Pink Ladies had rolled out of my grocery bag

and lay, shining, on the late sidewalk. Days I’d been waiting for a sign —
which might be why I thought of Jon. How busy the dead must be

at the beginning of being dead. So much to do. Even after you die.
So much we need you to do.

                        for Jon Tweedy, in memoriam

Excerpted from “Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?: Poems.” Copyright © 2026 by Donna Masini. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Writing Life

Last night on Martha’s Vineyard, I finally got to talk with the man who wrote the first novel I ever reviewed: Richard Russo.

Back in 1997, I was teaching English in St. Louis when a former student’s mother suggested I try writing book reviews. I bought a copy of Straight Man, wrote it up, and sold the review to The Christian Science Monitor.

The book literally changed my life. It was a great joy to tell him so in person.

Russo was on the island to talk about his career and his new novel, Under the Falls, as part of the Martha’s Vineyard Author Series. (Russo and I serve on the advisory board.)

The Series will close on Sunday with Michelle Obama in conversation with Michele Norris at 4:30. Because that event sold out in two minutes, a second appearance was added at 7:30. It, too, sold out.◆

Clippings

• This week’s review is A Tender Age, Chang-rae Lee’s most autobiographical work of fiction, which burns away the sentimentality of childhood (review).

• Speaking of, Christopher Robin was born on this day in 1920.

• To salvage its inane seashell case against former FBI director James Comey, the Justice Department is now pointing to Comey’s 2025 thriller, FDR Drive, in which a right-wing podcaster encourages his followers to commit violence (details).◆

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Chang-rae Lee’s new novel, A Tender Age, recalls a period of childhood freedom impossible for today’s iPhone-toting kids — or their anxious parents — to imagine.

“In our 1970s town,” Lee writes, “the adults, for whatever reason, whether they were working a job or not, left us to our own, and to one another.”

It’s true. After scarfing down peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, my friends and I would tromp into the Hundred Acre Wood behind our subdivision and not think about returning home until dinnertime. Our long unsupervised days were full of capture the flag, fort-building and -wrecking, and, if the older kids could get their hands on them, firecrackers. But Lee’s story burns nostalgia off that era like a mean kid frying an ant with a magnifying glass.

The narrator, Jeon-Gi, is a Korean-American man looking back half a century to the summer he turned 11. “When I was a kid,” he says, “there were some rough times.” Just what an Olympian act of understatement that is will only gradually become clear.

Jeon-Gi and his buddies live in a diverse, working-class neighborhood north of New York City. “We were young enough,” he writes, “that the bonds felt fierce, like in a tribe, tourniquet tight, yet our tribe was fueled by constant disagreements, contentions, sometimes outright bloodletting, which made everything dire and fragile.”

Lee offers a clear-eyed vision of the playground’s regal hierarchy, both its essential comedy and its horrible cruelty. Although the dimensions of the arena are cramped, the stakes are vast. These boys and girls play mildly injurious games, learn new swear words and slurs, and adhere to stringent standards for sneakers and haircuts. “A chunky kid, bordering on fat,” Jeon-Gi is generally happy, popular enough, but, he notes, “to be a kid was to be bullied.”

Which becomes the irritant that rubs Jeon-Gi’s soul raw. He can handle the typical picking-on just fine, but when Tommy Reilly, a creepy, violent boy from a different apartment building, starts taunting him, he grows alarmed, then paranoid. It’s a crisis that reveals to him, more clearly than ever before, how little control he has over his own life. Unable to tell any adults about his predicament, and with Tommy Reilly growing ever more threatening, Jeon-Gi begins to fantasize about how he might scar his antagonist, even kill him.

In the claustrophobic panic of the boy’s mind, every step to defend himself feels justified, but when he’s pushed too far, he erupts in a way that finally can’t be ignored, that shocks his gentle parents and threatens to derail his life. How perfectly appropriate that Jeon-Gi’s name literally means “electricity,” that elemental force for good or destruction.

“This is the nature of certain youthful happenings,” he writes, “how they can become a knot in the flesh that every other occurrence must bypass in order for you to know yourself, in order for you to grow.”

This was also the nature of childhood in an era when therapy was less common and school psychologists less ubiquitous. Jeon-Gi has no words to confess what he’s feeling or what he’s enduring. As a straight-A student, he’s disappointed to fail the test for mental illness. Nonetheless, his implacable silence becomes further evidence of his deviance, which plunges him into a world of wildly ineffectual and even abusive counseling. (The scare-’em-straight day trip to a prison is a chapter I will never forget.)

I asked Chang-rae Lee, “What do you think adults tend to forget—or sentimentalize—about being 11 years old?”

Lee, the author of six previous novels, has spoken of A Tender Age as his most autobiographical work of fiction. That’s not to suggest that the shocking events of Jeon-Gi’s life are Lee’s or that the parents and the sister in this novel are the author’s actual family members. But the intensity of the child’s need to assimilate, that fierce urge to reject one’s loving mother with her funny accent for the bleaching immersion of the American melting pot, feels tragically real in these pages.

And it’s the voice of the novel that proves most alluring. An 11-year-old protagonist poses a special challenge, one that reaches all the way back to that imperiled boy floating down the Mississippi on a raft. Twain, like so many novelists who followed him, maintains the illusion of the child’s consciousness through the charming vernacular of a boy’s speech.

Lee takes the opposite approach. His narrator throughout is a mature adult articulating with casual elegance and solemnity the boy’s inchoate terrors and desires. He claims, “How little you can fathom the consequence of a time,” but in fact this entire novel is an uncommon fathoming of those consequences. It’s a haunting act of ventriloquism, defined by self-consciousness and steeped in regret. What, he keeps wondering, brings out the evil in other people, in himself? Here is a person at the moment he recognizes himself becoming “a totally different creature,” as though the butterfly could describe its own chrysalis.

This older perspective initially risks disrupting the immediate sense that we’re experiencing the struggles of an 11-year-old. In the second half of the novel, when Jeon-Gi is sent to a Korean summer camp for two weeks that will end up shaping the rest of his life, his perceptive analysis of his campmates, his fully formed appreciation of their nobility, their wickedness, and their guile, can seem almost preternatural.

What I quickly grew to admire, though, is Lee’s willingness to consider the boy’s tribulations with the seriousness they deserve. He’s trying to capture that ephemeral stage when self-loathing first condenses in the fog of childhood guilt. While drinking bug juice and making lanyards and smelling his tentmates’ farts, this narrator is intellectually and emotionally equipped to convey what the boy feels but won’t be able to articulate for decades. The fear, the desire, the resentment, the shame that young Jeon-Gi experiences are no less painful, no less overwhelming simply because he’s experiencing them on a rainy campout. Only the deadening effect of familiarity and our falsely sentimental regard for adolescence allow us to pretend that a kid’s dirt-covered longings are somehow less existential than our own.

After Lee’s strikingly different novels about spies, veterans, suburbanites, war orphans, and dystopian wanderers, A Tender Age is another reminder that he’s one of the most insightful and wide-ranging authors in the country.

Making predictions about how our literary canon will develop is a fool’s errand. After all, just about every novel fades into obscurity, and some of our most famous ones have risen from it. Literary persistence depends largely upon school curricula — the choices, good or bad, made in thousands of high school and college English classes. But as someone who taught and loathed John Knowles’s A Separate Peace for several years, I wish I could go back and talk with my students about this infinitely finer novel that traces the unspeakable pain that twists around the spine even while we’re still reaching for the life ahead.◆

A Tender Age, by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead, 368 pp., $30)

Previous review: Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
A wide-ranging warning about the malignant effects of Silicon Valley on American democracy.

On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word marketing pitch tarted up as a manifesto.

“We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity,” Zuckerberg — or his avatar — wrote in a document that smells like Ayn Rand’s eau de toilette.

The message may be suspect, but the timing is superb. On Aug. 25, Jill Lepore will publish a wide-ranging warning about the deleterious effects of Silicon Valley on American democracy.

“The manifestos keep coming,” Lepore writes in The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, each one promising something “magnificently, impossibly, extravagantly world-changing.” For more than a century, prophets of technology like Zuckerberg have been pumping out such “messianic boosterism.”

But the stakes and the dangers have never been higher.

Lepore takes as her inspiration Hannah Arendt’s concern that someday human beings might “need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.”

“That day has now come,” Lepore says.

Her central thesis, first explored in The New Yorker in 2024, is that Western democracies are in thrall to a small handful of billionaires who talk like comic-book superheroes and dream of dissolving the constraints of government, our connections to each other, and even “the prison of their own bodies.”

In grandiose mission statements, these “twenty-first-century merchant princes” envision replacing the functions of government with the wiser, more efficient, more data-driven actions of AI. They promise personal independence and infinite power but consistently deliver political manipulation, algorithmic control, and environmental degradation.

It’s no accident, she suggests, that the rise of social media and its vaunted promises for participatory democracy has coincided with the decline of democracies around the world. And she expresses her concerns in the kind of witty, aphoristic lines you always think of too late at a party:

“Silicon Valley executives took their political philosophy not from Plato and Jefferson but from equal parts Atlas Shrugged and Marvel comics.”

Quoting Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and other tech moguls, Lepore shows that the AI hype is a subterfuge, a bait-and-switch — promising utopia but delivering it only for a few, while the rest of us are left on an increasingly ailing planet.

Any attempt to regulate these corporations for the benefit of citizens or the earth is met with apocalyptic warnings that only their complete freedom from constraints can save humanity from total annihilation.

The fundamental absurdity emanating from Silicon Valley goes something like this: Democracy must be circumvented and the natural world sacrificed so that tech companies can develop AI systems powerful enough to preserve democracy and the natural world.

It’s amusing — and infuriating — to see how worn and endlessly recycled today’s hype is. In 1975, a sociologist imagined that the computer revolution would return us to “the form of democracy found in the ancient Greek city-state, the kibbutz, and the New England town meeting, which gave every citizen the opportunity to directly participate in the political process.”

What we got instead is Cambridge Analytica exploiting voters’ outrage and your brother-in-law sending out YouTube videos about George Soros funding Antifa. What’s on the horizon will be infinitely more sophisticated and coercive.

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State tends toward high-level analysis and broad trends, but if the book has a starring villain, it’s Elon Musk, who claimed that his purchase of Twitter was “important to the function of democracy,” even to the future of civilization, but then used the social media platform “to bend political discourse, politics, and government to his will.”

Lepore also writes damningly about the parallel between Musk’s hyperbolic claims and the unhinged ravings of his racist grandfather.

And Musk comes up for a particularly entertaining lashing in a chapter about the way self-professed tech visionaries have drawn their visions from classic 20th-century science fiction. Trouble is, Musk and his fellow AI enthusiasts have consistently misread those dystopian stories as “assembly instructions.”

“They took more than a century of warnings about building a particular set of tools,” Lepore writes, “and instead of heeding those warnings, they decided to build those tools.” (See this recent excerpt in Wired.)

Not all the essays in Artificial State are equally effective — or well integrated with her larger thesis. There’s a strange section about the early 20th-century craze of electrocuting elephants that’s fascinating (and horrific) but seems, like a few other parts, obliquely tied to Lepore’s argument.

But that’s just fodder for interesting debate — which this book is sure to generate on op-ed pages, podcasts, and newsletters (voilà). Put in your hold now at the library, or you won’t get a copy till next year.

I’d love to tell you that The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State ends with a blueprint for resisting the tyrannical march of government by machine, but Lepore is too clear-eyed. We’re here, she states, “because of the failure of liberal democracy to limit corporate power over politics and government, its failure to heed decades of warnings about the dangers of an automated state.”

The best she can do is remind us — four times on the final page — that public debate about these new tools “can still happen.” On the flimsy modality of that claim, our future rests.◆

The rest of the newsletter — including an interview with Julie Andrews — follows below.

Books Go to the Movies

• My Brilliant Career, starring Philippa Northeast, is streaming on Netflix. This six-part Australian series is based on Miles Franklin’s 1901 novel about a poor girl who dreams of becoming a writer and avoiding the constraints of marriage — but then she falls in love. (You may remember the 1979 film, starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill.)

• Reacher is back for a fourth season of righteous mayhem and violent score-settling (exhausting trailer). Alan Ritchson returns as Jack Reacher, the refrigerator-sized former military policeman who really, really hates being told what to do. This season is based on Lee Child’s 13th novel in the Reacher series, Gone Tomorrow (2009).

• Time is running out to see Ragtime (trailer). The Tony-winning Broadway revival of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s musical adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s novel will close on Sunday at Lincoln Center in New York (tickets, few).

Cabin Fever

Nowadays when Dawn and I visit my folks in New Hampshire, we stay in the farmhouse on the hill overlooking the covered bridge. But decades ago, when my grandparents were alive, my family kept to the cabin down by the Blackwater River.

The smell of the place — those pine boards marinated in smoke and mold — wafts through my earliest memories.

There is something about a woodland cabin, something at once nostalgic, romantic, and just a bit terrifying. The idyllic getaway is also the scene of the crime, the residence of writers, hermits, witches.

I was delighted to catch wind of a curious project by the novelist Josh Riedel. While doing research for his next book, Riedel tracked down a collection of 30 building designs from 1918 called Sunset’s Cabin Plan Book. The vacation homes it describes have evocative names like “A Cabin in the Clouds,” “A Club House for Twenty,” “The Biggest Little Cabin.”

But rather than build a little house, Riedel built a little zine called Thirty Cabins. He enlisted contributions from 29 writers for a collection of short stories — flash fiction, really — inspired by these rustic dwellings.

Small images of cabin blueprints adorn the collection’s endpapers.

Ed Park sets an ominous tone in the first story about a man looking for a large stick or rock and then sneaking up on a cabin — his “target.” In Kathleen Boland’s witty story, a woman arrives at a large party in the woods where she knows no one. Gina Chung’s narrator might have seen a bear (or a man?) outside the kitchen window.

Time sometimes shifts unpredictably in these stories, as in Rachel Khong’s piece about a woman remembering the drowning of a friend more than 20 years earlier.

The paranoid husband in Ben Purkert’s story is concerned he shouldn’t fall asleep after suffering a concussion, but he might have bigger things to worry about.

Thirty Cabins is alternately charming and creepy, witty and sad, as diverse as the buildings that inspired it. What’s most striking, though, is how quickly these writers can create a scene, a collection of characters, a mood. In the cramped space of just two or three pages, they conjure up whole worlds.

Like a little house in the woods, each one is a quirky marvel of engineering (purchase).◆

Picture This

The first time I was offered an opportunity to speak with Julie Andrews, I ran around the house and told everybody I was going to speak to Julie Andrews — but never answered the publicist, so that fell through.

The second time I was offered an opportunity to speak with Julie Andrews, I set 18 alarm clocks and had two backup phones at the ready.

For those of you who have not yet received a phone call from Dame Julie, let me reassure you that she sounds just as warm, witty, and charming as you’ve always imagined.

She and her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, have just published a picture book called Shy, the latest of several dozen collaborations. The story, delightfully illustrated by Eva Byrne, was inspired by a gray poodle puppy that Dame Julie owned while she was playing Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady in the 1950s.

“I called her Shy,” Dame Julie tells me, “and it suited her personality. But after a while, when I did my daily practice at the piano — because when you’re in a big show, you have to warm up ahead of time — she suddenly would put her head back, and stretch her neck, terribly sweet, point her nose to the stars, and sing with me. And by that, I mean, she kind of howled.”

Professor Henry Higgins would be horrified, of course. He complains that Eliza is “crooning like a bilious pigeon.”

Dame Julie was far more sympathetic. “She couldn’t help herself,” she insists. “I thought, well, maybe it’s an unhappy thing. So I put her in the next room, behind a closed door, and then I saw the little snout appearing under the door, and these little whimpers continued, and attempts at singing continued, as I continued.”

“It wasn’t music in general — it was just between my little dog and me!”

That funny anecdote is essentially the plot of Shy, although in these pages, the dog’s owner is a young concert pianist, and Shy makes a fabulously successful concert debut.

Shy finds her confidence quickly, but that wasn’t the case for Dame Julie.

“Believe me,” she says, “it took a lot of time to learn to trust and to give. A lot of my early years, I spent learning how to connect, and I had a hard time with audiences because part of me kind of went out to the front of the house and judged my performance, as though I were part of the audience. I wasn’t doing the giving that is so important. But once I latched onto that and felt grateful for the fact that they paid money to see the show and me and all of that, it changed my life, and then I began to really know my craft.”

But after voice surgery effectively ended her singing career in 1997, she had to find a new outlet.

“I was bemoaning my fate to Emma one day, and she said, ‘You’ve just found a new way of using your voice with this writing.’ A great weight seemed to fall off my shoulders, and that’s exactly what it’s all about. I still can contribute, which I love to do, and the joy of finding a story, and particularly writing it with Emma, is tremendous.”◆

This Week’s Poem

Poetry is always concerned with economy but not always economics.

This wry poem from Bob Hicok’s new collection, Breathe, bristles with the experience of running out of money in a country very concerned about inconveniencing millionaires.

Minimum wage

Try buying a car on $7.25 an hour.
Covering rent or a house payment. Food.
Electric and heating bills. Health and car
and home insurance. Try being one
of over one hundred million Americans
who can’t. Try working
two or three jobs so you can probably
die earlier than you need to. Perhaps
you’re already dead or this poem
is boring you to death. I know
I’d prefer to be in a hot air balloon
looking for clouds or Canada
looking for moose or Detroit
looking across the river at Canada,
where I had my first cannoli
because Italy was too far away.
Try buying something nice for your kid,
a red tricycle or sunny future.
Adjusted for inflation,
1962’s minimum wage of a buck fifteen
would be twelve and a quarter now. Adjusted
for decency, capitalism would share
more of the wealth. At a minimum,
a minimum wage should minimally allow
a comfortable life. It’s common sense,
like not sleeping with knives or running
with sharpened wolves or drowning in debt.
One should drown in water or happiness.
Maybe pudding. Try buying your way out
of poverty, lifting yourself up
by your lack of bootstraps. I mean,
have you looked at how much boots cost
these days, at how expensive it is
to have nothing to your name or reason
to believe anything will ever change?

Excerpted from “Breathe.” Copyright © 2026 by Bob Hicok. Published by Copper Canyon Press, 2026. Republished with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.◆

Whole Cloth

In the mid-1830s, the textile mills in Lowell, Mass., were producing more than 39 million yards of cloth — almost enough to wrap around the Earth — every single year.

My family and I recently visited the Boott Cotton Mills Museum at Lowell National Historical Park.

The highlight is a long room filled with 88 looms from the early 20th century. Our guides paused their presentation, handed out earplugs, and started up the spinning leather belts that set a dozen of the looms clackety-clacking away, weaving towels for the gift shop. (Yes, of course, we bought one.)

The park, which also includes a recreated boardinghouse, lays out a story of astonishing industrial growth. Thousands of people, mostly women, were drawn to work on the looms from farms all over New England. Although the jobs could be dangerous and the hours were always long, in the early decades, at least, the workers enjoyed relatively high wages and cultural enrichment unavailable to them back home.

Of course, workers organized for better working conditions and more humane schedules.

But curiously, none of the three or four tour guides who spoke to us mentioned how more than 12 million pounds of Southern cotton happened to arrive at the mills every year. With such statistical elisions, history is woven into a pretty scrim.◆

Clippings

• This week’s review is Under the Falls, by Richard Russo, in which a rock star’s homecoming becomes a dark reckoning with guilt, success, and the town he left behind (review).

• Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed the Freedom to Read Act, which protects school and public libraries from politically motivated book bans (details).

• Bookstore Romance Day is tomorrow, Aug. 15. Beloved, you’ll find indie bookstores around the world celebrating romance fiction, readers, and writers (details).◆

Twenty-five years ago, Richard Russo dedicated his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Empire Falls, to the filmmaker Robert Benton.

In an interview around that time, Russo said Benton had changed his life by getting him into screenwriting, and he wanted him to know there were no hard feelings.

The boundary between novels and screens is now so permeable that it’s hard to remember a time when producers and directors weren’t scouring bookshelves for their next adaptation. But at the turn of the century, Russo was something of a career-blending trendsetter, frequently setting aside the difficult work of writing a novel for the relative pleasure of working on a script. Some of those scripts have never risen off the page, but millions of viewers have enjoyed Empire Falls, Twilight (not that one), The Ice Harvest, and other original and adapted stories.

His latest book, Under the Falls, rowed upstream. It’s a novel based on a script for a proposed TV show that sank during the 2023 writers’ strike. Overinterpreting that origin is tempting; this is Russo’s shortest novel and his most clipped and dramatic one, too. The propulsive requirements of the screen shape the flow of fiction in distinctive ways, privileging conflict and action, eliminating digressions, and bringing characters’ motives rapidly and explicitly to the surface. The result is an unusually brisk thriller that plunges into Russo’s signature exploration of small-town decline, resentment, and guilt.

The story opens with an aerial flyover gliding up Interstate 87 through upstate New York. “If the Northway is all you know about the Adirondacks, you might very well conclude that prosperity and good fortune are a matter of altitude,” Russo writes, “but you’d be wrong.” Head up Route 29 and you’ll find Stone Mountain, a dying community pockmarked by closed storefronts and cabins strewn with tires and trash.

“People from around here don’t go out into the world and become rich and famous,” he writes. “With one exception.”

You might very well conclude that Russo is referring to himself. But you’d be wrong again. That exception is a rock star named Tyler Sinclair, Stone Mountain’s famous son. After 18 years away, Tyler is finally returning home to launch his next tour and album. The concert — initially planned by his staff without his knowledge — is a benefit performance for Tyler’s old friend, Tim “Doc” Dockery, who’s permanently disabled.

When they were 11, the boys were playing on a rope swing at the Falls. Doc swung too far out over the water and dropped down on an iron pipe that ran along the dam. Tyler saved his friend from drowning, but he was also the kid who launched Doc on that rope, and for 18 years he’s been trying to reconcile his role as hero and villain.

Apparently, he’s not the only one.

When Tyler’s limo delivers him to Doc’s derelict trailer for their happy pre-concert reunion, Doc assures him, “I just wanted you to know there are no hard feelings.... If you don’t blame yourself, I’m glad.”

“Why would I blame myself?”

It’s an awkward conversation so perfectly drawn it’ll unearth any buried sins in your own past and make you squirm. Russo pits Doc’s nonchalance against Tyler’s desperate efforts to defend himself without sounding defensive. But clearly, Doc is picking at a scab of denial and enforced amnesia. After all, Tyler never wanted to return to Stone Mountain, but that’s the name of his band. He doesn’t want to think about his friend’s accident, but his greatest hit is “The Long Fall.” In Russo’s telling, he’s a slippery mess of contradictions and self-denials, facing his homecoming concert like a return to the site of a crime.

And almost immediately, old tragedies reverberate in the present day with new ones. The night of the concert, three people are dead.

Accidents? Murders?

Making those determinations is up to Tyler’s childhood friend Curt, now serving as the town’s chief of police — and another mess. Indeed, there are enough emotionally wrecked men in this novel for a whole support group.

In short chapters that rotate quickly from character to character, Russo rummages around in the dusty attic of Stone Mountain, where poverty and addiction have rotted the timbers. It’s a cast of damaged folks all trying to solve or cover up the deaths triggered by Tyler’s homecoming. Despite Curt’s impression that he’s in charge of the town, his wife — Lady Macbeth of the fentanyl trade — is the real force here, a creature of seething ambition and rage whom some great actress would have made the star of the show.

It’s easy to imagine that the demands of streaming TV aren’t the only forces driving this novel. The intensity of Tyler’s guilt — for leaving, for surviving, for succeeding — seems strangely masochistic. If Russo isn’t an actual rock star, he’s certainly a literary one who created a good life by writing about the people he, too, left behind in dying Rust Belt towns. The penance he demands from Tyler, in a plot that grows increasingly sordid and deadly, feels by the end almost expiatory in its intensity.

Richard Russo reflects on his hometown’s shifting response to his success:

Postscript. In 1997, when I was a high school English teacher tired of grading papers, a student’s mother suggested I try reviewing books.

I regularly read reviews in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but for all I knew they just sprouted up spontaneously like mushrooms on the morning lawn.

With what-the-heck optimism I’d never shown before, I went to Library Ltd., a massive indie bookstore in St. Louis — now long dead, of course — and looked at the novels on the New in Fiction shelf.

One of the books was Richard Russo’s Straight Man. Its plot about an English teacher railing against the inanities of the academy appealed to me.

Reader, I reviewed it.

A few weeks later, The Christian Science Monitor bought that review for $150.

I didn’t know it then, but Straight Man sent me careening into a whole nuther career as a book critic.

On Aug. 20, I’ll be in conversation with Richard Russo at the Martha’s Vineyard Author Series (tickets). It will be nice to finally meet the man who changed my life, and let him know there are no hard feelings.◆

Under the Falls, by Richard Russo (Knopf, 256 pp., $30)

Previous review: Bitter Honey
Jennie Durant’s fascinating new book explores the hidden costs of killing the bugs we hate — and the ones we need.

Every morning after breakfast, Dawn and I take a walk around my folks’ farmhouse in New Hampshire. A red-tailed hawk complains about us from atop a white pine. Dew glistens on goldenrod running down to the covered bridge.

But these days, preparing to enter this idyll feels like dressing for combat. A recent story from The Atlantic begins, “In woods that are lovely, dark, and deep, a many-legged menace now stalks the land.”

Terrifying reports about ticks bearing Lyme disease and mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus are enough to make one long for the underground dystopia of Hugh Howey’s Silo.

Dawn has us decked out in No Fly Zone clothing from L.L. Bean. That sounds like something you’d wear if you’ve been grounded by TSA, but it’s actually a line of apparel pretreated with permethrin, a chemical that repels mosquitoes, ants, ticks, chiggers, flies, and midges. These vaguely safari-esque shirts and pants — 93% nylon, 7% spandex — feel like wearing a Ziploc bag without the sandwich.

Now we stroll confidently through the loamy forest, repelling insects and fashion sense in all directions.

Permethrin is typically described as a synthetic version of the natural insecticide found in chrysanthemums, which makes it seem about as threatening as Valentine’s Day. And if used as directed — both as an insecticide and a treatment for scabies — it’s considered safe.

There’s just one catch: Permethrin is an indiscriminate neurotoxic insecticide. When sprayed on crops — everything from cotton to peaches — it persists on leaves for days and kills bees on contact.

That stings because bees are the tireless laborers upon whose wings much of our food supply depends.

“Today, around 90 percent of the world’s flowering plants and 75 percent of the world’s major food crops benefit from pollination services provided by insect and other animal pollinators,” writes Jennie Durant in Bitter Honey: Big Ag’s Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them. “Their decline threatens the stability of our environment, our food systems, and the intricate web of life that depends on them.”

Durant has been studying and writing about bees for years — years of decline. A beekeeper herself, she knows the farmers, the scientists, and these essential insects personally, and the story she tells in Bitter Honey is equally endearing and alarming.

She begins with an extraordinary report about California’s almond growers. Every February, nearly 99 percent of the nation’s honey-producing bee colonies are trucked to the Central Valley to pollinate those almond trees.

This annual pollination event turns bees into “a form of rented labor” with severely limited genetic variety, a development that has stark implications for the insects and the industry.

The result “has deepened bee vulnerability,” Durant writes. Beekeepers are stuck “pushing colonies harder each year, medicating against parasites and pathogens, coping with pesticide exposure inside and outside the hive, and chasing increasingly elusive bee forage.”

Despite the book’s serious subject and wide-ranging research, Durant sports a bright, conversational style and an easy candor about her own involvement in the story. She explores this complicated subject almost entirely through on-the-ground reporting and engaging anecdotes, like the experience of Evan Clay, who lost half of the 500 colonies he brought to an almond orchard when his bees (and he!) were sprayed by pesticides.

One of the many things I didn’t know is the way inert ingredients in pesticides undergo lesser regulatory scrutiny.

“These so-called ‘inerts,’ which are often untested and shielded by confidentiality, can harm other pollinators and beneficial insects essential to the broader landscape,” Durant writes. “Labels may promise safety, but they often ignore the complete formula’s complex and cumulative effects, making all of us unwitting participants in a large-scale field experiment on pesticide toxicity.”

Suddenly, my No Fly Zone Casual Button-Down Shirt feels uncomfortably warm.

But that could be climate change, which, Durant points out, is another factor in the complex nexus of threats bees are facing.

She doesn’t leave us there, though. The final chapters explore solutions like re-diversifying our agriculture and encouraging smaller, sustainable farms.

You can help, too. Embrace chaos! Plant a “rebel garden” that provides sanctuary for pollinators.

“We’re not the center of the universe,” Durant concludes. “We don’t own the butterflies, bees, birds, and rodents that pass through our yards — we are their hosts for a while. And that means we should treat them with as much care as possible.”

I’m not taking off my No Fly Zone pants just yet, but Bitter Honey has set my mind buzzing about the plight of these tiny pollinators our world desperately needs.◆

The rest of the newsletter follows below.

Books Go To the Movies

• In Late Fame, Willem Dafoe plays an old postal worker whose youthful poetry is rediscovered by a younger generation of artists who hail him as a genius. The film, playing in select theaters, is adapted from a posthumously published novella by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931).

• The Shards, streaming on FX/Hulu, stars Igby Rigney as a senior at an elite prep school juggling college applications, vicious cliques, and a serial killer, which could ruin the whole year (trailer). The nine-episode series is based on Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 semi-autobiographical thriller.

• Life as a National Park ranger is no walk in the park for Anna Pigeon, the crime-solving heroine of a new series starring Tracy Spiridakos on USA (trailer). The show is based on mystery novels of Nevada Barr, who once worked as a park ranger herself.◆

Check This Out

I was exactly this many years old when I learned there’s a whole world of association libraries in America. These private, nonprofit organizations function somewhere between Little Free Libraries and tax-supported public libraries.

Some are permanent and serve members all year long; others emerge just for the season like vernal pools.

Reflecting the state’s long history of small, isolated, and fiercely proud towns, Maine is home to an unusually large number of privately governed association libraries.

Will Allcott is president of one of them, the Hancock Point Library Association in Hancock Point, Maine, about an hour from Bangor. (Not too far from where Pet Sematary was filmed.) It’s been lending out books for more than a century.

The Hancock Point Library is essentially a private club that anybody can join. Membership costs $20 for individuals and $20 for a family.

“Yeah, that doesn’t make sense,” Will tells me. “But we’re very sensitive to tradition around here.”

Of course, dues aren’t enough to sustain the library, which holds a collection of about 6,600 books. Donations provide additional support, and the library has a small endowment.

The Hancock Point Library is open from July 1 to Labor Day, with 20 hours a week for general book browsing and lots of story times, teas, lectures, and other community events.

About 125 families spend the summer at Hancock Point, and almost all of them join the library.

“In a community library, certainly in ours, the sense of ownership is universal among the patrons,” Will says. “They believe that they are the owners of the library.”

And that’s not just a romantic ideal.

“In Maine, we have a lot of storms, and we have a lot of trees, and frequently they don’t get along,” Will says. “But if a tree falls on our building, it’s not unusual for someone to be there with a chainsaw.”

Many of the library users know each other, which accounts for some quirks one wouldn’t find in a public library. For instance, if a patron wants a book that’s already checked out, they ask who’s got it, and the librarian tells them so they can track it down themselves.

“A week or two later, the book comes back — not by the person who originally took it out, but by somebody else,” Will says.

“You just have to have a little elasticity in the privacy rules in this place, but it’s part of what makes it charming.”

The library also reaches beyond its summer community by providing free membership to parents of students at Hancock Grammar School. Library members volunteer to read with disadvantaged students, too.

Each year, the board hires a school librarian on summer vacation. Above the library there’s an apartment where the librarian can live with their family. “So,” Will says, “they get a family vacation for the time they’re here, as well as being a librarian.”

Recently, the librarian asked for a lock on the door to discourage patrons from walking upstairs at all hours and asking to borrow a book.

It’s a nuisance, to be sure, but also indicative of the community’s proprietary affection. “They don’t just go in and take out books,” Will says. “They go into the library feeling like they’re going into their living room.”

I confess, I’m enchanted by all this Down East charm, but the more I think about association libraries, the more questions I have:

1. How do they balance the intimacy of a small community with the privacy protections that public librarians have spent decades defending?

2. Do they strengthen a state’s reading culture, or do they inadvertently weaken support for tax-funded public libraries — particularly in communities that can least afford them?

3. Does private governance make them more or less vulnerable to book-banning campaigns?

I’m only on the first chapter of this rich subject. I hope those of you involved with libraries will help the rest of us by sharing your thoughts in the comments below.◆

Picture This

More than 50 years ago, during a Sunday dinner, my little brother asked for the pickles, and our grandmother said, “He certainly is a little pickle eater!”

In such moments, family sobriquets are born. And no obnoxious big brother would ever let that one die.

My brother is a successful businessman, a man of wide and undisputed talents, a grandfather, but I’ve also ensured that the Little Pickle Eater remains the perennial recipient of pickle Christmas ornaments, pickle dog toys, pickle stuffed animals, and a drawer full of pickle greeting cards.

This weekend, for his birthday, he’ll be receiving a copy of a wonderfully bizarre picture book called “The Wise Pickle.”

At the start of this story, written with existential gravity and dead-pan wit by Sarah Howden, a pickle comes to rest in front of a dry cleaner.

“I am a pickle on the side of the road,” it said. “I have lived a lot of life.”

Animals gather and begin asking the pickle questions about its nature, its origin, its purpose.

“I used to think I was meant to be a tasty snack,” the pickle says. “But now I am here, talking with you. Purposes can change.”

Such briny wisdom.

As the pickle withers in the sun and the end approaches, it tells the chipmunk and the mouse that it would like “to be gobbled up by a dog.”

The pickle seems at peace. But that’s just fate gherkin its chain. So much adventure remains.

Sabina Hahn’s illustrations — created with pencil, watercolor and pickle brine — leave plenty of white space and capture the story’s mock solemnity with just the right understated humor.

The little pickle eater in your house will devour this.◆

This Week’s Poem

Earlier this year, in an unusually profound interview with Peter Wehner for The New York Times, the poet Christian Wiman said, “Uncertainty is all we have.”

That would seem a paradoxical affirmation from the country’s finest living poet of Christian faith. But uncertainty is fundamental to Wiman’s concept of God. Like George Herbert, he refuses to rest on metaphysical declarations.

Our inability to define existence, he notes, should make us far more cautious about defining God.

“I have a hunger for the truth of the world. I wish I could relax, honestly. But it’s just a fever; it’s been in me forever. Poetry is the way that I’ve come closest to appeasing it.”

Thunder Wonder

Thunder wonder and a dream of being
at the exact and exacting
edge of rain, happy to have myself
so mystically split yet compelled
to step into an utter
one way or another. It must exist,
that elliptical but unmistakable line
where one might stand with single mind
experiencing luck and lack
depending:
relief that rain has finally come,
relief that rain is finally ending.
If I remembered how the dream
resolved, which way I chose or whether
weather itself determined,
if I could chalk it all to metaphor
and separate tenor from vehicle,
dearth from store, it seems
some main confusion in my life
would come clear. In truth, I’m left
with that half-elated, half-depleted
feeling of coming back
to consciousness, bereft
of something I can’t even name, and called
with all my mongrel words to praise
the very same.

Excerpted from “The Dance.” Copyright © 2026 by Christian Wiman. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

P.S. Five writers have been named Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows: Xochi Quetzali Cartland, Fatima Jafar, Noel Munguia-Moreno, Shaina Phenix, and Tariq Thompson. This $27,000 fellowship, awarded by the Poetry Foundation, recognizes exceptional poets in the U.S. who are between the ages of 21 and 31.◆

The Writing Life

Chris Bohjalian wrote his new thriller, “The Amateur,” in secret during an astonishing 90-day explosion of productivity. No one knew what he was up to — not his agents, not his editor. Even his wife was left in the dark. He told her, “If I gave you the elevator pitch, you’d think I was mad.”

When he finished, he attached the draft to an email and sent it around with the subject line: “How I spent my summer vacation.”

Monday night — on the eve of the publication of “The Amateur” — Bohjalian spoke to a crowd of enthusiastic fans at an event organized by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, N.H.

The story, a blend of suspense and autobiography, is about a novelist remembering when she was a golf prodigy who accidentally killed a high-school caddy with a golf ball.

Bohjalian, once a caddy himself, never killed anyone, but he says that young woman bears an uncanny resemblance to his wild youth.

When readers tell him, “She was completely out of control. She set a door on fire!” he thinks, “Yeah, she did, but so did I.”◆

Clippings

• Thanks so much for your kind and encouraging response to my career update, “Six Months After the Fall” (read).

• Stephen Colbert and Mitchell Kaplan, founder of Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla., will receive the Anti-Censorship Award from the Before Columbus Foundation as part of this year’s American Book Awards (full list).

• Washington Monthly is reviving Book World and looking for an editor (details).◆

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Today is the six-month anniversary of my pivot to Substack. I say pivot — so elegant! — but it was more like being pushed down the stairs.

Last January, everybody at The Washington Post knew trouble was coming, but after surviving so many earlier cullings, I imagined I could once again duck under the swinging scythe and keep writing till they carried out my carcass in a book tote.

That was not to be.

Still, here I am, six months later, with what’s looking like a career as an independent journalist. It turns out there is an audience for reviews — even from an old book critic “riding on a smile and a shoeshine.”

But honestly, my modest success only makes me more disappointed that the world’s richest bookseller and The Post’s breathtakingly incurious and uncreative senior executives wouldn’t help us reach that audience for books coverage.

A Substack subscriber commented on last week’s newsletter, “Reading this feels like an entirely freer piece than what you wrote in Book World. Maybe we should say thanks to Bezos.”

I can’t go that far yet. But I have to acknowledge that my Substack was initially propelled by The Post’s seppuku, which focused national rage on this little corner of the literary world. That’s publicity that money can’t buy.

Indeed, given how hard it is now to attract new subscribers, I need The Washington Post to lay me off every six weeks.

As for my alleged new freedom, I surely have more than I’m exercising. Where I should be a soaring eagle, I’m kind of an errant capybara. The audience here is a lot more flexible than I’ve given them credit for.

I need to be more adventurous about length, approach, and format, both for your entertainment and my sanity. Next month, I might start offering advice on how to get beach-body ready.

I knew almost nothing about Substack when I started, and I’m surprised by how much I’m still learning. It feels like discovering a new closet in a house bought at auction for back taxes. (Unfortunately, I’m also discovering new fees.)

To the consternation of my entrepreneurial brother, I’m relying on the NPR model: Most people read this newsletter for free, while a generous minority keeps the whole enterprise afloat by buying paid subscriptions. Social media companies are masters of ruining themselves at users’ expense — see Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification — but for the moment, this seems like a viable arrangement.

When I started here, I didn’t realize one had to select a name for one’s newsletter, so I just typed in my own. So I’m the creator of “Ron Charles” by Ron Charles, which sounds even more self-absorbed than I really am.

If I’d been required to select a name, I might never have launched. Many years ago when the novelist Meg Wolitzer and I were plotting a podcast, we spent untold months coming up with a name, and the one we liked best was the one we mocked most: Booknanza!

I’m regularly assured of the blessings of working for myself, but I’m not entirely convinced. I miss going into my office and seeing my colleagues, and I especially miss all the help those colleagues used to give me: suggesting new story ideas, correcting my creative spelling, noting where a review isn’t really convincing, warning me that I’ve already used that lame joke twice this year, and warning me that I’ve already used that lame joke twice this year.

Also, as some of you know, working for oneself means doing everything, including promotion (voilà!), editing (thanks, Dawn!), accounting, ordering books, sorting books, and, ultimately, finding someone to take the books away.

One of the greatest challenges is that the border between work and life has grown permeable to the point of invisibility. A project like this allows me to work on my own time, which turns out to be all my time. Feel free to write to me at 2:47 a.m. I’ll be laying/lying? in bed fretting about a grammar error in Friday’s newsletter.

Then there’s the challenge of selecting what to review. At The Post, when I couldn’t fit a novel into my schedule, I could try putting my thumb on the scale and asking one of my colleagues to assign it to someone else.

These days, I find myself writing far too many apologetic notes to publicists and authors (so many authors). Decisions about what to review — or, more frequently, what not to review — have become unexpectedly painful because they remind me just how dramatically the book-reviewing ecosystem has collapsed.

But there are plans, or at least concepts of a plan, percolating around the country. Three ambitious publishers have talked with me about starting new book sections.

That’s exciting but disappointing, too. As my former colleague Becca Rothfeld pointed out in The New Yorker, special book review publications are not in short supply; what we need are book reviews sown in general-interest publications with broad readerships.

How many Substack newsletters does it take to recreate the pleasures of one murdered book section?

If wishes were horses.

On the other hoof, I’ve been delighted by a new relationship with you.

I assumed my connection to readers could run only through cables maintained by The Post. But clearly, that’s not true. Substack offers the chance to hear from readers in real time. You bring an impossibly wide perspective — collectively a million years of reading experience — along with wry corrections, helpful directions, and heartfelt encouragement. I read every note and comment. If I don’t respond to every one, forgive me; I’m trying.

In January, I thought I’d just settle into my desk chair at 1301 K Street like moss on a log. But six months into my new indie career, I appreciate where I’ve landed.

To those of you who have subscribed, thank you. To those of you who have become paid subscribers, I’m especially grateful. You’ve allowed this book critic to reinvent his career — and his life — on the fly.◆

Last Friday, between bombing Iran and bombing at the Correspondents’ Dinner, President Trump issued an executive order requiring warning signs outside the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

The placards are necessary, Trump claimed, because a council led by one of his former speechwriters has found that the Smithsonian is not celebrating American history with “honesty and gratitude,” qualities dear to the president’s heart.

“Saving America’s Story,” a report by the White House Domestic Policy Council, is about as deep as the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and just as leaky. Although the anonymous authors characterize it as the product of a “monthslong investigation,” their alleged discoveries merely confirm the fever dream that has long aroused right-wing culture warriors.

The suggestion that Trump cares a whit about museums or anyone else’s history is, of course, ludicrous. But burning down the Smithsonian is an effective bit of political theater to cheer the faithful between $65 fill-ups.

Though tarted up with hundreds of footnotes, the report evinces scant awareness of reputable historians, major works of history, or developments in scholarship. Instead, like a MAGA health influencer who did his own vaccine research, the writers natter on about the Smithsonian’s “ideological agenda.”

“The Museum purposely presents America as a problematic country,” the report complains, “irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression.”

I suppose they’re three-fifths right.

And wouldn’t you know it, the museum’s intellectual framework is “rooted in Marxism.” Нас разоблачили, товарищи!

The president’s loyal propagandists are particularly alarmed that the Smithsonian contains examples of “activism”; in various forms, the word appears more than 70 times in the report but never with any ironic awareness of the authors’ own activist agenda.

Taken together — if anyone could possibly endure these 162 pages of leaden certainty — “Saving America’s Story” is a proud rejection of intellectual rigor and historical nuance. National pride is promoted as the central, though weirdly fragile, American virtue, one that must be vigilantly defended against any historical complications, questions, or counterexamples.

To accept this alarm is to assume that museumgoers lack the critical capacity possessed by the report’s authors. Americans, particularly our young people, must be reeds blowing in the winds of indoctrination, either toward the light of patriotic truth or the darkness of “intersectional critical theory.”

The saddest implication of “Saving America’s Story” is that the best story is the story that’s already known. In that mindset, federal museums exist to confirm familiar notions of national identity rather than to broaden citizens’ understanding of their history and inspire richer engagement with it.

In a typically measured response, Lonnie Bunch III, the first African American secretary in the Smithsonian’s 180-year history — a coincidence, surely — sent the staff an email saying, “This report is not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History. At the Smithsonian, our work is driven by scholarship, accuracy, and an uncompromising commitment to tell the fullness of America’s story.”

As ever, complexity is anathema to authoritarian regimes. Despite the Council’s claim that the Smithsonian should tell “a basic consensus view,” there is no such view soaring up like a marble monolith on the National Mall. In e pluribus unum, the many are as important to cherish as the one.◆

The rest of the newsletter follows below.

Books Go to the Movies

• Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey has sent the popularity of Homer’s 2,800-year-old epic soaring. Bookshop.org reports that sales of all editions are up 15-fold since last year. Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation rose to No. 2 on the site’s bestseller list, though she’s no fan of the movie. In The London Review of Books, Wilson skewers Nolan’s adaptation as mercilessly as Odysseus dealt with the Cyclops.

• The Samurai and the Prisoner, starring Masahiro Motoki, is playing in select theaters (trailer). The film is adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s 2021 historical mystery about a 16th-century warlord who must solve a series of murders inside his castle.

• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder, returns to select theaters on Aug. 2 and Aug. 5 to celebrate its 55th anniversary, which cannot be true (trailer).◆

“Some things could not be conquered with words.”

I’ve never forgotten the galvanizing effect of reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, an intimate prose poem about the lived experience of racism. It made me feel alert and hesitant in the way one anticipates a static shock.

Her new book, Triage, is, if anything, even more startling. It’s a memoir or a novella or maybe another prose poem — Rankine has never given categories any quarter — about enduring in a world that cannot be endured.

It’s fundamentally a book about a complicated friendship forged in college with someone she refers to only as the theorist. Early on, they establish their own strange form of greeting on campus:

“When we spied the other during the day, we had to collapse,” Rankine writes. “The collapse was literal and, on occasion, an inconvenience to those around us.”

What might look like a bit of sophomoric melodrama is, in fact, a way to keep from breaking, to keep refusing — an echo of the protester’s passive resistance or an allusion to Antigone’s preparation to be buried.

“The collapse was an antidote to an unbearable but borne disturbance we glimpsed in the face of each other. At last, here was another who embodied the expression of our puzzling predicament: Another life brought up to endure, not live, the harsh weather the seasons would not own.”

As the book progresses in a series of stark segments, Rankine keeps rolling that act under her tongue, drawing out the various meanings of collapse in the face of racism, genocide, environmental destruction, the death of her mother, the “toomuchness of now.”

Throughout, flashes of wit feel almost too profound to inspire a smile. Decades later, in her 60s, Rankine trips on the curb on her way to mail a letter to the theorist. When she wakes up in the hospital, she thinks, “If only triage existed before the collapse.”

Laced with photographs — mostly of couches, upon which one might collapse — this is a book of piercing insight, strangely intimate and analytical, with a vision alternately personal and global.

Rankine writes that her friendship with the theorist became essential to her “by a sleight of hand.” By the same magical dexterity, this unfathomable book amazes and perplexes in equal measure.

“I told myself it was ridiculous to try to use language like it was a couch,” Rankine writes, “even though the couch doesn’t assume we are okay in the end. It’s a rest stop in the midst of despair.”◆

(N)one Ringy Dingy

My wife has less than a month left until school starts — a fact I’m forbidden to mention in her presence — but there is some good news: Her district plans to ban cell phones throughout the day for all students.

Last year was the first year her school effectively banned cell phones in the classroom, and Dawn said the benefits were striking: Students actually talked to each other, paid more attention, and even looked her in the eye.

Such cell phone bans are spreading fast, as more and more parents and administrators heed the concerns raised in books like Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. A majority of states now have laws or statewide policies restricting cell phones in classrooms.

And new data from School Library Journal echoes my wife’s experience.

A SLJ survey of almost 900 school librarians and teachers found that 68 percent of them saw benefits, such as more engagement with books in the classroom, more independent reading during free time, and even higher library book circulation.

Some schools also noted “fewer disciplinary issues, less cyber bullying, and fewer students contacting parents because of anxiety or seeking to leave school early.”

But the SLJ survey highlighted a clear warning, too: Everything depends on how effectively the policy is enforced. As my wife found in the early days of her school’s “no phone policy,” placing the burden on individual teachers is a losing proposition. “The most successful policy is bell-to-bell, with phones put away in lockers or security pouches,” writes SLJ reporter Kara Yorio.

There are drawbacks, of course. Students reading ebooks on their cell phones are out of luck, and for safety reasons some parents insist on being able to contact their children anytime.

These stricter policies could revive old classroom management challenges, too. My wife remembers going into classrooms full of students all sitting quietly staring at their phones. No noise. No disruption. No discipline problems.

How scary is that?◆

The Booker Dozen

Two novels I’ve loved this year are on the Booker Prize longlist: Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say and Douglas Stuart’s John of John.

Stuart won the Booker in 2020 for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain.

Another author contending for a second Booker is Jamaican writer Marlon James. His longlisted novel The Disappearers, about the murder of an actor in a gay theater troupe, will be published in the U.S. on Sept. 1. He previously won the prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings.

(Only four writers have ever won the Booker twice: J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, and Margaret Atwood.)

For decades, the Booker Prize restricted itself to authors from the UK, Ireland, and the Commonwealth, but that rule fell away in 2014. Now the longlist regularly includes a sizable contingent of Americans, which I think is too bad, but that’s water under the London Bridge.

The Booker judges note that Chloe Aridjis, author of The Shadow of the Object (forthcoming Feb. 23), would be the first author of Mexican heritage to win the prize, and Kenan Orhan, author of The Renovation, would be the first writer of Turkish heritage. (You can read the genesis of his novel in The Atlantic.)

It’s foolish to draw any trends from a single year’s longlist — he said, as he prepared to draw one. But it’s striking that six of the 13 books on the longlist are under 250 pages. (The shortest — Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere — is just 141 pages.) Is the Distraction Economy reshaping literary prestige?

(For the record, I have nothing against short novels; in my panicked line of work, I prefer them.)

I’m particularly charmed by the age range on this longlist, from 28-year-old Djamel White, for All Them Dogs, to 81-year-old M. John Harrison, for The End of Everything, forthcoming Oct. 13.

The Booker Prize shortlist will be announced on Sept. 22, and then the winner on Nov. 9 in London. Pubs will be crammed with excited readers betting on the big reveal. Just like in America. <sigh>

The prize is worth about $67,000, though the worldwide publicity and sales are considered even more valuable.

P.S. Speaking of driving sales: Barack Obama has released his summer reading list. Among his recommendations are Ann Patchett’s Whistler, Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, and Tayari Jones’s Kin, which Dawn just started.◆

Picture This

With The Future Book, two of the cleverest children’s book creators soar hilariously into the great unknown.

According to National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Mac Barnett, the future is a time of linguistic chaos.

“In the future, the sun is called the moon,” Barnett writes, “and the moon is called the sun.”

Night and day, apples and bananas — they’ve all been gloriously scrambled, but that’s just the start. Even the most ordinary expressions have been revised.

“We don’t say ‘Goodbye!’ We say ‘You smell like a baby!’”

Shawn Harris’s deadpan illustrations — created with ink and gouache, “which means something totally different in the future” — make witty companions to the text throughout.

To say “thank you” in the future, people place a fish on someone’s head.

“There’s an interesting reason why,” Barnett says offhandedly, “but we don’t have time for that story.”

Instead, this delightful book charges ahead until we arrive at a breathless dialogue of nonsense that’s sure to inspire similarly silly declarations by a little one in your house.◆

This Week’s Poem

Gregory Orr has been one of America’s essential poets for decades. Across more than a dozen collections, starting in the early 1970s, he’s plumbed the depths of his own life with such sensitivity and wit that readers have understood their own lives more clearly.

His latest collection, We Interrupt This Broadcast, looks back without an iota of sentimentality but with the same brave candor fans have long adored.

“I’m so old now,” he says in one poem, “I don’t even / Have to stand tip-toe / To see over the final edge.”

At the end of a long poem titled “Pedagogy of Trauma,” he concludes by addressing his bruises and wounds:

You taught me not all hurt
Permanently harms
And some disasters
May even mask the arrival of grace.

I needed you to complete my education.

In a similar way, many of us need this valedictory collection.

Two Brief Notes to My Alternate Self

Boy, that was a bad idea we once
Had:
       You write one line,
I’ll write the next.

What made us imagine
That could cohere?

No accusations, no need
To blame, but it was
Delusional to think it could work

Or that either of us
Would let the other get the last word.
________

“Another poem is another hope.”
One of us said that
And the other agreed.

No need to close up shop
Just yet
Who knows what might
Come along?
                     Sixty
Years we’ve worked
With words, believing
They could save our life
And keep us both together.

Ploughed that field a thousand
Times, planted the seeds
And waited to see:
                             Sometimes
A harvest, sometimes just beautiful weeds.

Excerpted from “We Interrupt This Broadcast: Poems.” Copyright © 2026 by Gregory Orr. Published by W.W. Norton, Inc. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

P.S. As When Waking, by Daniel Schonning, won the Four Quartets Prize from the T. S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America. The award, worth $20,000, honors “a unified and complete sequence of poems.”◆

Giving a hoot, and getting one

On Tuesday, Dawn and I skipped out of Washington just ahead of a line of wild thunderstorms. Delays were promised at every point, but we made it to my folks’ house in New Hampshire before bedtime.

The only real struggle was hauling around a giant suitcase filled with all the books I might need over the next three weeks. So much anxiety infects that word might. Will I want to write about beavers while I’m here? (If I see one, yes.) What about digital surveillance? (Ask Google.) Not to mention all the children’s books, poetry collections, and novels I’m still trying to select.

I practically paid for my indecision with a dislocated shoulder.

Now I’ve taken over the guest room, and I’m hunched at my old high-school desk where I once pounded out essays about the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, sometimes solved quadratic equations, and wrestled with matters of theology as though they were a matter of life or death.

Yesterday, having observed me crouch at work for 10 hours, Dawn insisted we go for a walk along the edge of the forest. Almost immediately, a barred owl flapped up from the ground and lit on a branch. We said nothing, but it growled at us. And then flew deeper into the pines.◆

Clippings

• This week’s review is Yellow Pine, Claire Vaye Watkins’s smart, sexy, surprisingly hopeful novel about a woman who wants a baby even as the world goes to hell (review).

• After infuriating ticket holders by canceling more than a week of preview performances, George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones: The Mad King wowed theatergoers on July 28 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (tickets, not many).

• Today is the birthday of J.K. Rowling (1965) and, coincidentally, Harry Potter (1980).◆

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Among the swelling collection of books confronting our imperiled planet, Claire Vaye Watkins’s fiction remains defiantly alive. Her stories and novels are rooted in the American West, that awesome expanse of dunes and deserts that uninformed observers would call empty. Where life has adapted to the damning conditions of heat and drought, Watkins finds characters burned away to their elemental anxieties and desires.

Her new novel, Yellow Pine, is so clearly evolved from her earlier work that any fan could recognize it on a moonless night in Death Valley. But Watkins has never written more confidently or staked so much on her unmistakable voice, which winds through environmental catastrophe, goofy comedy, and sexual obsession. The desert isn’t the only thing that’s hot here — think Miranda July with cacti.

At the center of it all is Rose, a woman sliding toward 40 and growing disillusioned with her work for the Sierra Club. “She felt like a flunky for the nonprofit-corporate-industrial complex,” Watkins writes, “a whipper of frenzy, a vulture, an opportunistic bottler of rage, a hack alchemist attempting with shrieky, automated, and largely ignored emails to transform grief into cash.”

The isolation of the covid pandemic suited her just fine, she thinks, and now she lives in a cinderblock cabin appropriately called Nothingness Flats in Tecopa, Calif. Her thoughts are laced with quotations from Joan Didion, John McPhee, and Lydia Davis. She’d like to imagine she’s “Thoreau in the Mojave.”

“How freeing, how illuminating (in a deeply sad way) to watch pointless obligations slough off like so much dead skin,” she thinks. But her spirit is not really so reclusive, and her desert is more imperiled than Walden Pond. The ancient ground around her is “pulverized evermore each day by bombs, mines, house developments, server farms, so-called fulfillment centers, and industrial solar arrays.”

One of those solar arrays, a real project cynically dubbed Yellow Pine by a Florida-based energy company, is about to begin construction near Rose’s home. The solar farm may promise renewable energy, but in Watkins’s telling it serves the insatiable appetite of new AI data centers. Early in the novel, Rose falls in with a group of like-minded old hippies and environmental activists who begin staging tepid demonstrations against the Yellow Pine development. “It’s not a blockade,” one of them explains. “We’re not delusional. It’s more of a vigil.”

Alas, this is not a cause with panda bears or baby seals to tug at the hearts and wallets of well-cooled suburbanites. Instead, the solar array will destroy thousands of acres of creosote bush, and scores of desert tortoises may die during relocation. Making a case for preserving the desert pavement that maintains the area’s complex and largely invisible ecosystem is a lost cause. And besides, isn’t the green energy gold rush a good thing?

Watkins knows this desert well. It isn’t merely the setting of Yellow Pine — it’s the very model for its plot. Change is hard to spot here. This isn’t a T.C. Boyle climate novel; movement is rare and constrained in these pages, which have the metabolism of a kangaroo rat — a compliment, I promise. Almost everything interesting happens underground.

This is a story about daring to live in the climate of futility. It avoids the polemical tone of some climate-change fiction by interrogating the environmental movement itself. Sitting around their vigil at the Yellow Pine site, Rose and her friends wonder if the National Park System “made it possible for us to completely ruin the rest of the planet.” They scoff at the inanity of recycling, that “tragically effective engine of distraction,” which allows corporations to shift responsibility for the ocean’s health to consumers sorting their plastic soda bottles. And Rose brings a similar skepticism to green energy developments that scrape thousands of pristine acres, drain aquifers, and hand over billions of dollars to the same executives who brought us to this precipice.

I asked Claire Vaye Watkins: “Why does Rose long for a child in a world facing environmental collapse?”

These aren’t lectures. Watkins isn’t freighting her novel with essays — although she’s brilliant in that form, too. (See “The Creosote Sea” in The Yale Review.) In Yellow Pine, revelations bubble up organically, sometimes comically, among Rose and her off-grid comrades sitting around shooting the breeze in the breezeless desert. The dialogue sounds so real I wonder if Watkins’s friends will recognize themselves. It’s a community of sweet folks, artists, scientists, and amiable quacks vibrating between conspiracy theories and misdemeanors, guilty of doing nothing more than trying to save the Earth. One of them is a scantily clad ecofeminist wearing a lizard head. Their bull sessions careen from transmission towers to the Crucifixion to Fritos.

The environmental shibboleth that Rose is most determined to defy is population control. “It was like the weird wrong mole marking the ecofascist tumor that had been metastasizing in the toxic sludge of ‘the climate debate’ for Rose’s entire life.” Why should she — why should anybody — give up on babies, on life, on the future just to keep corporate America from having to pay for its ongoing crimes? Is the only satisfaction left a kind of “Dover Beach” consolation “in a low-key failed state on a dying planet”?

That’s a question Rose keeps debating with herself and an old lover named Miles who pops up like “a carnal magnet.” He’s positively pneumatic in bed. And when he’s not in bed, he’s the kind of dude who reads A Course in Miracles and tells the 40-year-old woman who adores him that he can’t be a father “for a few more moons.” Cerebral, “bafflingly gorgeous,” and chronically unemployed, Miles weeps and claims he’s “afraid of losing himself.” I kept writing “RUN” in the margin, but Rose is hooked, obsessed, driven mad with lust, which few writers can capture with such wit and eros as Watkins. “She aroused herself thinking of all the things he’d quit, first among them her, nearly two decades before.”

How much shorter this book would have been if Rose had put down Slouching Towards Bethlehem and picked up He’s Just Not That Into You. But Rose has hope, despite the dying oceans, despite the rising temperatures, despite even Miles’s infuriating fickleness, and who am I to argue with that — or this sly novel?◆

Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverhead, 256 pp., $29)

Previous review: Cool Machine
Colson Whitehead bids farewell to Ray Carney in a witty, bloody, and unexpectedly moving finale to his Harlem Trilogy.

Back in March, I regarded H.R. 7661 — a national book-banning bill titled the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act” — as dangerous but politically unserious. After all, Congress is designed to thwart rashness, to subject outrageous proposals to serious scrutiny, to allow bad ideas to fail like seeds sown on rocky soil.

Election denier Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) had introduced her legislation to strip federal funds from public classrooms and school libraries that contain “sexually oriented material.” It was a clear case of moral panic devised to subvert the judgment of teachers and librarians, who have long demonstrated their ability to select appropriate books for students without federal micromanagement.

And besides, I thought, a large majority of Americans have consistently opposed book banning. Surely, Rep. Miller’s effort to project her mania across the country would drown in its own tangled mess of First Amendment contortions and Puritanical horrors, such as the bill’s ban on depictions of “lascivious dancing.”

I assumed Congress would do what it has traditionally done with performative culture-war proposals: let it expire.

I no longer believe that.

The reasonable forces that would once have snuffed out H.R. 7661 have been overwhelmed by a wave of toxic initiatives, scandals, and crises. Suddenly, that little patch of black mold in the basement has spread throughout the house. And the House.

Since its introduction, Rep. Miller’s bill has attracted the support of more Republicans. In June, Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) introduced a parallel bill in the Senate. Earlier this month, H.R. 7661 was formally reported to the full House with a recommendation that it pass.

Both the House bill and the new Senate bill define acceptable works of literature by referring to reading lists from Compass Classroom, a publisher for evangelical Christian homeschoolers.

Tellingly, Compass Classroom’s list of “Classics Every High Schooler Should Read” does not name a single Black, Latino, Asian, or Indigenous author.

As for Frederick Douglass, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison?

Well, let’s just say we know who’s dancing lasciviously.

The last thing schools across our country need is a wave of federal court cases brought by well-organized fanatics juiced up on dirty passages of Slaughterhouse-Five that they pass from district to district with the fervor of eighth-grade boys swapping a tattered copy of Playboy.

The American Library Association recently asked everyone who cares about books and our literary freedom to tell their senators they oppose S. 4925.

“It’s ideological grandstanding and political overreach, pure and simple. This type of fear-mongering and censorship can’t become law,” the ALA statement said.

“The bill is dangerously broad, withholding critical school funding for the mere mention of transgender people or nudity. Such a sweeping prohibition threatens health, art, and science education.” (Speaking of science, Compass Classroom also offers several books promoting so-called creation science and intelligent design.)

Given the Supreme Court’s growing enthusiasm for Christian nationalism, there’s a chance Rep. Miller’s theocratic crusade could survive judicial review.

All kinds of terrible things we couldn’t have imagined happening 10 years ago are happening. This censorious legislation shouldn’t usher in the next one.

P.S. Bravo to New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte, who recently vetoed a book-banning bill for the second time. Live Free or Die Without Books.◆

The rest of the newsletter follows below.

Books Go to the Movies

• These days, booksellers on TV either solve murders (Bookish) or commit them (You). So I have high hopes for Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, a new sci-fi comedy series on HBO Max. It’s about a comic-book store owner who accidentally triggers a multiverse Armageddon. Fans of The Big Bang Theory will feel right at home.

• “Love is a canyon that feels impossible to cross,” says Patricia Clarkson in the second season of Ransom Canyon, which rode onto Netflix last night (trailer). This hot-n’-dusty TV show is based on Jodi Thomas’s Ransom Canyon series of eight Western romance novels that started heating up the Texas plains in 2015.

• The Twisted Childhood Universe, a series of gory movies devoted to the desecration of children’s classics, continues this week with Pinocchio Unstrung, based on Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel. (I’m guessing most of you missed Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey). This time around, Richard Brake plays Geppetto, a woodcarver who creates a homicidal puppet that uses its long nose to impale people. (No, I’m not lying.) Alas, Jiminy Cricket is voiced by Robert Englund, best known for playing Freddy Krueger — not exactly the guide anybody’s conscience needs.◆

The Sirens Are Calling All Book Lovers

With the world newly obsessed with a certain hero from Ithaca, Odyssey translator Emily Wilson should be mobbed at the National Book Festival in Washington next month.

Other equally popular authors scheduled to appear include Ann Patchett, Patrick Radden Keefe, Andrew Sean Greer, Karin Slaughter, and Tayari Jones. All told, more than 80 writers and illustrators will be on hand.

To celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, this year’s festival will include extended programming on literature, history, music, film, folklife, and more.

Actress Cynthia Erivo will talk about her work and her new memoir Simply More: A Book for Anyone Who Has Been Told They’re Too Much.

Martin Scorsese will discuss his career in moviemaking and the Library’s role in preserving films.

This is your chance to hear historians Douglas Brinkley and Annette Gordon-Reed in person.

U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze will explore the art of translation.

I’ll be talking with Sasha Waters about her upcoming PBS documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World.

Plenty of authors and illustrators for young adults and children will be on hand, too. Full list of authors here.

The Library of Congress National Book Festival is on Saturday, Aug. 22, at the Washington Convention Center.

As always, the festival is free and open to the public. BUT WAIT — NEW THIS YEAR: Free tickets are required to enter the festival. Reserve yours here.

If you can’t make it to Washington, you can watch many of the events livestreamed on the Library’s website. (Eventually, all the events will be posted there and on YouTube.)

To pull off this mammoth festival, the Library of Congress needs hundreds of helpful volunteers. Interested? Learn more.

I hope to see you there. I’ll be the one carrying a book tote.◆

Postmarked

Cork is so central to Portugal’s heritage that the Portuguese even make postcards out of it. While staying in Lisbon last month, I sent several cork missives back to the States using stamps featuring pastéis de nata. (If yours hasn’t arrived yet, be patient; I’m told the international mail is slow.)

Alas, the act of sending postcards is going the way of clipping coupons and reading newspapers. A new study in Britain finds that just 16 percent of adults send a few postcards every year; more than half never send one.

Against the relentless onslaught of email and apathy, English Heritage, the UK’s leading historic preservation organization, is determined to keep those brief notes sailing through the mail. Wisely, they’re starting with children before Snapchat has zapped their fondness for real correspondence.

At more than a dozen historic sites across England, kids can now pick up free postcards designed by children’s illustrators Nick Sharratt and Quentin Blake.

“At English Heritage we believe the postcard deserves more than a place in the nostalgia tin — it’s a living tradition worth preserving,” a spokesman said in a statement announcing this new program.

Sir Quentin, 93, added, “There’s no better way to put a smile on someone’s face than with a postcard.” There may, in fact, be better ways, but there is possibly no cheaper way.

An inveterate postcard sender, I’m currently working through my second box of World’s Greatest Bookstores, designed by Bob Eckstein (Clarkson Potter).

P.S. In my final months at The Washington Post, someone sent me a story on postcards. They arrived out of order, some disappeared in transit, and I never learned who the author was. If you’re out there, please reveal yourself.◆

Picture This

The Knight With No Bottom starts at the end, so to speak.

In the heat of battle, a dragon took a bite...
and now our brave fellow is a bottomless knight.

Butt won’t this corrupt our youth?

Flush the prudes away! This hilariously silly picture book by Dutch writer Levina van Teunenbroek should be wedged right between Captain Underpants and Everybody Poops.

From the moment our gallant knight loses his derriere, he sets about on a quest for a bulbous replacement — a Holy Pale, if you will.

“Bereft and bumless,” he discovers “a shop for bottoms” in all sizes and colors. Restored, he woos a princess he’s long adored.

They went out boating and had such fun;
the day was full of laughter.
She didn’t care if he could ride;
It was his humor she was after.

Anyone else after humor will giggle along with this cheeky book, which has sold more than 50,000 copies in Europe.

Charlotte Bruijn’s illustrations are a subversive blend of goofy and pastoral, with just enough butt showing to send Moms for Liberty farting away to their legislators.

The double-spread Bum Shop is a thing of wonder.◆

This Week’s Poem

Sarah Hanson opens her new collection, Conjuring the Hurricane, with a poem titled “My Father’s Anger.” Cruel and narcissistic, he was a man whose mood served as “a thermostat nobody could regulate.”

By the account of these devastating poems, his home was designed to crush a young woman.

In a poem called “PTSD,” Hanson writes, “I can’t seem to heal / no matter how many skins I shed.”

But what’s so exhilarating about reading this brave, tender collection straight through is watching her attain that healing, that sanctuary, that joy that eluded her for so long.

“I am learning,” she writes near the end, “how to tell a hard / truth gently.”

Print this poem out and keep it somewhere you can find it when you need it.

On Impermanence

I can only tell you what I know:
there will be good days, when the sun
splashes on your upturned face
and washes over you, when laughter
bubbles out of you, when you lean

back in contentment and murmur,
Isn’t this lovely? because nothing
has ever, in fact, been lovelier.
There will be days when all of that feels

so far away, you couldn’t reach
for it or remember it if you tried.
You can almost convince yourself

it never happened, not to you who is currently
so bereft and alone, becoming one

with your blanket and bedsheets as you try

to dig one single lovely thought from the emotional

rubble. Sometimes a bunch get strung together,
which can trick you into thinking that whichever version

you are in, the good or the bad, the sun-
shine or the long shadow, it’s permanent.
I promise you it isn’t. Both days come, and both days go.

And depending on which kind of day
I’m having, this truth fills me with either aching

nostalgia for the moments I am already starting
to miss, or knee-buckling relief as I steer

the darkness into my rearview again.
The best and worst days both end.
The sadness and relief of this holy
impermanence is one of the sacred truths
I breathe into, and whisper Thank you as I exhale.

Excerpted from “Conjuring the Hurricane.” Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Hanson. Published by Inked Elephant Publishing House. Reprinted with permission of the author. All rights reserved.◆

Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For?

Last week, while visiting our elder daughter in Santa Clara, Calif., I overheard a bookseller at Books Inc. say he was retiring.

In fact, everyone in the store heard him.

Doug Stocks is not the fading, whispering figure of some dusty Masterpiece Theatre bookseller. He’s a tall guy with a big, gray beard, somewhere between a happy Hemingway and an off-season Santa — and around here, more famous than either one.

Doug is retiring next month after 48 years. “I’m the longest-standing bookseller in Silicon Valley,” he told me. It’s been the only job he’s ever had. “Since I was 18 years old! Can you believe it? Books, Inc., oldest bookseller west of the Mississippi, publisher of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte.”

For a moment, I think he’s going to tell me about meeting them, but he has more contemporary tales to spin.

He once helped Steve Martin find a book about how to pick up girls. “I thought it was just a kind of gag,” Doug says, “but two years later, he came out with his first novel, Shopgirl. You remember the character that read these self-help books on picking up women? Yeah, he was doing research for one of his characters.”

Doug sometimes waited on the comedian Red Skelton, who used to sell his own clown plates at a shop across the street. “He came over to the bookstore, and he’s like 6-foot-5 — a monster character, fur coat in the middle of summer — and he had two guys bigger than him as bodyguards.”

“Clowns,” Doug adds wistfully. “Totally makes sense.”

He confesses that he sometimes entertained celebrities unawares.

Once he spent about an hour with a guy who was buying a stack of books for his sister’s birthday, including a large-format catalog to a fashion show at the San Francisco Museum of Art. “It was like all the bell bottoms and all the hippy shit that was going on back in the day. Beautiful book.”

“I actually accused him of being someone I knew from the train,” Doug says. “He had that look on his face: Uh-oh, he realized who I was. And then he was like, ‘Nope, that’s not me.’”

Only after the customer walked out the door did Doug look at the receipt and realize it was Johnny Depp. “That was hilarious.”

As I’m leaving, Doug asks, “Do I know you? Are you famous?”

“No,” I say. “For years, I reviewed books for The Washington Post.”

“A formerly great newspaper,” he says.

Sigh.

“I got laid off in February.”

“Yikes,” he says. “So, are you working?”

“I switched over to Substack. Now, I review books there.”

“Yeah, you were the book review guy,” he says, either remembering or humoring me. “We have few of those left.”

He laments what’s happened to book coverage at the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. “I mean, they do some reviews, but they don’t have a focus.”

When I ask Doug what he plans to do in retirement, he says, “Sit around in my underwear and drink beer.”

I don’t believe him.◆

Clippings

• This week’s review is Cool Machine, the witty and surprisingly moving conclusion to Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy (review).

• The Frozen People, by Elly Griffiths, was named the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year last night in Harrogate, England. The prize, worth about $4,000, recognizes the finest crime novel by a UK or Irish author published in paperback.

• The man convicted of trying to murder Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution in 2022 is being tried on federal terrorism charges in a Buffalo courtroom (AP). ◆

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Go slowly. This is goodbye.

Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine concludes one of the richest portraits of New York — a suave trilogy of novels that opened in the late 1950s with Harlem Shuffle.

Now, it’s the 1980s in a city where “the only permanent tenants were hustle and impermanence.” New buildings rise every day, but “the richer those up top got, the more miserable and numerous those below became.” Yuppies are taking over, and Reaganomics is engorging Wall Street while “cleaning out the flophouses and SROs, closing the institutions, cutting social services.”

Through it all, somehow Ray Carney has survived, even thrived. A mostly reputable furniture salesman, Carney knows how to match a striped sofa with the drapes or, if necessary, a stolen necklace with a buyer. When we catch up with him this time, he’s started to think of himself as “one of the old guys.” He doesn’t need to fence hot TVs any longer — doesn’t even want to, he claims. After 27 years in the biz, he’s finally been named Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month by Sterling Quality, the monthly magazine of the Sterling Furniture Company.

What nobler proof of success could a man desire?

Whitehead loves to hover on that transparent boundary between sympathy and teasing. He’s shacked up with Carney long enough to know where all the man’s dreams and delusions are buried, and the final volume of the Harlem Trilogy finds author and hero looking at where they’ve been and wondering what comes after ambition. It’s a story about both the allure and the dread of retirement, about trying to assess one’s life without concluding it.

But if nostalgia pumps through these pages, it leaves the iron taste of fresh blood. Carney’s every other thought is consumed with his future. “He had wanted to be a good father and husband. He had done that,” Whitehead writes. “He had wanted to be a successful businessman. He had achieved that. And now what? A force pushed Carney forward to the next corner. He didn’t know where to or what for.”

Even the East Village graffiti artist spraying just one step ahead of Mayor Koch asks, “Who Are You Now And Who Do You Want To Be?”

In this state of existential restlessness, Carney enlists with Uncle Rich, “the legendary uptown criminal mastermind,” for one last string of heists. Uncle Rich was long presumed dead. “Everyone should fake their death at least once,” he advises. “It’s clarifying.” And thank God he’s back. Uncle Rich is Whitehead’s Arsène Lupin, an urbane master of disguise who makes as much money conceiving schemes as carrying them out. “How to put it, the immensity of the man?” Whitehead asks. “Harlem cranked out its allotment of vicious mobsters, stone-cold killers, gambling impresarios, and cunning thieves — even an able fence or two — but no one before or since had so completely captivated Harlem’s cops and criminals. He was half crook, half crooked fantasy.”

Carney tells himself he joins up because he needs extra money to fund his wife’s travel business, but get real: “Deep down he loved the chaos as much as the next crooked soul.” He thrills to see “pistols glinting like minnows in the scant light.” This man wants to feel alive again, and you will too, riding along with Uncle Rich and his crack team through escapades so cinematic the book should come with a bucket of popcorn.

I asked Colson Whitehead, “Now that you’ve completed your Harlem Trilogy, what will you miss most about living with Ray Carney?”

I was tempted to feel disappointed that the middle section — set two years later, in 1983 — shifts away from Carney. But the result is an irresistible novella about Pepper, Carney’s avuncular associate who adores his word-a-day calendar. (As one might expect in a Whitehead novel, these characters are obsessed with words, with the slippery eels of language.) Now in his 60s and unimpressed by the “improvements” overtaking New York, Pepper “gave off menace the way movie stars gave off charisma, in beams.” He suspects he’s dying but hopes swigs of Pepto-Bismol will keep the Grim Reaper tied up in red tape.

As a favor to Carney’s wife, Pepper accepts a job providing security for an art deal involving an African mask with shady provenance. It’s no spoiler to tell you that something about that plan goes wrong, and then everything goes wrong. But what makes this section such a delight is the chance to sit — and run — with Pepper, who is surely the coolest machine in this trilogy. “He was an old thief. And a good thief,” Whitehead writes, and despite that life of thievery, he lives by an unbreakable code that comes to look a lot more ethical than the behavior of anyone more reputable.

That irony gets spread on even thicker when Pepper’s opponent — a character called the Melancholy Hitman — enters the scene. He’s like Cormac McCarthy’s monster if Judge Holden read You Can Heal Your Life every night before bed. Whitehead has always relished the comedy of killers’ genteel affectations, and watching the Melancholy Hitman try to lift his spirits by doing his “I Feel” vocalizations is one of this novel’s many silly pleasures. “A fellow killer suggested he get a pet. That helped some.”

The African mask that the Melancholy Hitman, Pepper, and others are pursuing comes to embody the elusive identities they’re all chasing. Every one of them wants to know who they are or, better yet, who they could be. And they’re willing to kill, sometimes gruesomely, to find out.

But for all its bullets and mayhem, Cool Machine is ultimately a meditation on growing old without surrendering one’s appetite for life. That might sound melancholy, but it’s probably illegal to have this much fun writing a crime novel. Like the finest renovators, Whitehead moves into the antique building, treasures the old molding, and manages to construct a space that respects the past while offering something wholly new. He’s perfected a voice of mock formality shot through with morbid humor, absurdity, and gore. Who else makes a sentence work so hard without breaking a sweat?

“There’s a story to crime,” Carney thinks, and Whitehead knows how to tell it. I’m bereft that one of them is done but eager to see what the other one does next.◆

Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 368 pp., $30)

Previous review: Cloudthief
In Nathaniel Rich’s unsettling thriller, the most valuable loot is us.

Standing before Mount Rushmore on July 3, President Trump said, “In America, we speak English because that is the language of our founding and for a thousand years that has been the language of freedom.”

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1056, “He biþ swā dysig and swā ungewiss.”

Trump’s campaign to promote English is, unfortunately, just one of many fantasies rattling around the rusty roulette wheel of his mind. In early 2025, during a blitz of performative rage, he signed an executive order purporting to make English the official language of the United States.

A more effective way to honor English might be to stop using it to lie, insult, and confuse, but nobody invited Orwell to this rally.

In her new book How to Kill a Language, Sophia Smith Galer neatly dismisses the suggestion that we’re all better off speaking English: “In our insistence that a common language can unite us, we forget that multilingualism is — like all biodiversity — a connective tissue in the grand scheme of our existence.”

Besides, English hardly needs more official defense from the federal government. English already exerts an implacable force: “Bloated and greedy, our language siphons off the words of many of our speakers, benefiting from what multilingual immigrants contribute to our countries but stripping them of their own language within two generations.”

That linguistic crisis, she explains, is far more dire than most people realize.

“This is the century that will make or break the future of languages around the world,” she writes. Thousands of local tongues are already as endangered as pandas. “In the next one hundred years, up to half of the world’s languages will die.”

“No funerals will be held; no cemeteries will fill. Some languages will leave behind dictionaries, novels, hours of radio; others will leave nothing save for a relative’s turn of phrase someone still remembers with affection.”

In fact, it’s Smith Galer’s affection for her Nonna that serves as the spine of this engaging work of memoir, reporting, and cultural analysis. Determined to track down the language that her grandmother brought from Italy, Smith Galer begins investigating the state of imperiled languages the world over.

Alas, it’s carnage everywhere: dozens, sometimes hundreds of languages slipping into eternal silence. And there’s nothing normal about this spate of linguicide, no natural reason we should be losing “one indigenous language every two weeks.”

War, commercial hegemony, and the lingering effects of colonialism are snuffing them out like an infernal red pen scratching across the planet’s manuscripts.

And what’s lost is not merely another name for love. Every time a language dies, it takes with it a unique way of understanding life, a whole universe of insights, distinctions, desires, and memories. “In short,” Smith Galer writes, “language diversity is one of our most potent weapons against the diminishment of deep knowledge, the homogenization of culture, the erasure of history.”

She considers a fascinating range of examples — from the Kremlin’s war on Ukrainian to the plight of a remarkably compact language called Śḥerɛ̄t spoken in the mountains of southern Oman.

Her chapters are arranged around the various threats languages face — from occupation to expulsion to criminalization.

A complicated essay on the remarkable revival of Hebrew considers the countervailing risks of sanctification and the tragic loss of linguistic diversity in Israel.

But despite its often elegiac tone, How to Kill a Language is not a work of resignation. As Smith Galer notes near the end, “We have also witnessed astonishing, fate-reversing language revivals.” Just consider Welsh, Hawaiian, and Basque.

This can seem like one of those colossal challenges that defies any personal solution — What can I do to preserve Arctic ice? — but Smith Galer has a concrete suggestion: “There is one small action that anyone can take to resist glottophobia, or the discrimination against other people’s languages or accents: learning a second language yourself.”

As the Dagomba people of northern Ghana say, “Suɣulo yi beni chinchini ni kpe gaɣili ni.”

Where there is patience, you can put a cloth into a narrow-neck gourd.◆

The rest of the newsletter follows below.

Books Go to the Movies

• The first time I read The Odyssey was late — not just 2,800 years after it was composed but a week before the freshmen I was teaching it to. And honestly, I didn’t take to it easily. But the story and the students’ questions eventually won me over. How great a hero can Odysseus be, they wondered, if he loses 100 percent of the men under his command? And why must Penelope put off the suitors for years while her husband frolics with every nymph and goddess who falls in his way? What could I say? He was between Scylla and Charybdis. We used Robert Fagles’s edition — which was relatively new at the time — but now I’d want them to read Emily Wilson’s thrilling translation, which reportedly inspired Christopher Nolan’s new film version of The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway.

• More than two decades ago, Azar Nafisi published a memoir about her years as a professor in post-revolutionary Iran, where she and a handful of female students risked gathering to read Western classics by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and Austen. Now, as the U.S. bombs Iran, bans thousands of books in schools and libraries, and lurches toward theocracy, a film adaptation of Reading Lolita in Tehran, starring Golshifteh Farahani, is playing in select theaters (trailer).

• Lucky, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Annette Bening, and Timothy Olyphant, is streaming on Apple TV (trailer). The seven-episode series is based on Marissa Stapley’s 2021 thriller about a young con artist who’s been trying to put her criminal family behind her, but one last heist could be her undoing.◆

The Most Beautiful Bookstore in the World

Last month, Dua Lipa’s banned-books library in the basement of Livraria Lello sparked headlines around the world (story). But I also want to tell you about the magnificent old bookstore above it.

Founded in 1906, Livraria Lello has become a mobbed tourist attraction in Porto, Portugal. So far as I know, it’s the only bookstore that charges every visitor just to enter.

Tickets — good for credit against any book that Lello publishes — start at about $18 and go up to more than $110 for various extra benefits. That admission policy might sound absurd, if not a little offensive, but it’s allowed the store to monetize its popularity and flourish.

The day we went, lines snaked down the street for various entrance times — 11, 11:30, 12 — like the gate for a packed flight to Paris, and just like those passengers, the bookstore’s customers are sternly managed by a cohort of agents wearing earpieces. (Your ticket will be checked and checked again.)

The moment you step inside, all the fuss makes sense. The store, beautifully refurbished in 2018, is a portal into the elegance of the Belle Époque. Gorgeous bookcases, filled with titles in six languages, soar to the ceiling. Above it all stretches a stained-glass skylight, its floral Art Nouveau border framing the store’s motto, Decus in Labore — “Honor in Work” — with the figure of a blacksmith presumably hammering out some great work of literature.

And dead center, inspiring gasps from all who enter, a bifurcated spiral staircase spills down from the second story. It’s a masterpiece of Old World craftsmanship perfect for the Instagram Age. Camera-wielding visitors — which is to say all of us — patiently wait their turn for a selfie on the stairs.

My ticket — about $57 — included a private tour with a Lello bookseller named Virginia. Among her first revelations: All the intricate woodwork I’m seeing on the walls and ceiling is not wood; it’s faux bois — painted plaster.

And the iconic red staircase was a mistake.

Virginia tells me, “In 1995, they made the first renovations, some maintainments in the staircase, and they bought the wrong color. They made the work at night, and in the morning, they look at the staircase and they say, ‘Well, that is perfect.’ And they keep it. It was the most beautiful mistake in the most beautiful bookshop in the world.”

One quickly succumbs to the extravagance of Lello rhetoric.

In Livraria Lello: The Book, an enormous and unintentionally hilarious tribute published in 2023, CEO Aurora Pedro Pinto writes, “From the humidity of the walls, we created humanity on the shelves.”

Brand Specialist Carlos Coelho adds, “Livraria Lello is a top model in an eternal pose, a timeless orgasm, a churn in the sacred milk ocean of knowledge.”

The book costs $80 and took up half my luggage space, but how could I leave Porto without “a timeless orgasm”?◆

Picture This

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
— Elon Musk

Picture books about kindness and inclusivity can taste as sweet as a strawberry cupcake. But given the poison trickling down from America’s ruling class, some kids may need a sharper interrogation of bigotry.

That sounds like a terminal load of moral freight for any children’s book to carry, and I’ve complained before about the sludge of didactic titles clogging up the shelves.

But Others, by Kobi Yamada, embraces its didacticism in a way that makes it more effective.

The story unfolds as a conversation between two boys standing in front of a large hedge. One boy is thoughtful and inquisitive; the other one sounds ready for a play date with Stephen Miller.

“You really have to wonder what they are thinking.”

“What do you mean?” his friend asks. “Who are you talking about?”

“Them. The other people,” the boy says. “They look different. They talk different. Everything about them is different.”

And then they’re off, back and forth, testing this concept of otherness against their teeth like a fake coin.

Again and again, the thoughtful boy considers what “different” could mean. “Do they have scales and feathers?” he asks. “Do they have sticky tentacles?”

Again and again, his friend is forced to admit, “No, don’t be silly. They don’t have those things.”

As their exchange grows incrementally more sophisticated, the fearful boy concedes that these mysterious Others probably feel lonely sometimes, that they celebrate birthdays, that they love their families.

And then, illuminated by Charles Santoso’s clever illustrations, the story starts rubbing “here” against “there” and “us” against “them” until there’s no way to avoid seeing that we’re all here, and we’re all us.◆

This Week’s Poem

Chera Hammons’s new collection, Birds of America, takes its title from John James Audubon’s study of North American birds published almost 200 years ago. But there’s nothing retrospective about these vibrant poems, which swoop and soar through trauma and healing.

In a bracing introduction, Hammons reveals that she was once in an abusive marriage and later found herself abandoned and penniless. “As I rebuilt my life,” she writes, “the natural world was my solace.”

But she doesn’t posit the woods, fields, and streams as a pure alternative realm to human strife. No, she understands that the natural world is a fellow victim of humanity’s cruelty and carelessness. “The earth wants to heal,” she writes, “but it needs the same things we do: care, effort, and time.”

It’s a terrific collection — witty, moving, and ultimately hopeful.

The Wedding Poem

How dangerous this ritual looks even to us,
though we are in the habit of taking risks:
Two bald eagles, talons locked,
spiral as they plummet from the sky
in freefall. This dive is their courtship,
the quickest way to approximate
the whirlwind of a life together.

Imagine how that round sun spins,
how the toes tighten their grip,
how large and sharp the rushing stones become,
how fast and blurred the familiar stands of timber.

Let’s pretend that we are the first people to see this.
Let’s pretend we have discovered
an uninhabited wilderness.
Look, we are walking away from the cities
into a dappled wood, and anything can happen.
Our home will be a tree. We will sleep on a bed of leaves.

Forget for a moment that,
when we open our eyes,
we will still be damaged people waiting
where the world ends.

Instead, remember that there are eagles
whirling in breathtaking ceremony
even when — especially when — no one is there to see it.

There are spiders spinning histories in corners,
and galaxies that spiral into wheels of stars.
Water bears go about their invisible business
without interruption, having survived every extinction,
proof that there is something that can’t be reached
by our kind of hurt. Something that has never asked
for us. Something that hopes there is no ending.

See how the eagles lift now, bound by surviving together.
We only get one shot at this. Save
what you can. Love even what you can’t save.
Believe me when I tell you
gratitude is almost never wrong.

Excerpted from “Birds of America,” by Chera Hammons. Copyright © 2026 by Chera Hammons. Published by Dial. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.◆

The Writing Life

Don’t bother Jonathan Franzen this fall. Despite the recent appearance of an excerpt in The New Yorker, the novelist must set aside work on his sequel to Crossroads to finish an adaptation of The Corrections for Netflix. Filming is scheduled to begin in January, with Meryl Streep playing Enid, the unforgettable matriarch inspired by Franzen’s mother.

Last Friday night, I interviewed Franzen at the Book Ball, a fundraiser for Aspen Words, which supports writing workshops, school programs, and author events.

The upstart crow who once famously dissed Oprah, disparaged Michiko Kakutani, and declared television the enemy of serious fiction has mellowed into a gentler, more reflective literary statesman.

“I was extremely opinionated and extremely righteous as a kid in his 20s,” Franzen told the crowd enjoying their lemon tarts. “I thought I knew what was wrong with the world, and I thought I knew whose fault it was, and I made searing moral judgments. It was only when I entered my mid-30s that I realized, ‘You know what? You shouldn’t be so sure you’re right.’”

Despite the attention generated at the time by his debut novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, Franzen said, “I look back at that novel, and I see a very brainy kid who hadn’t figured out how to really write a novel.”

The fundamental shift that eventually produced The Corrections came when he dropped the old models and found new ones.

“I’d stopped reading the people I was supposed to be reading as an ambitious young, male, white, straight writer in America, and started reading fiction by women,” including Paula Fox, Jane Smiley, and Alice Munro.

“Those books were incredibly personal,” he said. “They were getting at what was going on in the larger society — not by trying to go out and gather in all of this information,” but by following “very carefully what was happening with someone who was anxious, who wanted something, who was failing.”

In other words, his mother. “She’s actually the model for all of my characters,” he said. “She so wanted things, and she mostly couldn’t have them. Wanting something and not being able to have it, that’s kind of the master key to story.”

Now, nearly three decades after reinventing himself with The Corrections, Franzen has come to see television differently, too.

Back in the mid-90s, he tried to make a living in Hollywood but recoiled from the collaborative writing process, and his agent dropped him “like medical waste.”

Since then, he said, two things have changed: He gained total artistic control over his material, and The Wire ushered in an era of socially engaged, long-form television in the tradition of great 19th-century novels.

“I realized at a certain point that TV like that is not a threat,” he said. “TV like that is another form of the novel. And I should just let go of my hostility to it, especially since I really like watching it.”

Franzen wrote the screen adaptation of The Corrections with Meryl Streep in mind as Enid. “She is a good comic actress,” he said, “and we are intending to make a comic show of it.”

P.S. Early Friday morning, Franzen led a small group of Aspen Words donors on a private bird tour. The highlight, I’m told, was spotting a Lewis’s Woodpecker with its distinctive pink belly. My own private tribute to birds took me to Poppycock’s for the legendary oatmeal pancakes, which were indeed very good, though the fake syrup is an abomination.◆

Clippings

• This week’s review is Cloudthief, Nathaniel Rich’s unsettling thriller in which the most valuable loot is us (review).

• Newsletter reader Kristy, in Bozeman, Mont., is the winner of Power Lines, by Peter Keating (see my giveaway on June 26). She tells me she’s loved maps since childhood, when her family’s long road trips fueled her curiosity about the world. Thanks to everyone who entered.

• My friends and former Washington Post colleagues Becky Meloan and Olga Massov have started an occasional feature called “Feed & Read” that pairs a book worth discussing with a recipe inspired by its pages. You can sample their first offering here.◆

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Blue diamonds. Vermeer paintings. Gold bars.

These are the treasures of great heist novels.

But Nathaniel Rich’s new thriller isn’t eyeing anything so quaint — or, frankly, any thing at all.

Cloudthief is a novel scheming in the modern age when our wealthiest companies lay up their treasures in heaven, where thieves do not break through nor steal.

God help us.

Nowadays, the most precious treasure is, of course, data — that incalculably vast stream of bits and bytes ascended to the cloud. It holds our retirement savings and our angry tweets, our medical records and our selfies, including every email, website, message and video, a trove of secrets capable of securing or destroying every nation, corporation, and person on earth.

Except it turns out that “the cloud” is a somewhat fanciful metaphor. As straining towns across America are discovering, our data doesn’t actually hover in some cumulonimbus mind. Instead, that invaluable information is encoded on millions of hard drives spinning away in sprawling data centers here on terra firma. Where thieves do, indeed, break through and steal.

I asked Nathaniel Rich: “What’s the scariest thing most of us still don’t understand about data centers?”

Tim, the narrator of Cloudthief, had no intention of ever becoming a crook, petty or otherwise. When we meet him, he’s looking back more than two decades to a time when he worked as a journalist. “It was one of the ancient trades driven into obsolescence by digital technology,” he explains. “It disappeared not long after the phrenologist, the broomsquire, the VCR repairman.” That voice, locked in sardonic mourning, is our guide through this tale of bizarre derring-do.

It begins, as so many bad ideas do, with a desire for easy money. Tim’s friend, Ces, is “an inveterate conniver and hustler” with a penchant for mangling idioms and ethics. Stealing from mini storage facilities, he claims, will be as simple as “falling on a log.” It’s not even really illegal, or if it is, “just barely, by the skin of its eyes.”

For all his incompetence with the English language, Ces is right about the penetrability of mini storage units. A little surveillance, a little planning, and they’re in. “I’m conducting research for an article,” Tim tells himself, and soon they’re pawing through strangers’ old photo albums, board games, baseball cards, and hi-fi equipment. “The owners of these units, I decided, deserved to have their superfluous possessions confiscated. We were doing them a service.”

What Ces and Tim never expect to find, though, is a young woman living inside one of the mini storage units. Virginia — not her real name — has been driven to this Thoreauvian extremity by a desire to remove herself from modern society and its obsessive surveillance.

If you’ve ever used a computer, a credit card, or a phone, indeed, if you’ve ever left the house without wearing a paper bag over your head, you may have some vague idea of how elaborately our lives are tracked and recorded. (Depending on your browser and your network provider, more than a dozen companies have just noted that you’re reading this review.) Stepping out of that modern-day panopticon is practically impossible. But Virginia — whoever she might be — has managed to do it, and Tim is first fascinated and then besotted.

Rich is particularly deft with the ever-shifting and unequal balance of this relationship between two poseurs, the discouraged journalist and the paranoid hermit. “We have an infrared sensor for each other,” Tim says. “Lonelies know Lonelies.” But Virginia is not looking for a soulmate; she’s looking for a collaborator — or a mark.

That painful ambiguity runs through the novel as Tim describes their most audacious scheme: a plot to steal servers from “the world’s second-largest data center.” If they can pull it off, it will be “the greatest heist in American history.”

In Rich’s telling, it’s a tremendously exciting crime — and a ludicrous one, I thought, until Sunday when I read his crazy true story in the New York Times Magazine about a gang of thieves with names like Micky and the Tall Fella who stole 80 servers from a data center in London in 2007.

What’s so striking about Cloudthief, though, is how little Rich leans on his considerable skill as a thriller writer. This will disappoint some readers and please others. Like the Wi-Fi at the airport, there are some slow spots. And the inescapable claustrophobia of the first-person narrator is not alleviated much by this cloistered man who commits a series of secret crimes against secret information.

“I won’t bore you with the additional technical challenges,” Tim says, at precisely the moment some modern-day Tom Clancy would savor every grain in the hourglass of disaster.

But what interests Rich and what fascinated me is the complicated tension between being seen and being unseen. What does it cost, he wonders, to have our lives so intricately recorded and known? And what are the countervailing costs to being unknown?

In a brilliant and harrowing subplot that helps explain Tim’s need for extra money, his sister is gradually losing her hearing and her sight. She is, in a sense, being removed from the world, thrust into a kind of cerebral hermitage. What wouldn’t Tim do to help her, even if it means exposing the data of untold strangers? “The only thing that matters is the crime,” he writes. “The crime, and what it did to us: what it gave us, and what it took away.”

Cloudthief is a rare and curious novel that seems to resist its own commercial potential in favor of exploring the challenges of intimacy and trust in the Silicon Age. While bolted to the most esoteric technology of our era — those voracious data centers swallowing up land, water, and funding — the story soars through questions about who we are, what can be known about us, and what, in the end, we can know about each other. ◆

Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (MCD/FSG, 304 pp., $28)

Previous review: Can You Dig It?
Daniel Mason’s “Country People” follows an incurable dreamer into a world of folktales, rabbit holes, and underground mysteries.

PORTO, Portugal — Portugal feels awfully far away from America’s 250th-birthday celebrations this weekend, but a brand-new library of banned and censored books here may be one of the world’s most timely celebrations of liberty.

British singer and songwriter Dua Lipa created the collection — called The Manifesto Library — in partnership with Livraria Lello, the celebrated bookstore in Porto.

Although hundreds of customers were lined up outside the store — with timed tickets that start at about $15 — few people seemed to know about Lipa’s new Manifesto Library, and there are no signs indicating its existence. But if you ask a staff member, you’ll be led down the white stone stairwell to the basement level of Livraria Lello’s new cultural space, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira. (The exhibition space is also wheelchair accessible via an elevator.)

Fewer than a dozen people are allowed to enter at any given time, which contributes to the quiet, pensive atmosphere of The Manifesto Library.

In a statement printed on the wall, Lipa writes, “This library is a shrine to books that have disappeared, to authors whose courage unmasks structures of power and control, and to readers who refuse to be told what book they are allowed.”

The large rectangular room, indirectly lit, is lined with colorful books on simple white shelves. But what’s most striking is the room’s dramatically sunken floor — three levels of oak boards that seem to place visitors on shelves, too, suggesting that we’re all at risk of being censored.

The books — about 100 titles — have been banned or repressed at various times and in various places around the world.

The collection contains all the classic targets, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Toni Morrison’s Beloved to more recently banned titles like Alexei Navalny’s Patriot and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime.

It feels serendipitous — and then sobering — to see the same titles, such as Anne Frank’s Diary and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reappear around the room in various editions and different languages. It’s a physical reminder that the fight for intellectual and creative freedom is worldwide.

Pithy quotations appear in spaces between the books, like warnings whispered to co-conspirators.

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance. You have to work at it.”
— The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

“No matter what happens in the world, however brutal or dystopian a thing, not all is lost if there are people out there risking themselves to document it. Little sparks cause fires, too.”
— Swimming in the Dark, by Tomasz Jedrowski

A large television screen at one end shows video footage of protests and clips of Lipa interviewing some of the authors represented on the shelves, such as Olga Tokarczuk and Percival Everett.

That feature is muted. Instead, as visitors to The Manifesto Library browse, they hear only a mournful soundtrack of music selected by the staff of Livraria Lello.

The experience, so carefully designed and controlled, is strangely beautiful, a reminder of how fortunate we are and how much we have to lose if these books are someday available only in a guarded basement for paying customers.◆

Maybe every vacation should start with a little disappointment — like rain at a wedding.

After a seven-hour flight from D.C., we arrived in Lisbon on Sunday morning, whisked through customs, and took the Metro to an apartment building in the city’s historic center.

But our entry code was wrong. And so was the second one we were sent. For 90 minutes we wilted in a dark, airless hallway until a third code finally let us in. We ran, somewhat ungraciously, to the bathroom and — only after the deed, dear readers — discovered that the apartment had no running water.

With no hope of repair on the horizon, we booked a second Airbnb, where our new host, the lifesaving Pedro, welcomed us up four narrow flights of stairs — watch your head! — to his apartment, from which, on tiptoes, we could see São Jorge Castle.

The next day, we set out on foot for that very castle, which is guarded by shrieking peacocks and provides spectacular views of this gorgeous city.

We walked 24,000 steps, and somehow 23,000 of them were uphill. Lisbon, we’ve discovered, is basically an antique StairMaster tiled blue.

I still have the upper body of Mr. Burns, but I’m starting to develop the thighs of Hercules. (Though the ubiquitous pastéis de nata are not helping.)

In Lisbon, even the tiniest alleys, dank passageways that Americans would abandon to dumpsters and raccoons, hide tiny restaurants where mournful waiters serve bacalhau, dourada, and robalo.

Naturally, our first literary treat was a visit to Livraria Bertrand, the oldest continuously operating bookstore in the world. Founded nearly half a century before the Declaration of Independence, the business survived the 1755 earthquake and eventually relocated to its present location.

Livraria Bertrand is now a train of linked rooms, each named after a different Portuguese author — José Saramago, Eça de Queirós, etc.

As I lingered, a clerk explained, in English, the oeuvre of Lisbon’s beloved poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote in more than 70 distinct personalities that he called heteronyms, each with their own biography and style.

I bought a beautifully designed anthology of Pessoa’s poetry, I Am the Size of Whatever I See, translated by Calvin Olsen, and a tote bag, which I need like Pessoa needs another heteronym. (The poet, who died in 1935, is still holding the No. 1 spot on the store’s fiction bestseller list.)

In the last room, we found Café Bertrand, opened in 2017 to celebrate the bookstore’s 285th anniversary. There we enjoyed a slice of torta de laranja under the watchful gaze of a whimsical mural of Pessoa.

On Tuesday, we toured Jerónimos Monastery, founded in 1501 for the Order of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators — and, unofficially, just about everybody who loves books.

Which clearly includes the Portuguese. Lisbon has a number of wonderful bookstores, like Ler Devagar (“Read Slowly”) at the LX Factory marketplace. Vast machinery still looms over patrons from the second-floor balcony, a reminder of the building’s previous incarnation as a printing plant. The temperature inside was only a few degrees cooler than the withering 100-degree heat outside, which enhanced the old factory vibe.

As we checked out, a clerk illustrated a paper bag for my daughter’s purchases. (Children’s book publishers: Track this guy down.)

Wednesday, we got up early and headed to Sintra. Lord Byron wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

Lo! Cintra’s glorious Eden intervenes
In variegated maze of mount and glen.

Byron — “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” — put Sintra on the map for British Romantics. At Lawrence’s Hotel, a flight of stairs that the 21-year-old poet descended to pursue, one must presume, some unspeakable abomination, is still memorialized with a lovely tile plaque.

What’s most remarkable is that Byron praised Sintra in 1812, decades before Ferdinand II transformed the ruins of a 16th-century monastery into the fantastical Pena Palace, a fairy tale in stone that’s missing nothing except an imperiled princess and a fire-snorting dragon.

Today we’re heading off to Coimbra and Porto for more adventures. I confess to feeling conflicted about missing America’s 250th birthday, which is also my own, though I’m somewhat younger.

A tour this week of the Aljube Museum of Resistance and Freedom, which is dedicated to the work of victims, activists, and writers who fought back against Portugal’s 20th-century fascist dictatorship, makes me realize again how precious — and fragile — liberty is.◆

The rest of the newsletter follows below:

Books Go to the Movies

• Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World opens in select theaters today and comes to PBS on Aug. 25. Sasha Waters’s documentary explores how this famously private writer became one of America’s most popular poets. Created in consultation with biographer Lindsay Whalen, the film features never-before-seen photos and correspondence, along with readings and reflections with John Waters, Stephen Colbert, Oprah Winfrey and others.

• Silo returns to Apple TV today for its third season (trailer). Based on Hugh Howey’s bestselling Silo trilogy — which began as the self-published novella Wool — the show follows the remnants of humanity living in a cavernous underground bunker. This season promises to reveal what originally drove people beneath the ground. (The series has already been renewed for its fourth and final season.)

• A special 85th-anniversary re-release of Citizen Kane begins on Sunday in select theaters (trailer). Orson Welles’s classic film about the rise and fall of a newspaper tycoon isn’t based on a book, but it’s inspired a library full of them, including Warren Buckland’s Who Wrote Citizen Kane?◆

Kristy’s Great Idea

This year marks the 40th anniversary of The Baby-Sitters Club books, which have sold nearly 200 million copies. At this point, the series and its related spin-offs, adaptations, and merchandise have earned enough to keep Kristy in pin money until the sun burns out.

But those industrious middle-school girls aren’t done — not by a long shot.

Next week, Scholastic will publish The Baby-Sitters Club Fan Edition: Baby-Sitter Summer.

The original series creator, Ann M. Martin, has enlisted a half-dozen children’s, YA, and adult authors to create a new book for kids that may also serve as the ultimate Gen X nostalgia pajama party. Emma Straub, Becky Albertalli and four others each write from the point of view of different BSC members.

According to publishing lore, back when Dionne Warwick was singing “That’s What Friends Are For” and phones were attached to the wall, The Baby-Sitters Club was conceived as a collection of four books. Let’s just say Kristy’s Great Idea was greater than anybody could have imagined. Now there are more than 250 titles in 23 languages around the world.

And the original entrepreneurs of Stoneybrook are old enough to take their grandkids to The Baby-Sitters Club Musical, currently in development.◆

A Revolutionary Revision

While Thomas Jefferson was drafting the Declaration of Independence in June 1776, he made a small but history-shattering change.

In a passage about grievances against King George III, Jefferson rubbed out the word “subjects” and wrote in “citizens.”

That particular sentence didn’t make it into the final document, but philosophically, this was the edit heard round the world.

Jefferson’s original rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, which also shows changes by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, sits at the heart of a new exhibit opening today at the Library of Congress.

“The Declaration’s Promise: A Revolutionary Idea,” commemorating America’s Semiquincentennial, contains more than 120 items from the Library’s collection to highlight the principles of the Declaration and their influence.

Among the items on display are a 1690 edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which had a profound influence on the Founding Fathers, and the first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence.

Treasures from the 19th century include Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”; a first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; Abraham Lincoln’s handwritten Gettysburg Address; and ambrotypes — glass-plate images — of Civil War soldiers.

You can see the Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States that Susan B. Anthony read after suffragists interrupted the centennial celebration at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4, 1876.

The exhibit also celebrates newfound freedom in the arts, from jazz to musical theater, including sheet music from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.

Even Kermit the Frog — doing his best imitation of Jefferson — makes an appearance.

This free exhibit runs through July 2027, so there’s no rush, but you’ll need to reserve timed tickets here.

P.S. For a revolutionary look at America’s founding document, check out Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence. In this engaging book, historian Robert G. Parkinson asks us to stop swooning over Jefferson’s idealistic introduction and concentrate instead on the 27 grievances against King George and his officers. Far from being a litany of antique complaints irrelevant to our contemporary lives, Parkinson argues that those indictments contain the values, anxieties, and contradictions of the first Americans that still resonate with us today, from disputes over judicial independence and civilian control of the military to immigration policy, citizenship, and executive power.

“These are twenty-first-century problems,” he writes, “as much as they were eighteenth-century ones.”◆

Picture This

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” — or, in the case of this Rebecca, to the White House.

April Genevieve Tucholke has written a book for the littlest readers about a truly zany chapter of presidential history.

In 1926, someone sent President Coolidge a live raccoon for Thanksgiving dinner. But instead of eating it, the president and his wife, Grace, named it Rebecca and gave it free rein. (The pests in the White House were cuter back then.)

It sounds mad, but Rebecca became something of a national celebrity.

Dave Szalay’s wonderfully chaotic illustrations show the raccoon competing for Grace’s affections with her many other pets — including a bear and two lion cubs!

Meanwhile, Rebecca clears off the White House dining room table, cleans up in the First Lady’s bathtub, and generally causes mayhem for the panicked staff.

“Everyone loved me,” Rebecca claims. “You would have loved me too.”

This seems like a horrible lesson about adopting wild animals, but a hilarious one about U.S. history.

A brief note at the end explains that Rebecca was eventually transferred to what is now the National Zoo.◆

This Week’s Poem

Weeks ago, when I first started thinking about sending this newsletter from Lisbon, I realized I didn’t know any Portuguese poets except Fernando Pessoa.

I needed a crash course in the nation’s verse.

28 Portuguese Poets, edited by translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, gave me a terrific introduction.

While apologizing for the inevitably “skimpy” selections possible in a single volume, Zenith provides a great service to interested but uninitiated readers like me.

“Portuguese poetry throughout the 20th century and into the 21st,” he writes, “has been a dynamic, wide-open territory, whose inhabitants have spoken with candour and been restlessly inventive, using language to embody their different sexualities, political and cultural preoccupations, amorous passions, religious passions, and in some cases just their yearning for solitude, or the pioneer’s yen to pick up and move on, without really knowing to what end.”

The following poem is by Ruy Belo (1933–1978), one of Portugal’s most beloved modern poets. His statue stands in Poets’ Park in Oeiras, near Lisbon.

Pilgrim and Guest on Planet Earth

My only country is where I feel at home
it’s where I pay for that feeling with suffering
it’s where in an instant I have everything
Right now my country is the same green fields
which looked sad and forlorn to me in autumn
and where I never need to show a passport
since that’s where I was born and at each moment die
peace not being a word that applies to me
The daisy the grass the peach tree in flower
guarantee the minimum of necessary pain
for a man who would look upon any happiness
as a pension check or an insult
Life begins anew the sun is shining
and this is called spring
but it’s far too varied and concrete
to fit into just one abstract word
My country is all the friends
I keep making and losing
My friends are the most recent ones
those from other countries those I hardly know and
I have to leave them because I’m going away
since I’m never at home where I am
I’m not even here where I am
I’m not very big I was born in a village
and my country that was small to begin with
became even smaller for me
owing to the landowners and people-owners
and the hawkers of souls in the temple of the world
I’m me where I am and I’m only portuguese
for having first seen light in portugal

“Pilgrim and Guest on Planet Earth,” by Ruy Belo, translated by Richard Zenith and Alexis Levitin. Excerpted from “28 Portuguese Poets: A Bilingual Anthology,” edited by Richard Zenith. Published by Dedalus Press, 2015. Reprinted with permission.

P.S. Since coming to Lisbon, I’ve found several anthologies of Portuguese poetry, including Lisbon Poets, a bilingual edition from Shantarin, translated by Martin D’Evelin and Martin Earl, with witty illustrations by André Carrilho.◆

Clippings

• This week’s review is Country People, Daniel Mason’s delightful novel about a hopelessly distracted scholar searching for wonder in Russian folktales and the hills of Vermont (review).

• If you woke up this morning feeling like a giant bug, happy Kafka’s birthday! The master of existential dread was born on this day in 1883 in Prague. If you know a young reader who might resonate with Kafkaesque stories about the inexplicable absurdity of life, introduce them to Gary Clement’s graphic novel series, K Is in Trouble.

• Lisbon is crawling with writers this week. The annual DISQUIET International Literary Program, sponsored by Dzanc Books, has brought American authors to the city, where they’re joining Portuguese colleagues for workshops and readings through July 10.

Note: I’m taking next week off. No Tuesday review, no Friday newsletter, no email.
By Order of Dawn.◆

No one is likely to ask Daniel Mason, “Is Country People really about you?”

His effervescent new novel is about Miles Krzelewski, a perpetual graduate student who’s done little with his life but start and abandon 11 dissertations.

Mason has the opposite problem. He knocked off his bestselling debut novel, The Piano Tuner, in 2002 as he was working on a medical degree. Since then, he’s published several more terrific works of fiction — including, most recently, North Woods — and been a Pulitzer finalist, all while teaching and researching in Stanford University’s psychiatry department.

The good doctor seems positively allergic to idleness.

But you don’t need a psychiatry degree to see the connection between this funny novel and the lightly repressed enchantment that bubbles through even Mason’s most haunting books. Faeries of wit and mischief have always danced around his fiction, whether he’s pursuing a piano through the Burmese jungle or taking an ax to a twin sister.

In the pages of Country People, those whimsical sprites have been given free rein. This story of self-delusions, bizarre eccentrics, and absurd antics is narrated in an arch, long-suffering voice that brings out the comic flavor like salt on caramel. Think of it as a companion to Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco. One comic novel this good feels lucky; two in the same summer feels like cheating.

When we meet Miles, 44, he’s been working on the first draft of his dissertation on Russian folktales for 14 years, and, let’s face it, the end is nowhere in sight. It’s not that he lacks the requisite intellectual rigor (in high school he taught himself Basque because so few people speak it), but he has the attention span of an erudite squirrel. His wife, meanwhile, is an academic superstar, who’s been offered a one-year position at a posh college in Vermont. So, as the novel begins, they load up their Italian dog and two children, say goodbye to San Francisco, and set off across the country.

Miles is sufficiently self-aware to appreciate the burden of his good fortune, which is stacked perilously high. After all, his wife is “a woman of beauty and intelligence, who could have chosen any number of wealthy suitors.” Her students regularly report being inspired and moved to tears by her lectures, while Miles’s students say he’s “nice.” She illuminates Milton, the colossus of English literature; he studies bedtime stories for children.

What man wouldn’t wilt next to the heat of such a companion?

His wife gamely hopes that mingling with actual country people might give him the practical experience to understand Russian peasants with even greater sympathy. And who knows, perhaps a year spent inhaling the invigorating air of the Green Mountain State will spur Miles to finally finish his dissertation and become the figure he imagines, in moments of increasingly strained optimism, he could be.

Reader, there is not sufficient invigorating air in the whole world to effect such a transformation.

I asked Daniel Mason, “What is it about the gap between who we are and who we imagine we’ll be that fascinates you?”

Much of the novel’s early comedy reads like Green Acres by way of Chekhov. Miles is an enthusiastic dilettante who dreams of becoming a farmer based solely on the knowledge of beekeeping he’s derived from Anna Karenina. As a denizen of San Francisco, he’s astonished at the wonders of nonorganic food: “Who was this Sara Lee of such extraordinary industry?” he wonders. Everything about the non-tech-based lives of these Vermonters charms him. “Miles’s heart quickened — could this be a real country person?” And look here: “a classic New England church, not a church converted into a loft or a restaurant, but a true, functional church with bells ringing, and New English people walking benevolently from its doors.”

Drawing on his own family’s year in New England during the Covid pandemic, Mason is hilarious with this West Coast fetishization of ordinary rural life. As a lifelong academic himself, he knows every arcane footnote that a fellow like Miles would append to, say, a third-grade play or a swimmin’ hole.

The plot of Country People is no more disciplined than the family’s Italian dog, which chases down every stray scent. This novel never meets a roadside attraction it can resist. But soon enough, all these quirky encounters and diversions accrue into a stalagmite of real mystery. Miles discovers a group of spelunkers and amateur historians searching for a lost paradise deep underground, guided by a curious testimony that sounds as though it were written by Jules Verne or Edgar Allan Poe. They all seem like folks who could make a tinfoil hat by candlelight — one of them is assembling a vast catalogue of human fallacies in his van.

But for Miles, who’s always running down rabbit holes, these folks venturing down actual rabbit holes are natural allies — and didn’t his wife encourage him to make new friends? Their reports of a hidden world beneath Vermont don’t sound any stranger than the Russian folktales that have occupied him for years. No matter where you come down on the Inner Earth Theory, you’ll be moved by their camaraderie.

As a similarly earnest but incompetent man who never finished his own dissertation, I may be guilty of a certain degree of over-identification with Miles. It’s possible that this chronically distracted character whom I enjoyed so much will strike some women readers as a tedious reminder of their first husband.

But I hope not. For all his infuriating indirection, Miles remains tremendously endearing. Mason has written a comedy about a man who can’t quite secure his place above ground but senses the wonder lurking just beneath our feet. That and a beloved Italian dog who digs through every pillow, sofa, and floor are all you really need for a book to make the world feel a little lighter, a little warmer.◆

Country People, by Daniel Mason (Random House, 320 pp. $30)

Previous review: There Goes the Neighborhood
In De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s thriller, “The Fervent Whites,” a wrongfully convicted White couple returns to a Black community — and old wounds bleed again.