Discussed: Kate Braverman, Squandering the Blue; Hob Broun, Inner Tube

In the right hands, a new edition of a book published years ago can be the makings of a new cult classic. The NYRB Classics edition of John Williams’s Stoner is the example I’ve seen the most evidence of, but it’s far from alone. It’s no surprise that a growing number of publishers are tapping into literary history for their work, from Hagfish to the new Penguin Random House imprint Outsider Editions. There’s another useful task that reissue imprints accomplish: getting books that might have been overlooked to contemporary readers.

I am currently typing these words approximately 18 inches to the left of a shelf full of Wakefield Press’s editions of several books by Jean Ray, a Belgian surrealist whose uncanny fiction has been among the highlights of the last few years for me. These words were written more than 50 years ago, but the feelings of awe and discomfort they inspire is urgent indeed.

A copy of Outsider Editions’ new edition of Kate Braverman’s collection Squandering the Blue caught my eye at P&T Knitwear one evening. I knew that I’d read about Braverman before, but wasn’t sure exactly what. I opened the book a few days later and was drawn into the title story, which opens the book. By the time it reaches its final sentence — four devastating words long — I realized this was going to be one of the best books I read this year. Nothing about the stories that followed made me question that impression.

Some writers use collections as a way to showcase their range. Braverman does something else here: revisiting many of the same themes — the artist’s life, mothers and daughters, addiction and recovery — from different angles. If that sounds like a poet might do, there’s a reason for that: Braverman was equally at home writing poetry and prose.

What does that look like in practice? Here’s how “Temporary Light” begins:

“It is early in December. Suzanne Cooper drives down Wilshire Boulevard through Beverly Hills and the city is not as she knew it. Overnight, wide, red ribbons have been entwined around street lamps, there is simulated snow and frost in shop windows, and legions of slaughtered pines are everywhere decorated and displayed. It is as if the earth had suddenly divested itself of the ordinary and revealed its pagan interior.”

While reading certain books, I imagine the author sitting at a typewriter composing impeccable sentences and throwing them on the ground with an Emeril-eque shout. This collection was full of those moments. Also: Its Pagan Interior would be an amazing title.

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I’d heard a bit about the late Hob Broun through a number of missives from publisher Calamari Archive, and I knew that Sam Lipsyte was one of his admirers. Both of those got my attention, but what pushed me to actually read something by Broun was a Zona Motel conversation about Broun between Gene Kwak and David Nutt. Nutt described his introduction to Broun as the novel Inner Tube, which prompted Nutt to call Broun “the missing link between DeLillo, Lipsyte, and Nathanael West.”

That was about the point when I ordered a copy of Inner Tube from WORD.

Inner Tube has its share of dynamic sentences as well: “I watch, my attention paid like a war tax” is how one chapter begins. This is a frankly brutal book to read in places: it begins with the narrator describing the violent death by suicide of his mother and ends on an equally violent, equally disquieting note. The narrative moves around in time as the narrator recounts his troubling family history, juxtaposing scenes from his childhood with his equally troubled middle age.

Throughout the novel, Broun’s prose conveys a sense of a fundamental wrongness. Here’s another representative sentence: “The sunset, laced with hydrocarbons, was deep purple.” The image it summons is pastoral, but the language clues you in to the effect that something is very wrong. It’s like one of those behind-the-scenes articles that shows you all the unappetizing ways food is prepared for a commercial shoot.

These new editions were my introduction to both Braverman and Broun. Neither one will be the last book of theirs I read, and I’ve sent a few choice sentences to friends who might view things similarly.

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Some Recent Writing

…it’s been a while since I did one of these. I made a foray into topics cinematic with an article on One Night Only and Code 46, two very different looks at authoritarian states controlling sex, at Reactor.

A pair of features I wrote for Publishers Weekly are up, one on comics as a medium for biographies of comic book creators, the other on boutique Blu-ray imprints making forays into the book world. I wrote about some recent books in translation for Words Without Borders, and chatted with both Ron Currie and Karishma Jobanputra for the Portland Press Herald.

Some recent reviews include Avigayl Sharp’s Offseason (for On the Seawall), Adam Voith’s Recommended If You Like and Clair Hopple’s Change the Subject (both for Zona Motel), Scott McClanahan’s Fights! (for Vol.1 Brooklyn), and De Elizabeth’s She Haunts Me Still and Jedediah Barry’s Kill All Wizards (both for Reactor).

I should say this before proceeding: there was nothing about my experience at Experimental Cocktail Club Venice that disappointed me. The bartenders were friendly; the drinks were tasty. The decor, both there and in its sibling restaurant, was excellent. But there was something about the experience of drinking there that snapped something else into clear focus for me: are some cocktail bars better for social drinking?

I don’t think this is the case for all bars. I’ve visited Seattle’s Canon with friends and alone and had an excellent time in each situation. This Venice establishment was a little different from some cocktail bars where I’ve spent time. Their remit is less about reinventing classics or exploring one particular spirit; instead, Experimental Cocktail Club — based on my time there, anyway — was about doing things with cocktails that you wouldn’t expect.

When I was there (December 2025), the menu consisted of cocktails inspired by other notable bars elsewhere in the world. I ended up having three drinks while I was there. One was the Overground, described as an “Old Fashioned meets [a] carrot cake.” This one had frosting and sprinkles on the rim; another of the drinks I tried also had an unconventional dusting of spices, in this case salt and pepper, designed to compliment a drink described to me as the bar’s variation on a Manhattan.

The third drink I had, the Thalassa, came with a piece of salty candy. My notes from that night include the word “refreshing,” and I appreciated the craft behind all of them. In some cases, trying a cocktail might inspire you to replicate it at home. Unless I’m in the midst of baking cookies, I think at least some of these drinks are ones that I’ll leave to the experts.

But this experience has also given me another way of looking at a bar’s cocktail menu: whether or not a given recipe was assembled with a “can you believe this?” factor in mind. There’s something of an element of that to tiki drinks, I’d say; I also look back fondly on a now-defunct Williamsburg bar called The Drink, whose whole concept was making cocktails at a punchbowl scale. It was great if you went there with a group; you’d have fewer options if you arrived solo.

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Presumably someone with a powerful liver could also have tried their hand at an entire punchbowl, much like how I ended up accidentally consuming an entire “Fuck-It Bucket” at a now-defunct Prospect Heights bar. But I can’t imagine that it would be much fun. For many people, there’s a social aspect to drinking; Rosie Schaap’s excellent memoir Drinking With Men is one of the best distillations of this I can think of. And it doesn’t surprise me that New York City has, in recent years, seen some later-night establishments, including coffee shops and bars serving non-alcoholic cocktails, open up.

And perhaps that brings us back around to the idea of cocktails as conversation starters. The trick, of course, is to find the right balance between an interesting taste and an interesting composition. (See also: a recent article by Courtney Iseman in Slate about soup-centric cocktail recipes.) Finding the right combination might well yield a drink that endures on long past the night on which it’s consumed.

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Discussed: Scorpions by Yumiko Kurahashi (translated by Michael Day); Amygdalatropolis by B.R. Yeager

If you spend enough time following literary controversies online, you may have encountered people quarreling over whether depiction is endorsement in fiction. In other words, is including bad behavior in a novel or story bad, even if it’s intended as criticism? This lines up neatly beside arguments over the “likability” of characters, which can also crop up with relative frequency.

These are not new debates. There’s a bit partway through Steven Bach’s memoir Final Cut in which he shares some of the history behind the making of Raging Bull, including one studio executive denigrating the central character. The version of Jake LaMotta that appears in said film is, in fact, fascinating — though “likable” is not a word that would come to mind. As Lyta Gold pointed out in a 2024 essay, arguments over the morality and suitability of certain stories can be traced back for thousands of years.

As a reader and writer, I’m equally in favor of protagonists both likable and despicable, as long as they are written interestingly. A violent sadist can be just as boring as a beatific saint, and there’s a particular challenge in writing a virtuous character who is also interesting. The same is true for the brutally antisocial: someone whose default state is one of relentless violence is fundamentally boring.

One way to make an unlikable character interesting is through a series of contrasts, and one place to see this in practice is in B.R. Yeager’s novel Amygdalatropolis. I’ve read other work by Yeager, and his Negative Space is one of my favorite novels of the last decade. This novel was his first, and while it’s less overly a work of horror per se, it is also not a book that lacks outright horror.

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Amygdalatropolis is not a book that holds the reader’s hand as they make their way through it. Gradually, a few things become clear: this is a novel about a disaffected young man who spends his time on a forum called /1404/ — a spot that may summon up memories of some of the grimmest places online for certain readers. /1404er/ — that’s what the protagonist is referred to throughout — lives in the house where he grew up, though he’s making enough money to buy his parents to move into the home’s master bedroom.

Yeager’s novel is one of the few books set in an online community that feels authentic. (See also: Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts, which would make for an excellent double feature with this book.) Much of its power comes from the banality of hearing its characters discuss incredibly disconcerting things, from the slurs they casually refer to one another as to the discussions of doxxing and harassment that take place online. It isn’t always an easy read, but it also feels unsettlingly clarifying about a certain sector of angry young men.

There’s also the route of outright extremity. Yukino Kurahashi’s Scorpions (translated by Michael Day) is the novelistic equivalent of some head-spinning work of grindcore: imagine blastbeats wound around genuinely transcendental moments and you’d have an idea of what to expect. Edia Connole’s introduction to Amygdalatropolis cites, among others, the works of Georges Bataille. In his introduction to Scorpions, Day cites a different transgressive French author, Jean Genet, as an influence on Kurahashi.

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Scorpions is presented as found document: a series of comments made by L., who has been charged with the crime of matricide. That doesn’t do justice to precisely how unsettling the story L. tells is; it is in part about someone with a deep contempt for almost everyone else around her and in part about her love for her brother K.

“K and I had resided in this room, which resembled the brain of a person with bipolar disorder, since our birth. I had spent a week pulling book after book from our voluminous library, casting each aside, until the mountain of books collapsed upon itself, and ever since, sentimentally attached to this chaos, we had been competing to adorn the room with books and rubbish and bits of paper.”

The violence is explicit in Scorpions and implicit in Amygdalatropolis, but both books offer a sense of controlled chaos in their protagonists’ living spaces that seems inexorably tied to their more shocking acts. That seems consistent with the broader method of both books depicting characters transgressing against the social norms around them. What makes both books gripping are the permutations that their characters go through. These are not people you’d want to emulate in any way, but that doesn’t mean that their violations of social morays or criminal codes can’t be fascinating to observe. Still, you might need to get some fresh air into your lungs

Has any novelist been remembered for two books as wildly disparate as Russell Hoban? His Turtle Diary is a largely realistic work of mid-life anomie; his Riddley Walker is a linguistically innovative story of Britain years from now, where society has regressed to a pre-industrial state. If you didn’t know these two books were by the same author, you might assume that they were not. There’s some precedent for this: Iain (M.) Banks’s novels range from tender chamber dramas to ambitious science fiction. (And there’s a pretty clear line that can be drawn from Riddley Walker to Banks’s Feersum Endjinn, I’d say.) But it also begs the question: what else can be found in Hoban’s body of work?

I have read and enjoyed both of the books mentioned above, but until recently that had been the extent of my immersion in Hoban’s fiction for adult readers. While traveling, I picked up copies of two other Hoban novels: 1996’s Fremder and 2002’s The Bat Tattoo. Guess what: each of them is also very different from its fellows. Each is also quietly bizarre and eminently compelling, the kind of fiction that sparks hours-long conversations.

We’ll start with Fremder, which opens with a scene of disassociation: a figure “tumbling over and over” in a distant galaxy, with the first-person narration not kicking in until the second paragraph. This is Fremder Gorn, the novel’s protagonist. The year is 2052, and humanity has spread to the stars — due in part to an interstellar form of transportation that allows spacecraft to cross vast distances in the blink of an eye.

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Fremder is alone in space because the rest of the vessel he was traveling on failed to re-materialize. This sets into motion the two questions that will fuel the rest of the book: what exactly happened to Fremder, and how does this all relate to the technological breakthroughs made by his late mother, an eccentric genius whose work made this new era of intergalactic travel possible?

Hoban describes this near-future society organically, parceling out details as Fremder encounters them, but doing so without adding too much exposition. Fremder is a part of this society, after all; it isn’t until partway through the book that we realize that there are some decidedly sinister and authoritarian aspects to it. By novel’s end, we’ve also received a better sense of his mother Helen, who experienced a series of horrific traumas over the course of her life.

I think what Hoban is getting at here is a way in which traumas can propagate themselves; hurt people hurting people, but on a grander scale. That’s my read of it, anyway: when we do hear from Helen, there’s a dearth of empathy in her worldview, and a goal of changing the world no matter what the cost might be.

The Bat Tattoo is, on the surface, a more overtly realistic book, focusing on the burgeoning relationship between Roswell Clark and Sarah Varley. Roswell designs toys and devices; Sarah sells antiques. Each of them narrates some of the chapters, and the slow development of their midlife romance makes for a charming experience. Except that there are bleaker things afoot: eventually, Roswell reveals that his wife died in an automobile accident after he drank too much alcohol, an event for which he feels understandably guilty.

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The title of The Bat Tattoo comes from the tattoos that both Roswell and Sarah have received, unbeknownst to one another. That’s one of several ways in which eerie coincidences creep into the narrative. Sarah’s previous relationship was with a man who comes off like a funhouse mirror of Roswell. There’s also the presence of a third narrator: the magnificently-named Adelbert Delarue, a wealthy client of Roswell’s who hired him to design a series of elaborate car crash-themed sex toys. (And yes, the subject of J.G. Ballard’s Crash comes up — more specifically, David Cronenberg’s screen adaptation of it.) Read for long enough and you may wonder if Adelbert, who seems both more eccentric and more sinister than he’s let on, might have had something to do with the death of Roswell’s wife. The Bat Tattoo is full of these strange and ominous hints: the sense that everything might be a bit more connected than Sarah and Roswell would like it to be.

There’s a sense of larger mysteries afoot in these books of Hoban’s, and they’ve left me wanting to go even further into his bibliography. If my quick glimpses at Bookshop and Blackwell’s are any indication, Hoban is better-represented in the U.S. by his books for young readers, while readers based in the U.K. have a wider swath of his work available to them. Perhaps there’s a cult dedicated to his work just waiting to happen.

Discussed: Jarrett Kobek, Soft & Cuddly; Charlotte Reber, Dragon Age II

In the last four days, I have spent something like 15 hours playing Baldur’s Gate III. This anecdote is as good a reason as any to explain why I don’t play video games all that much: I can get obsessive about them, and the reasons to keep playing pile up. I just need another 20 minutes or Just let me finish this one last quest. I end up spending more time reading about video games than I actually do playing them. See also: Elden Ring lore videos.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve picked up and enjoyed a couple of Boss Fight Books’ titles over the years. In the last few months, I’ve read two — and while the styles and eras of gaming chronicled in each are very different, there’s something similarly ominous in each one. A final boss to end all final bosses, one might say.

First up: Charlotte Reber’s Dragon Age II. While not every Boss Fight title I’ve read has been about a game I was familiar with, this is a game I know very well. Yet of the three Dragon Age games I’ve played, II has historically been my least favorite. What’s notable about Reber’s book is the way the author explores some of the flaws in the game and convincingly argues that certain elements of the game are, in fact, assets.

There are elements of criticism (in the sense of it as a discipline) found here: Reber argues that Dragon Age II’s configuration as a game with a not-entirely-reliable narrator adds welcome ambiguity to a genre not known for having much of it. And the interviews with many of the creators behind the game illustrate the process by which studio BioWare works and the means by which a highly-anticipated game like this is created. (More on that shortly.)

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A few weeks later, I sat down with Jarett Kobek’s Soft & Cuddly. (Full disclosure: Kobek and I are both contributing editors for Zona Motel.) I have never played this game; I was also familiar with the ZX Spectrum, the system on which it was designed to be played. And if you’d told me that Kobek had made the whole thing up and that I’d actually read a novella about the cutthroat world of 1980s U.K. video gaming, I’d believe you. (The game is very real; also, it looks not unlike a video art installation from someone’s nightmares. Maybe mine.) Kobek goes big with the scope: in telling the story of Soft & Cuddly, he also tells the story of both personal computers and gaming in the early 1980s, with a focus on the U.K.

Despite the big differences in style between the two books, they have one thing in common besides a publisher. In telling the stories of an acclaimed game studio working with intense deadlines (Reber) and how a young programmer created a truly bizarre and disturbing game (Kobek), each book winds up being at least somewhat about the business of manufacturing and distributing video games.

In the case of Soft & Cuddly, the company behind the Spectrum wound up — like many others in similar situations — unable to deal with a market experiencing rapid booms and busts. In the case of Dragon Age II, software giant EA buying BioWare and betting on bigger and bigger outcomes proved disastrous for BioWare’s independence. As Reber writes early in the book, BioWare having employees dedicated to specific games was rare for the industry; over the period covered in her book, readers can see that phenomenon become even more rare.

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Reber succinctly documents shifting labor practices in the gaming industry, which has largely worked out badly for workers. (The experience of BioWare is not unique, sadly.) This cautionary tale manifests in a different way through Kobek’s book, where you’re never far removed from the presence and practices of Margaret Thatcher’s government — not exactly known for its friendliness to organized labor. Perhaps there’s a deeper reason the “ethical consumption is impossible under capitalism” meme prominently features a certain video game mascot. Either way, it begs the question: just how many hit points does an invisible hand have, anyway?

Recent Work

My forthcoming book on Kill List has a cover! (And it’s pretty.) Out December 10 wherever books are sold.

In a feature for Publishers Weekly, I chronicled boutique Blu-ray imprints pairing movies and books. Writing at On the Seawall, I discussed Avigayl Sharp’s Offseason. At Reactor, I reviewed Nick Cutter’s The Dorians and Jedediah Barry’s Kill All Wizards. I wrote about five books out in translation in the month of June for Words Without Borders.

I suspect that at some point in the next 18 months, the majority of the email in my inbox will be from imaginary people asking me to give money to literary services that do not exist. I am trying to maintain a good and jovial approach to this, but it’s also starting to get under my skin. In her excellent newsletter Agents & Books, the estimable Kate McKean titled a recent installment “Your Dream Agent: Who is She?” In my case, my expectations are a lot lower: my dream agent is an actual human being; everything other than that is, as they say, cake.

This week, I received multiple emails that struck me as…strange. Both asked if I was the author of the books Reel and Transitory. (I am! Available wherever books are sold, etc etc.) I replied in the affirmative, in part because, well, sometimes book people can be awkward. I am certainly awkward, especially when reaching out to people I don’t already know.

By the second email, though, it seemed as though something was off. For starters, there was the name of the sender, which was one letter removed from the name of a long-running supporting character in the Marvel superhero universe. This, in turn, led me to the website of something called the Novirra Literary Book Club.

Quoth the Book Club’s website: “Novirra was founded by Nyra Solenne in 2024 with a quiet ambition: to gather, in one slow and luminous place, the readers who still believed in the long sentence.”

Okay, sure. Long sentences are having a moment, after all. I went from there to the Book Club’s “Authors” page and saw Brandon Hobson there. I have met Brandon multiple times and could confirm that the photograph of him there was, in fact, accurate. Perhaps this was, in fact, a legitimate venture.

Then I continued scrolling down the page and the unintentional humor began. Beginning with the Book Club’s entry for Miranda July, who — how best to phrase this — does not look remotely like this.

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Also on the “Authors” page are entries for both Denis Johnson and W.G. Sebald, both of whom are deceased, and both of whose photos are similarly inaccurate.

Perhaps I’m missing the point here; perhaps this is actually all a grand conceptual art piece, and next year I’ll walk into PS1 and see a dedicated record of all of this sprawling across one wall. Maybe these are actually dispatches from a parallel universe, one where W.G. Sebald is alive, female, and writes climate-oriented science fiction. It’s a mystery.

Still, as genuinely weird as all of this is, it’s also depressing. The world already has plenty of reasons to distrust other people and engage in bad-faith readings of correspondence. Things like this, entertaining as they may be, don’t help. We’re isolated enough as it it; the last thing we need is the conviction that a genuine attempt at connection is an AI-fueled scam in disguise.

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Previous adventures in sleuthing can be found here. God, there are going to be more of these, aren’t there.

Émile Zola (translated by Elinor Dorday), La Débâcle

We all have gaps in our reading history. In the first decade of this century, a pair of Slate articles posed this question to a number of lauded writers, whose candid responses made for excellent reading. For me, Émile Zola has been a substantial entry in the “authors I plan on getting to someday” list for most of my adult life. I’d had a copy of his La Débâcle on my to-read shelf for years now, and brought it with me on a recent trip.

This novel follows a group of characters through the end of the Franco-Prussian war and the ensuing collapse in French society. I was not prepared for utterly intense this book was; I’ve tended to associate fiction about the horrors of war with the 20th century and beyond, but this book features several sequences — including one in which a group of starving soldiers begin butchering eating a horse while it’s still alive — that are among the most disturbing I’ve ever encountered in prose.

This novel, as the saying goes, goes hard. When I posted a photo of my copy on Instagram, a friend responded to the effect that it was one of the best novels of war that he’d ever read; having finished it, I feel confident in seconding that assessment. Throughout the novel, Zola emphasizes the experience of everyday people, reserving his disdain for those in positions of power who have placed them in impossible positions. Moments of unspeakable violence and haunting absurdism coexist here; it’s a reminder of just how hellish war can be.

Elsa Morante (translated by Jenny McPhee), Lies and Sorcery

Do I make a habit of bringing massive books with me when I travel? Yes, I do. (That’s also how I came to read The Quincunx, The Adventures of Augie March, and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.) And on the same trip where I began my forays into M. Zola’s oeuvre, I also opened up Elsa Morante’s 775-page Lies and Sorcery.

Morante has some big names in her corner, with Natalia Ginzburg, Italo Calvino, and Elena Ferrante among her admirers. There’s an excellent reason for that: Lies and Sorcery manages to work as both a psychologically rich chamber drama and a haunting generational saga. Our narrator here recounts the complex relationship between her mother, her guardian, and two men often referred to as “the Cousin” and “the Pockface.”

One of the more striking aspects of Lies and Sorcery is how Morante taps into a certain timeless quality. I mean that in the most literal sense: while the action of the book takes place over the course of several decades, there’s little sense of technological or societal changes; instead, it seems to exist in a perpetual present. This may not be a surreal device a la A Little Life; instead, Morante might be illustrating the relatively static nature of Italian society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But it’s an unsettling aspect nonetheless, much as the way this novel’s structure ends on a disquieting note suggesting the full effect that all of this familial drama has had on the book’s narrator.

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Some recent work

Well, I contributed to Publishers Weekly’s recent list of notable books from the U.S.A. In preparation for the World Cup, I wrote about Carlos Labbé’s novel The Murmuration, about a dramatic soccer game as well as psychic powers. I discussed some of May’s books in translation for Words Without Borders. And I reviewed Sarah Gailey’s unsettling novel Make Me Better for Reactor.

On the latest episode of Framed & Bound, Paula Bomer and I chatted about the 2006 drama Even Money. And at Postcards From Komiksoj, I reviewed Joe Ollmann’s excellent collection The Woodchipper.

There’s a good piece of advice I’ve seen shared a lot over the years, and it boils down to a very simple act: if you like a piece of art someone has made, you should tell them you appreciate it. I cannot think of a single writer, artist, or musician who doesn’t appreciate a sincere compliment, and it’s possible that said compliment can make someone’s day or week during an otherwise difficult time.

There’s one big corollary to this, however. Does it involve AI? It sure does.

It began a few days ago, when I received a very nice email purporting to be from an editor at a press behind a number of books I’ve enjoyed in recent years. This email had very nice things to say about one of my books, and expressed an interest in working with me in the future. Basically, it’s the sort of email most writers dream of getting.

There’s an old adage about things being too good to be true that, unfortunately, applies here. The language in the email was reminiscent of the “we would like to promote your book to our reading network” scam emails that I get every couple of weeks, for one thing. The editor’s email was also slightly off: at first glance, the domain looked legitimate, but upon closer inspection, the domain name was the publisher’s name with an “s” added to the end.

Whoever was behind this impersonation had done a few things well, though, including redirecting the domain that they had bought to the actual publisher’s website. A whois search revealed that this domain had been purchased 43 days ago and was hosted by a completely different entity than the genuine article. Red flags all the way down, you might say.

Still, I was morbidly curious and wanted to see where this would all go, so I replied to the account, mentioning that I was working on a few new projects; all things I’ve mentioned on social media, and which are (presumably) already available for public consumption.

My correspondent got back in touch with me and expressed their continued interest. Did I have an agent? they asked. I replied that I did not. They then suggested that I contact someone; again, this looked legitimate until I noticed a slight irregularity in the domain name.

Specifically, the real agent being impersonated has one letter repeated three times in their domain; the address I was sent has the letter repeated twice. In this case, the people behind the scam did not quite do their due diligence well enough; the bogus domain did not redirect to a legitimate website. Poorly done, scammers; poorly done.

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Someone claiming to be the agent did respond to me, asking for more details on my projects. At this point, I decided to stop; my curiosity at precisely how deep this all went was piqued, but I also had no desire to wind up in the literary equivalent of waking up in a bathtub full of ice sans kidneys. I had also, by this point, reached out to someone at the actual press to notify them that someone was impersonating one of their editors; it seemed as good a time as any to stop spending time talking with people who, presumably, were engaged in a very ornate con.

I’ll be honest: it’s disheartening. Would I like to get an actual email from an editor or agent expressing interest in my work? Yes. Is it depressing that the closest I’ve come in a long while is a con artist presumably looking to separate me from my money? Also yes. There are moments when I understand why people fall for scams like this; it’s nice to feel wanted. Writing (or any creative discipline) comes with a lot of rejection wrapped up in it. Sometimes, a kind word is worse than a cruel one when delivered under false pretenses.

Also, I now know way too much about how literary scammers operate, and I’m a little angry about it.

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Cesare Pavese, The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese (translated by R. W. Flint)

Sometimes the internet is good. I was looking for recommendations for books set in or around Turin when a thread on Reddit directed me to the works of Cesare Pavese. I’ll admit to not knowing much about Pavese before cracking into this anthology of four of his novels published by NYRB Classics. Translator R. W. Flint contributes an introduction here that’s also a neat summary of how Pavese’s life and work overlapped with 20th century Italian politics.

Each of the four works collected here — The Beach, The House on the Hill, Among Women Only, and The Devil in the Hills — is terrific. Flint refers to The House on the Hill as Pavese’s “masterpiece,” an observation I can only second. In all of these novels, Pavese demonstrates a precise attention to social hierarchies and details; it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say “imagine an Italian anti-fascist version of Edith Wharton,” but if you enjoy Wharton (or the fiction of Pavese’s peer and friend Natalia Ginzburg), you’ll find much to savor here.

The House on the Hill, though — god, what a book. When the novel opens, the narrator is doing his best to remain alive and unobtrusive during the Second World War. Over the course of the novel, we see his close-knit social circle come undone, as the narrator and his friends’ attempted resistance to the fascism around them becomes harder to maintain and their safety becomes increasingly risky. Pavese’s attention to social dynamics makes the early parts of the novel feel comfortable; the way in which he tears away that comfort and shows a precarious society disintegrating is nothing short of stunning.

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Dennis Potter, Blackeyes

Most of my knowledge of Dennis Potter’s work came from his status as a broadcast television innovator, the man behind works like The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven. I’ll admit that I hadn’t realized that he had made forays into fiction as well until I was browsing the shelves at Black Spring Books one night and saw a couple of Potter’s novels for sale.

Blackeyes is a thoroughly heady work, about a young woman whose writer uncle Kingsley draws on her life for the story of the title character, a gorgeous model. It’s a short novel — the copy I have is 184 pages — and much of the book operates in a haze where what is fact and what is fiction is not entirely clear. This becomes especially relevant when Blackeyes turns up dead. Are we in a situation where a fiction character has crossed over into the real world? Has Jessica’s perception of reality become distorted? Has Kingsley’s?

That’s an intriguing premise all its own, but Potter is after something else as well. In the opening sentence, he informs the reader that “[t]he lovely Jessica” has “murder in her heart.” There’s a reason that he leads with that information; much of Blackeyes can be described as the slow revelation of why Jessica bears such rage within her. It’s a thoroughly bleak novel, and one that may leave readers with a sense of wanting to leave the room burning behind them.

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What I’ve Been Up To

I’m currently looking over page proofs for my book on the Ben Wheatley-directed film Kill List, due out at year’s end from Bloomsbury Academic. Friends, I’m going to be talking about this a lot more as we advance into the second half of the year.

At Reactor, I looked back on the early-90s miniseries Wild Palms, which was a lot of fun to research and write. (It’s also a shame that there is no legal way to stream it as of this writing.) I also reviewed Maile Chapman’s excellent novel The Spoil and discussed six May books in translation; the latter of those was for Words Without Borders. And at Zona Motel, I interviewed Aoife Josie Clements about her excellent novel Persona and her work in music and film.

And in podcast news, there’s a new episode of Framed & Bound out in the world; this time, Arianna Reiche and I talked about 84 Charing Cross Road

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The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria; translated by Ramon Glazov

The Twenty Days of Turin messed with my head the first time I read it. Guess what happened the second time around?

The history of this utterly terrifying novel is fascinating. It was first published in Italy in 1977. Forty years later, Liveright published Ramon Glazov’s English translation; now, almost a decade later, they’ve released a paperback edition with a Jeff VanderMeer forward and a pair of short stories added into the mix. I had plenty to say about this book back in 2017; since then, more of De Maria’s bibliography has been translated into English. I wrote about that a bit, too.

I don’t honestly know how best to classify The Twenty Days of Turin. I’ve seen it described as one of the best books written about Italy’s Years of Lead. In his introduction, VanderMeer provides a few points of comparison, one of which — Michel Bernanos’s The Other Side of the Mountain — I’m reading now. This novel is subtitled “A Report From the End of the Century” and follows a journalist as he attempts to better understand a series of deaths that took place in Turin years before.

De Maria’s book has the skeleton of a procedural, then…at least up until the point that it doesn’t. And what this book does better than almost anything else I’ve read is describing the sense that the world its protagonist believed himself to be a part of no longer exists. The final sequence of this book taps into something truly primal. It is truly one of the most unnerving books I’ve ever experienced.

The Monroe Girls by Antoine Volodine; translated by Alyson Waters

Speaking of writers I first wrote about in 2017! The last few years have seen an uptick in the number of books made available in translation by the writer best known as Antoine Volodine; besides this one, the University of Minnesota Press has several more either recently published or in the works. That’s a good thing. It’s never a bad time to read Volodine’s hallucinatory stories of storytelling and altered perceptions in authoritarian states, but right about now is a better time than most.

In broad strokes, The Monroe Girls is about an attempt to counteract a revolution that has turned into something sterile and authoritarian. This novel abounds with double agents and shifting loyalties, and in those respects it will be familiar to readers with a penchant for the dystopian. The Monroe Girls is a lot stranger than that, however: the titular characters are a kind of paramilitary force that emerge from an afterlife to wreak havoc in the world of the living.

Even that, though, doesn’t quite get at the way that this book handles the line between the living and the dead. Dying doesn’t seem to take characters off the board here; it adds to the dreamlike qualities of the narrative. There’s also the matter of Breton, a man whose alienation is so profound that appears to have developed a second, detached personality. This is a book in which reality itself seems broken, like a metaphysical remake of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. And as strange as all of that may sound, it’s also worth stating that this is probably one of Volodine’s more accessible books — so if you’re looking for a window into their bibliography, this makes a good starting point.

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Hello, and thanks for reading. I’m the author of five books: the novels In the Sight, Ex-Members, and Reel; the story collection Transitory; and Political Sign, a work of nonfiction. Next up: a book about the film Kill List, due out later this year.

First thing first: yes, that cover is utterly terrifying. It’s by Nick Bantock, in his pre-Griffin & Sabine days. As Will Errickson notes in his introduction, this collection focuses on Tuttle’s more overly horrific work — something that the opening story, “Bug House,” makes clear. This story and the one that follows, “Dollburger,” are built around particularly striking images, unnerving enough to send a chill down one’s spine.

If that was all Tuttle was up to here, that would be fine; the first story is a kind of haunted house tale that reveals itself to be something very different, while the two stories that follow depict innocent characters meeting unsettling fates. As you make your way into the collection, though, another side of Tuttle’s work comes to the foreground: a sense of mystery and atmosphere.

Some of this comes from Tuttle knowing how to meticulously cultivate a slow-burning narrative. “The Other Mother” shares an interest in myth and folklore with her novel The Mysteries, but it also contains a thread of narrative ambiguity. Its protagonist Sara sees a figure that seems archaic, with an interest in her children. Precisely what that interest is doesn’t become clear until the conclusion, which features a devastating moment of revelation.

For me, the high point of the book was “Flying to Byzantium,” about Sheila, an ambitious writer who visits a science fiction convention in a small Texas town. She’s the guest of honor there, but upon her arrival, things seem somehow wrong — beginning with the odd dynamic between the two women who meet her at the airport, Victoria and Grace, and escalating from there.

Just shy of a decade ago, I wrote about Rachel Ingalls’s novella “Friends in the Country,” a notable example of a strain of uncanny fiction where manners and socializing have turned sinister. “Flying to Byzantium” absolutely falls into this realm: as Sheila visits a place that seems both familiar and utterly alien, her own ambitions and memories become increasingly menacing. There’s a kind of dream logic to this story, with each new wrinkle revealing more and more of Sheila’s psyche.

What makes this story particularly notable is the character of Sheila herself. Though she’s in some form of peril, she’s also a deeply flawed protagonist — one who saw writing as a means to an end rather than a rewarding act all its own. It’s notable that, of these stories, this is the one that seems the most moralizing — but Sheila’s crime, as it were, is not a social transgression but instead the squandering of what seems to be genuine skill at her craft. It’s a haunting trip in a book full of them.

Hello, and thanks for reading. I’m the author of five books: the novels In the Sight, Ex-Members, and Reel; the story collection Transitory; and Political Sign, a work of nonfiction. Next up: a book about the film Kill List, due out later this year.

I’m going to pin this on Lydia Davis’s blurb, who referred to the “several overlapping tales” found in Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter. Either way, I read it — thinking maybe I was getting a novel in stories — and left the experience floored. For a few reasons, actually.

One of those reasons is best articulated by Ben Lerner’s introduction, which The New Yorker published in 2019. Lerner refers to Waldrop’s practice of using “destabilizing section headings” throughout the book, which both interrupt the flow and redirect it. I haven’t seen this technique used to this effect ever before, really, which lent a playful element to the whole book.

That’s especially notable, because the themes Waldrop is pursuing here are anything but playful: lies within a family; adultery; the loss of religious faith; and, to top that all off, the rise of fascism. This is a novel largely about events taking place in Germany between the wars, narrated from several decades later and one continent away.

I have a fondness for novels that create characters by suggestion and implication, and that’s one of the things Waldrop does here: the narrator is recounting this story to her estranged sister, and it’s through these references that the post-war iteration of the family begins to come into focus, even as Waldrop focuses much of the temporal narrative on 1920s Bayreuth.

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At the center of this novel is a marriage and a friendship marred by infidelity: Frederika’s affair with her husband Josef’s friend and fellow World War I veteran Franz. Franz is Jewish; Frederika and Josef are not, and if you think that the timing of this affair and its aftermath might take on grimmer tones due to the timing, you’d be absolutely correct.

If this was the only story Waldrop was telling, it would be powerful enough. But in telling the story of Frederika and Josef’s children and how they have reacted to both the flaws in their parents’ marriage and Germany’s descent into fascism, Waldrop refracts that core tension in several ways. That she is able to do this through implication, creating hints of decades-long lives through inference and suggestion, is one of several elements of this novel that make its craft particularly potent.

But it’s also memorable for its potent use of timing and language. The end of this book hits especially hard, the combination of narrator’s voice and historical context dovetailing in devastating fashion. Waldrop’s novel of an imperfect marriage, paradoxically, achieves a perfect marriage of form and content. It’s stunning work.

On Thursday, the National Book Critics Circle Awards for publishing year 2025 took place. Publishers Weekly has an excellent write-up of the event, which I highly recommend checking out. I should stress that I am not at all objective here: this is my second year on the NBCC board, and I’m extraordinarily proud of the work we did.

My memories of last year’s award ceremony are a little hazy for one reason: it turns out I was coming down with COVID-19 that week, which left me borderline delirious at the time. At this year’s ceremony and finalist reading, I noticed a couple of themes coming into focus that weren’t necessarily present as the long lists, and then the short lists, came together.

One of these was a general resistance to AI, and to unrestrained technology in general. Most notably, this came via Karen Hao’s win in the Nonfiction category for her book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI — but it was also present in Liz Pelly’s John Leonard Prize-nominated Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, which critiques Spotify’s approach to the music industry and its business practices. Quinn Slobodian was also critical of the tech world and companies that played fast and loose with copyright law when he gave his acceptance speech for Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, which won for Criticism.

Another recurring motif, at least in the acceptance speeches, involved the amount of time several of these books took to come to fruition. In accepting the Leonard Prize for Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs shared that the book had been twenty years in the making. Kevin Young discussed the many years it took for Night Watch to be written, and how the pandemic had prompted him to believe this was the appropriate time for it. And Alex Green, in accepting the award for Biography for A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled, contrasted his belief of a decade ago that he wasn’t writing a biography of Fernald with the reality that he had done exactly that.

There’s almost certainly more analysis to do here, though I’m probably too close to the process to be the one doing it. Chad W. Post has done some excellent deep dives into literary awards, as has Alex Shephard; I’ve even engaged in a bit of it myself, in my pre-NBCC board days. But this year’s award cycle has also been a quiet sort of revelation for me: that awards as just as interesting to me from the inside as they’ve been as an observer.

I’m back from this year’s AWP, which was an excellent time. And I have brief thoughts on three books with one big element in common.

William Melvin Kelley, A Drop of Patience

Joe McPhee as told to Mike Faloon, Straight Up, Without Wings: the Musical Flight of Joe McPhee

Rupert Thomson, Barcelona Dreaming

Sometime after its publication in early 2018, I read Kathryn Schulz’s excellent New Yorker article on the works of William Melvin Kelley; later that year, on a visit to Edinburgh, I picked up a copy of Kelley’s excellent novel A Different Drummer. I’d always intended to read more of Kelley’s work, and Anchor’s new editions of his bibliography gave me the chance to do exactly that.

A Drop of Patience is, essentially, a character study of a brilliant jazz musician, Ludlow Washington. Besides his talent as a musician, Ludlow is blind; one of the subtly understated aspects of Kelley’s prose is the way that he ushers the reader into Ludlow’s perspective. In many a novel, physical descriptions of characters frequently appear; in Kelley’s use of language, he focuses instead on voices and demeanors. It’s a restrained but effective way of building empathy for Ludlow, whose life as a Black man in the U.S. in the mid-20th century is fraught in many ways, but who is also capable of mercurial behavior towards others.

Brief flashes of prose suggest a time after many of the novel’s events when Ludlow is recognized for his abilities as a musician. The tormented jazz musician can easily become a cliched character; Kelley avoids that here while also evoking both Ludlow’s perceptions and his music through a precise use of language. It’s a quietly stunning feat.

I’m not sure when I first encountered Joe McPhee’s music, though I’ve had Atavistic Records’ edition of his album Nation Time in my collection for ages now. (I’m guessing it has to do with being a reader and occasional contributor to the early-2000s publication Copper Press, but I could be wrong.) McPhee’s collaborator on the book Straight Up, Without Wings: the Musical Flight of Joe McPhee is the writer Mike Faloon, who - full disclosure - is a friend.

McPhee’s book is a fantastic chronicle of a long life in music; one of the details that comes from reading it is a sense of just how he can zero in on specific sounds, sometimes evoking them using his own music and sometimes incorporating them into his work. There are also plenty of appearances from other notable artists, including Cecil Taylor, Pauline Oliveros, and Rachel Pollack. (Plus contributions by both Fred Moten and Moor Mother.) It’s a memorable guide to one musician’s artistic influence and evolution - and a book that should inspire many a deep dive into its author’s discography.

There’s a very different sort of jazz musician to be found in the pages of Rupert Thomson’s Barcelona Dreaming. Everything I’ve read from Thomson is vastly different from what’s come before it, a quality that he shares with McPhee and Kelley. “The King of Castelldefels” is this novel’s middle section; each of the book’s three parts shows the titular city from the viewpoint of a different character. Ignacio “Nacho” Gomez Cabrera is the narrator of this section, and what ultimately rises to the surface is a sense of squandered potential.

Nacho is an enthusiastic musician but one whose habits are uneven. We meet him in dissolute middle age; to say that he isn’t an entirely reliable narrator of his own life is clear from the outset. But his enthusiasm for jazz, including the music of Keith Jarrett, is clear, and there’s a sense that his life might have been very different had he pursued his passion earlier on. (Alternately, it’s also possible that his appetites might have undone him sooner.) It’s an interesting route Thomson takes here, providing a haunted look at the road not taken by showing us its inverse. You could probably write a song about it.

In interviews, Verbinski has discussed how Sam Rockwell’s character in Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die is light-years removed from who you’d expect to be the lead in a science fiction action movie. I’m a fan of that approach; one of the things I like about Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin is the way that it’s centered around a man who has no business being at the epicenter of a story of international intrigue. A Cure for Wellness begins with a long sequence establishing a high-powered executive in a finance company - only for him to drop dead of a massive heart attack.

That’s where Lockhart (Dale DeHaan) enters the story: he’s promoted to replace the dead man, and is also tasked with retrieving the head of the company, who has settled in in a luxury spa in Switzerland. Notably, Lockhart is not a traditional hero: we learn that he is an amoral finance bro in the first scene where we meet him, and in subsequent scenes we also learn that he’s been embezzling. The executives above him aren’t appalled by this; instead, they’re disappointed that he didn’t do a better job with it.

And so off Lockhart goes to Switzerland, and when he arrives at the castle where the spa is situated, he quickly demonstrates an unparalleled degree of entitlement and Ugly American-ness. It’s worth stating here that the film does reveal a fairly harrowing backstory for him; there’s a sense that he’s adopted this utterly ruthless personality as a coping mechanism.

When he finally meets the absent CEO, the older man is absolutely steadfast in his conviction that he will not return with his young employee. He’s become convinced that the work that he was involved with is actively harmful, and he wants nothing to do with it. He also admits to feeling guilt over his role in Lockhart’s father’s death by suicide - an act that the young Lockhart watched happen. And, look, this is the thing: nothing we’ve seen in the film so far suggests that the older man is wrong. Pretty much every high-ranking employee of this company we’ve seen is amoral at best and actively venal at worst. In other words, this criticism lands because it’s true.

But if you think that there’s something amiss about a Master of the Universe type having an epiphany while at an absurdly luxurious Alpine resort that presumably costs an absurd amount to visit, well, you’re entirely correct. As Lockhart learns more about the sanatorium, he finds evidence that something sinister is afoot here, possibly involving eels, and definitely involving the head of the operation, Dr. Heinreich Volmer (Jason Isaacs).

[Major spoilers follow]

The doctor, it transpires, has been creating a bizarre concoction involving mineral water and eels that effectively halts aging. It turns out that he is the nobleman with a penchant for incest whose medical experiments led to an uprising against him more than a century earlier, and the young woman in his care (Mia Goth) is actually his daughter, who he plans to wed. It’s all very Aguirre, the Wrath of God with proto-fascism thrown into the mix.

It would have been very easy for this film to go an easier route: to undermine the CEO’s epiphany or portray the doctor as a kind of proto-class warrior. Instead, Lockhart winds up in a situation where there are no good options except to escape the entire operation - and, by film’s end, that’s exactly what’s happened, with DeHaan and Goth riding a bicycle away from both the burning castle and the finance executives who are utterly dumbfounded as to what’s going on.

To watch this in 2026 also left me viewing the film as a kind of parable for the current state of conservative politics in the U.S. Lockhart never discusses politics on screen, but it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that he’d be a reliably Republican voter. And what do his choices end up being? On one hand, there’s the faux-populism espoused by the CEO, who criticizes the industry in which he made his fortune but doesn’t seem to be remotely concerned with ameliorating its effects on society. On the other, there’s the doctor and his work, which now plays like a satire of, well, wellness culture - and has at its center a proto-Nazi with a eugenicist bent.

At a time in American politics where both right-wing populism and the “MAHA” movement are both ascendant, you don’t have to look too hard to see aspects of both present in this film. And while I wouldn’t call A Cure for Wellness an overtly political film, its critique nonetheless stings - even more than it did upon this film’s initial release.

I heard you like capsule reviews? Here are some capsule reviews.

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

Years ago, I picked up an early novel by Robert Jackson Bennett after seeing plenty of praise for his fiction. The book turned out to not quite be my thing — not bad, but also in the “didn’t quite click for me” camp. But I’d been seeing (and reading) plenty of good things about his work since then, and The Tainted Cup won a boatload of awards (and was nominated for a boatload more), so I picked up a copy and quickly found myself unable to put it down.

There’s a lot that Bennett does right here. This is both a fantasy novel and a mystery novel. Finding a balance between these two genres isn’t easy, but I’ll be damned if the solution to the mystery here isn’t eminently satisfying even as the fantastical elements also feel fresh. Here, the fantastical elements involve bodily enhancements, which can increase strength or give someone (such as this novel’s protagonist) flawless memory. There’s also the matter of giant sea walls to keep massive beasts from rampaging through the empire where this book is set. Bennett includes a passing reference to what sexual taboos in this society look like; again, it’s a way that this world feels fleshed-out rather than like, say, medieval history with some of the names changed.

The Tainted Cup is the first book in a trilogy, and there are definitely hints of a larger storyline that will play out on a grander scale. But one of the other things that impressed me here was just how self-contained it felt; in other words, I wasn’t left with the feeling that I was going to have to reserve judgement on this until I’d finished several other books. I enjoyed this immensely, and I’m eager to read what Bennett does with these characters next.

Root Rot by Saskia Nislow

The older I get, the more I find myself puzzled by certain family memories. On both sides, I come from a fairly small family: each of my parents has one sibling, and each of them have two children. But there are some memories I have — including some of visiting my great-aunt in Queens when I was young — where I know that certain family members were there, but I have no idea who they actually were. I can remember the sense of a crowded living room, and I can remember presences there, but I have no idea who some of them were.

Basically, imagine that sensation but as a horror novel and you have a sense of what’s happening with Root Rot. Saskia Nislow recounts a large family gathering; there’s something of a collective narrative voice and a sense of describing characters by their traits rather than by names. It all gives the sense of memories that are slowly curdling into something strange and unsettling. Also, there are weird beings living in the trees and plants that behave like human beings. It’s the kind of work that is well-suited to the short novel/novella form: it’s long enough for its hypnotic qualities to come to the forefront, but not so long that its ambiguity becomes something other than an asset.

Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio

I knew next to nothing about this book — the first in the seven-book The Sun Eater cycle — before reading it, other than two things: it’s a big deal on TikTok and a writer friend with solid taste had very good things to say about it. A few days after that conversation, a copy of this book showed up in my mail, complete with a new introduction by its author.

That introduction gave me a very interesting window into this book. Ruocchio discussed his passion for science fiction and the writers whose work he admired and was influenced by. Specifically, he pointed to Frank Herbert’s Dune books — and, with that in mind, I could see where Ruocchio had drawn inspiration. What was most interesting about this, though, is that he didn’t draw inspiration where I would have expected: there are no giant worms or millennia-long genetics programs here.

Instead, if there’s an element of Dune that Empire of Silence most echoes, it’s in the political intrigue — specifically, the sense of political intrigue among various wealthy families rivaling one another for power in a distant future. I’m generally up for a good use of palace intrigue — even space palace intrigue — and there’s plenty of that to be found here. Ruocchio’s influences are often clear, but he’s doing interesting things with them, and the result is something that still feels fresh.

My introduction to Elizabeth Taylor came via this bit of late-December reading: her 1971 novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. The novel’s title tells you exactly what you’re getting: it’s about an aging woman (the titular Mrs Palfrey) who moves into a hotel (the titular Claremont) and attempts to sort out her place in the world.

It is often a thoroughly bleak book. Mrs Palfrey’s relationship to her family is chilly, and her grandson appears to have no use for her whatsoever. Instead, she befriends Ludo, a young writer. It’s in their bond that I began to understand why a lot of writer friends are Taylor devotees. There is genuine affection between the two characters, but each also gains something from it: Ludo draws upon their meetings for his fiction, while Mrs Palfrey enlists Ludo as a stand-in for her grandson to gain some social cachet with the other residents of the hotel.

This is a book about people nearing the ends of their lives, and one of the questions Taylor addresses in its pages is how precisely one does that. Several residents of the hotel spend plenty of time arguing about how much better things were in the past; Mrs Palfrey’s search for something other than that makes her an unlikely existential hero, but also a thoroughly compelling one.

As for Muriel Spark, this year’s intended Christmas Eve reading was her 1979 novel Territorial Rights. This novel has a lot of engaging elements: a Venetian setting, the hints of some characters’ connections to fascism, and a subplot involving a private detective agency. The novel begins with two characters set to meet — one younger man, Robert Leaver, and one older man, Robert Curran, who prefers to go by his surname. Robert has an interest in art history; Curran is well-positioned to help Robert achieve his goals. Are we about to witness a nuanced power struggle in the Patricia Highsmith mode?

Not really, because halfway through the novel, one of its main characters abruptly exits the narrative. This isn’t an avant-garde gesture; that disappearance becomes the focal point of the novel. But it isn’t remotely where you’d expect this book to go; what had seemed to be the central relationship and central conflict instead fragments into a number of interconnected clashes. It’s a memorable immersion in its Venetian setting — but it’s also a gripping novel that rarely goes where you might expect, and it’s a stronger book for it.

Here we were, 76 miles from the end of the Parkway. A clear night on Christmas Eve. Washburn told me it was important to look for them at the right time. “If no one was watching, they’d come out on the regular,” he said. “But people are always watching, eyes craned up to the skies. Too many and it’s…what’s the phrase. Tipping point.” It wasn’t anything like stargazing, he explained. It was more of a seance, us earthbound and the shapes above.

“We look up,” Washburn said once, early in this process, and I didn’t understand what he meant until weeks later; until months later; until years later. I’d met Washburn because a mutual friend had told me he could show me things, and so began my apprenticeship, which stumbled over the better part of the decade that followed.

Washburn said that the phenomenon we were there to observe had something to do with methods of perception, he said it was maybe to do with quantum physics or the air quality in this part of the state. Could’ve been a curse, could’ve been a blessing. “A miracle?” I asked him and he huffed. “Miracles have reasons,” he said. “I don’t see reasons here.” And I said to Washburn, we’re standing here on Christmas Eve, isn’t that reason enough?

The parking lot of the Forked River rest stop — it was still Forked River then, the powers that be hadn’t yet renamed it — was where we stood. It was a cold night; it always was.

“The thing you have to understand is that these aren’t ghosts of people,” he said. “They’re like the memories of an object, or at least that’s how I understand them.” How do you know that, I asked him. “I don’t. I have no way of getting up there to see them. Maybe it’s some pilot, long dead and feeling unrest, who’s manifested the entire thing. But it’s my sense of the things. The ghost of the thing, not the thing itself.” He sipped from his flask and I abstained. “Hindenberg was the last one through, but there were plenty before it,” he said.

We’d come out here seven years running, and every time there’d been nothing. I was getting too old to be an apprentice and Washburn was talking about cataracts more and more; the clear sky and the clouded sky were blurring together for him. It was a question, open and unspoken, as to whether he’d even be able to see the ships if they came next year. For now, this was it; this was all we could hope for.

I blinked and suddenly the sky above me was full, these massive translucent forms moving in front of the clouds and revealing the clouds as they went. I tapped Washburn’s arm and pointed up. He looked up and paused and said, “This is a good crop” after a little while. And I just stood there and watched, a fleet of spectral airships crossing the sky and headed west, no terrestrial destination in mind. Ovals hundreds of feet long, fins at the back, passenger compartments below. Dozens of them, far more than there ever had been in life. I was at a loss as to where they were from, if they weren’t the memories of airships that had once flown through these skies. They were simply there; a reason, after all that, to be out here on a cold night watching the sky at a rest stop in south Jersey.

You can tell a story set in the distant future or in a fantasy world using virtually any medium imaginable, but prose has one advantage over many of its compatriots: writers don’t have to worry about disappointing visual effects. Director Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, a 1957 adaptation of M.R. James’s story “Casting the Runes,” about the diabolical effects of a lethal curse. Just what was carrying out those lethal acts was made far more explicit in the film, against the wishes of the director.

In other words: there’s a reason why the film is called Night of the Demon, and it has to do with a visual effect that turns up several times in the film. According to documents from the American Film Institute, Tourneur was opposed to this aspect of the film.

“The scenes in which you really see the demon were shot without me. All except one. I shot the sequence in the woods where Dana Andrews is chased by a sort of cloud. This technique should have been used for other sequences. The audience should never have completely seen the demon.”

The director blamed the film’s producer for adding the demon, which he referred to as “that horrible thing.”

The gulf between what’s possible on the page and on the screen can also be reflected in what hasn’t been adapted. Consider H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, a genre classic that has resisted cinematic adaptation thus far, despite the interest of high-profile filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro. It isn’t hard to see why this has eluded easy adaptation: much of Lovecraft’s work involves indescribable horrors that are outside of the boundaries of human perception. It’s one thing to write that on the page; it’s another to come up with an onscreen translation for that that doesn’t look ridiculous.

Which brings us to the question of animation.

There’s been no shortage of high-profile science fiction and fantasy films told using animation: KPop Demon Hunters, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, and the Spider-Verse films all come to mind. Here, I’ll be looking at three animated films that adapted existing novels: writer/director Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 Howl’s Moving Castle, adapting the novel by Diana Wynne Jones; writer/director Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, adapting the novel by Philip K. Dick; and writer/director Ari Folman’s The Congress, adapting Stanisław Lem’s novel The Futurological Congress. Each of these three films uses animation in a very different way; each one also demonstrates different strengths when it comes to telling these particular stories though an animated medium.

Arguably the most faithful of the three adaptations is Linklater’s. The film and novel both tell the story of one Bob Arctor, an undercover drug enforcement agent whose mind has splintered, meaning that the man he’s currently investigating is himself. Linklater and his collaborators told the story using rotoscoping, the same technique Linklater had used in his earlier Waking Life and would go on to use in his 2022 film Apollo 10 ½.

For me, the greatest strength of this decision comes from the way that it allows Linklater to depict the “scramble suits” that Arctor and his colleagues wear to disguise their identities. Here’s a passage from the novel explaining how they work:

‘This man,’ the host declared, ‘whom we will call Fred, because this is the code name under which he reports the information he gathers, once within the scramble suit, cannot be identified by voice, or by even technological voiceprint, or by appearance. He looks, does he not, like a vague blur and nothing more? Am I right?’ He let loose a great smile. His audience, appreciating that this was indeed funny, did a little smiling on their own.

The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell Laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers. He had, a few years ago, been experimenting with disinhibiting substances affecting neural tissue, and one night, having administered to himself an IV injection considered safe and mildly euphoric, had experienced a disastrous drop in the GABA fluid of his brain. Subjectively, he had then witnessed lurid phosphene activity projected on the far wall of his bedroom, a frantically progressing montage of what, at the time, he imagined to be modern-day abstract paintings.

For his part, Linklater has stated that he always envisioned this adaptation as an animated one - though that led to some delays in funding. Here’s how he described the process to the Austin Chronicle in 2006:

“I had it in mind as animated from the get-go. But I still had to kind of fight the fight, which is probably one of the reasons the film didn’t happen for two years after I wrote it. The word came down from above that adults don’t really go to animated movies. And this is obviously not a kids’ film. So it kind of lingered in the background for a while. It wasn’t until the actors came aboard and we kept our budget low that it began to happen.”

There’s an elegiac quality to the surreal visuals as well. Having a world that drifts, in its animation, from realistic to bizarre - at one point, Arctor hallucinates one of his housemates turning into a gigantic insect - helps to bolster the novel’s sense of a constantly fluctuating reality. There are times when, watching A Scanner Darkly, you might wonder why this wasn’t told more conventionally - but as you get further into Bob Arctor’s shattered mind, the reasons for that become far more understandable.

The Diana Wynne Jones novel that Hayao Miyazaki adapted for the screen was published in 1986, and was followed by several other books set in the same world. Both the novel and the film tell the story of Sophie, a young woman cursed by the Witch of the Waste, who takes refuge in the home of a mercurial wizard named Howl. This is how the castle that gives the novel its title is described in the book:

“So when, a few months after that, a tall black castle suddenly appeared on the hills above Market Chipping, blowing clouds of black smoke from its four tall, thin turrets, everybody was fairly sure that the Witch had moved out of the Waste again and was about to terrorize the country the way she used to fifty years ago. People got very scared indeed. Nobody went out alone, particularly at night. What made it all the scarier was that the castle did not stay in the same place. Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest, sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north. You could see it actually moving sometimes, with smoke pouring out from the turrets in dirty gray gusts. For a while everyone was certain that the castle would come right down into the valley before long, and the Mayor talked of sending to the King for help.”

Miyazaki’s adaptation has a more traditionally animated approach than Linklater’s film. It abounds with lush landscapes, bizarre non-human characters, and strange magic. Certain scenes from the film play like direct adaptations of the novel. Other elements, such as the role of a character named Suliman, are wildly different. The novel’s more pastoral setting and the idea that Howl is actually from modern Wales are not present in the film; instead, the world where Howl and Sophie live is more, shall we say, steampunk.

And there’s also the matter of war. Much of the film involves Howl’s efforts to contain a war taking place between two neighboring kingdoms, an effort that puts his life at risk and threatens him with permanent transformation into a bird-like creature. This element is new to the film and, as its director pointed out in an interview with Newsweek, it had to do with the then-ongoing war in Iraq. When asked about his previous film Spirited Away winning an Oscar, Miyazaki addressed the elephant in the room:

“Actually, your country had just started the war against Iraq, and I had a great deal of rage about that. So I felt some hesitation about the award. In fact, I had just started to make Howl’s Moving Castle, so the film is profoundly affected by the war in Iraq.”

It’s not hard to figure this out; an anti-war ethos runs throughout Howl’s Moving Castle. Does it mesh seamlessly with Jones’s original novel? As someone familiar with both, it can be a bit jarring at first - but the novel has a fairly anti-authoritarian element to it, and the horror that both Sophie and Howl feel at the leaders who put their people at risk emerges organically from that.

Of the three films discussed here, The Congress is both the loosest adaptation and the most unique in its use of animation. Only about half of the film is animated, for starters; writer-director Ari Folman has taken the plot of Lem’s novel The Futurological Congress and added a very different element: namely, a look at aging and technology in the film industry.

Lem’s novel is set at, well, The Futurological Congress, an event taking place that year in Costa Rica. The attendees are overwhelmed with psychedelic drugs, making the question of what is real and what is a hallucination increasingly difficult to pin down. Here’s how Ezra Glinter described the world of the novel in a 2014 piece for The Paris Review:

“Rather than solving its problems, humanity learns to mask them using comically sophisticated pharmaceuticals. In the “psychemized” future, you can take drugs like “gospelcredendium” to have a religious experience, and “equaniminine” to dispel it. Books are no longer read but eaten; they can be bought at the psychedeli, a kind of one-stop psychem superstore.”

And here’s a selection of the novel as narrator Ijon Tichy describes the growing chaos there as the hotel where the congress is taking place comes under attack:

“Professor Trottelreiner was, as luck would have it, a specialist in the field of psychotropic pharmacology, and he cautioned me not to use the gas mask under any circumstance, as it would cease to operate at sufficiently high concentrations of aerosol; this would then give rise to the so-called phenomenon of filter overload, and in an instant one could inhale a much heavier dose than if one breathed the air without the benefit of a mask. The only sure protection, he said, anticipating my question, would be a separate oxygen supply; so we went to the hotel desk, managed to catch one receptionist still on duty and found, with his assistance, a storeroom full of fire-fighting equipment, including plenty of oxygen masks: Draeger make, with closed circulation. Thus accoutered, the Professor and I returned to the street, just in time to hear the dreadful, ear-splitting whistle that announced the arrival of the first planes. As everyone knows, the Hilton was accidentally bombed with LTN minutes after the air raid commenced; the consequences of that error were disastrous.”

Among the big differences between Lem’s novel and Folman’s adaptation is who the protagonist is. As opposed to Ijon Tichy, Folman’s film is centered around Robin Wright, playing a version of herself. The first half of the film is set in the present day and centers around Wright’s agent and a studio executive trying to convince her to be scanned, so that an electronic version of her can go on acting forever; the second half, set twenty years later, finds Wright visiting a massive hotel where an event familiar to readers of Lem’s novel is taking place so that she can renew her contract.

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In an interview with Craig Skinner, Folman explained what drew him to the novel in the first place:

“The book is completely psychedelic. And I think it’s such a cinematic book, extremely cinematic. For me it was a gift that I could explore. Obviously when I first read this novel, when I was sixteen years old, I was attracted to it solely because of the psychedelic part. But when I grew older I understood all the layers of it. For making this kind of animation – going backwards in time – the drugs and the psychedelic part, this is I think every director’s dream.”

The idea of losing oneself in time is shared by both versions of this story, though in the film that sense of loss is bolstered by Wright’s character’s love for her son and her attempts to find a treatment for a degenerative condition he has been diagnosed with. Much of The Congress also has plenty to say about aging in the film industry; it would make for a fascinating double bill with The Substance, for instance.

The Congress feels prescient in other ways as well, notably in the questions it raises about how advances in technology will affect storytelling, and what it might mean to have recycled screen icons delivering “performances” that they were never on set for. It’s telling that the brief scenes of computer-generated films in this film’s universe are, by and large, terrible.

The Congress takes some of the biggest risks of these three animated features, both in terms of its storytelling and its deviations from its source material. I’m not sure all of them entirely work, but there’s a bravery in how Forman and his collaborators pulled it off.

This might be the beginning of a recurring feature where I write about, well, recent cultural experiences I’ve had.

Octet at Hudson Valley Shakespeare

I probably have an essay in me on my conflicted relationship with musicals. For a long time, that translated into me being Not a Musicals Guy. That wall has gradually broken down, due in part to John Doyle’s production of Company and in part due to John M. Chu’s adaptation of In the Heights. A recommendation on a Discord prompted me to drive an hour north of the city to see a production of writer/composer Dave Malloy’s Octet. It may have been the most moving artistic experience I’ve had all year.

Octet is structured as a support group meeting for internet addicts. While it isn’t entirely a capella, the instrumentation is relatively minimal: some percussion operated by the players, as well as pitch pipes. And there’s a definite sense of Malloy pushing himself to see just how far he can take this constraint, which means both elements of sacred singing and one moment in which the cast played their pitch pipes in harmony, creating a hazy drone that wouldn’t have been out of place on a mid-00s Kranky release. Absolutely stunning stuff throughout, to the point where the penultimate number “Beautiful” left me as, I believe the technical term is “a soppy mess.”

The Waterboys at The Basie Center

Somewhere in the last few years I became a Waterboys fan. This is somewhat strange because “Fisherman’s Blues,” one of their most recognizable songs, is relatively low on my list of favorite songs of theirs. But there’s something about the group’s deep dives into their own archive that have made for some fascinating collections of music lately.

So I went to see them near my hometown, slightly wondering if Bruce Springsteen (who appeared on their recent album Life, Death and Dennis Hopper) would put in an appearance. (He didn’t.) But the full set was a lot of fun; the band was tight and the set list balanced old and new songs. That they encored with a cover of “Purple Rain” was unexpected, though given that Prince had been known to cover “The Whole of the Moon,” it felt somehow full circle.

Outlaw Music Festival at PNC Bank Arts Center

The first adult concert I attended was at the Arts Center, albeit during a time when it was still the Garden State Arts Center. (The lineup: Duran Duran with guest Sananda Maitreya.) I was back there for the first time in 30 years for the Outlaw Music Festival; I’d never seen Bob Dylan or Willie Nelson live before, and it seemed like a good place to see two pretty iconic artists.

The fact that Waxahatchee was on the bill didn’t hurt, either. (The last time I saw them before this was 285 Kent, and I’d be hard-pressed to think of two more different venues.) It was nice to hear “Right Back to It” get a cheer from the audience; Sheryl Crow, who followed them, played a pretty wide-ranging set to an appreciative crowd.

Dylan and band took the stage shrouded in darkness, and kicked things off with a taut version of “Masters of War.” His set covered a lot of ground, and the band’s version of “Love Sick” was especially bracing. I also realized that as much time has passed between the release of Time Out of Mind and today as there was between the releases of Nashville Skyline and Time Out of Mind. And Nelson’s set, despite some uneven mixing to start things out, was also a fine overview of his career backed by a skilled group of musicians. That he’s 92 years old makes it all the more impressive.

Cosmic Tones Research Trio at Public Records

This one was an impulse buy. I tend to enjoy most things Mississippi Records releases, so the fact that they were sponsoring this with the digital music company Qobuz piqued my interest. I’ve liked what I’ve heard from this trio on record, and they were able to tap into a similar strain of precise melody in a live setting. For my money, the moments that stood out the most were when the trio veered into an expansive mood, sometimes with improvisation and sometimes with sung vocals.

Their closer, in which they asked the audience to create a tone and then played atop that, was like nothing I’ve experienced before, and was hopeful and cathartic at the same time.