This week, we bring you reviews from four of our issue no. 240 contributors.

I went to Johannesburg in 2013, I don’t know why I’m telling you about it now. Maybe because lockdown is a kind of segregation, where you see only the people you live with. Dilip picked me up at the airport. Driving into town, he left a car’s length between his Toyota and the car in front. I noticed other vehicles doing the same. We don’t want to be carjacked, he said, they box you in and smash the windshield. The seminar began the next day, and I was at my seat at 9 A.M., jet-lagged and medicated. I nodded off during Indian Writing in English: An Introduction. Later, I vomited in the staff restroom, left the university building, and went toward the center of the city. In the wide shade of an overpass, I walked into a smell of barbecue meat that would stay in my clothes all day. There were people drinking beer, blasting cassettes, selling fruit and cooked food from tarps spread on the ground. In the car Dilip had said apartheid was a thing of the past, but wherever I went I saw people segregated by habit. The days passed so slowly that it felt like a long season, like summer on the equator. I saw people in groups, some kind of shutdown in their eyes. I saw a man kneeling in the middle of a sidewalk. Why we got to go out there? he wailed. Why? I had no answer for him. At the Apartheid Museum, the random ticket generator classified me correctly among the NIE-BLANKES | NON-WHITES, and I entered through the non-white gate. The museum was designed to provoke. Of the exhibitions, documents, photographs, and pieces of film footage I saw there, only the installation Journeys stays with me now, a decade later. In 1886, when gold was discovered in Johannesburg, migrants came to the city from every part of the world. To prevent the mixing of races, segregation was introduced in both the mines and the city. Journeys is a series of life-size figures imprinted on panels and placed along a long, sunlit walkway. These are images of the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that first wave of migrants. By walking among these people of all races, something you have done countless times in the cities of the world, you are part of a subversive tide of art and history, an intermingling, the very thing apartheid was created to prevent.

—Jeet Thayil, author of “Dinner with Rene Ricard”

“In more than one language the words for love and suffering are the same,” observes the narrator of Sigrid Nunez’s debut novel, A Feather on the Breath of God. “I have hurled myself at men’s hearts like a javelin.” But Nunez herself, whose Art of Fiction interview appears in our new Summer issue, has no interest in effortful seduction. Speaking to the Review’s Lidija Haas in early May, she expressed impatience with writers who want to break their readers’ hearts: “There’s an arrogance to that that has always bothered me. You leave my heart alone!”

Writing that beguiles and devastates often appears to do so casually, with the smallest of phrases or gestures, and those moments were what caught at us as we put this issue together: a little girl, in a debut work of fiction by Harriet Clark, patted down by her grandfather with a tailor’s respectful discretion on their Saturday visits to her mother in prison; a phone call from a former lover, his voice as jarringly familiar as “the feeling of my tongue inside my mouth,” in Robert Glück’s “About Ed”; that gentle “mm-kay” in a poem by Terrance Hayes written in the voice of Bob Ross.

Although the Review has generally resisted the lure of the themed issue—the main criterion for what we publish is that it leave us in some way altered—just occasionally, as if from the unconscious, the hint of a theme emerges. This time, as press day approached, we noticed that several of the pieces we’d chosen conjured the experience of an intense crush—the kind that takes you over with a fierce possessiveness, while its object remains oblivious. The fastidious, measured narrator of Esther Yi’s “Moon,” attending the concert of a K-pop band whose fans she’s always looked down on, finds herself instantly undone. In a portfolio made especially for the Review, the artist Marc Hundley captures the vertiginous sensations of reading alone, falling under the spell of certain lines from our own archives. And, in a short essay, Darryl Pinckney describes the night when he was alone in an upstairs bedroom as a child in Indianapolis and the film Paris Blues “switched on a certain channel of my being.” What channel, exactly? As Rilke would no doubt have written had he seen the movie: Paul Newman must change your life.

“Russian soldiers stayed in our building,” my friend, the poet Lesyk Panaisuk, wrote to me when the Ukrainian city of Bucha was liberated from Russian occupation on March 31. Some months before, as soon as the war ensued, Lesyk had left Bucha in a hurry, fleeing the Russian soldiers.

Although the city is now liberated, it is still dangerous to walk around Bucha. Lesyk’s neighbors find mines in the halls of their building, inside their slippers and washing machines. Some neighbors return only to install doors and windows. “In our neighborhood, doors to almost every apartment were broken by Russian soldiers,” Lesyk emails.

“A Ukrainian word / is ambushed: through the broken window of / a letter д other countries watch how a letter і / loses its head,” writes Lesyk in one of his poems. He continues: “how / the roof of a letter м / falls through.”

While I read Lesyk’s emails, miles from Ukraine, my own uncle is missing. As bombs explode in Odesa, I email friends, relatives. No one can find him.

Saturday. July.       7:15 am

Yoga.

Translating Bayard’s Peut-on appliquer la littérature à la psychanalyse? from a Spanish copy of ¿Se puede aplicar la literatura al psicoanálisis? One word at a time. Speed limit, 25 mph.

To Cartagena with Jamie this 22-26 September.

There is a video of Prince that I can’t stop watching. It’s just over an hour long, shot in grainy black-and-white. It looks like a surveillance tape. This is Prince in 1982, before 1999, before Purple Rain and Sign “O” the Times, before there were stadiums packed with people demanding something from him. Three months earlier, he opened for the Rolling Stones, wearing thigh-high boots and bikini briefs, and got chased off stage by an audience throwing garbage. Now he’s playing in suburban New Jersey for a crowd of college kids who don’t know how to process what they’re witnessing. It’s one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen. 

The show starts in pulsing darkness, with an a capella gospel track. Above the choir we hear Prince clearly, his always startling baritone rolling up to a keening falsetto. “You’ve got to love your brother if you want to free your soul,” he sings. These are the last religious words that will be sung that night, but they’re a reminder that Prince is an artist who knows, like Madonna and Al Green and Marvin Gaye, that all the sexiest music is at least a little bit about God. Then the drums kick in. Prince’s strobe-lit silhouette flashes out of the darkness. His body looks enormous, which it was not. I’m reminded, strangely, that Prince was born epileptic, and that as a child he informed his mother—correctly, it turned out—that he wasn’t going to have seizures anymore. He’d been cured by an angel, he said. 

It feels like there’s something private about what he’s doing up there, like we’re not supposed to be seeing this, like it’s a sin. The camera can’t contain him. He vanishes a few times, leaving an empty black square. When the camera pulls back, we realize he’s dropped to the floor, seeking an angle of even greater intimacy with his guitar. Over the course of the hour he seems to draw inward, choosing to ignore the teenagers shuffling clumsily around him. At several points, I think, he forgets the audience is there. But then he remembers, looks up, shoots his arms to the ceiling and poses for a beat before retreating again into his body, that place where he spins and jumps and grinds and, unasked, gives freely of himself. 

—Charlie Lee

In the opening scene of the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, first performed in 1897, “orange girls” at a Parisian theater in the 1640s make their way through an audience of soldiers, society ladies, noblemen, and riffraff, selling orangeade, raspberry cordial, syllabub, macarons, lemonade, iced buns, and cream puffs. The handsome soldier Christian de Neuvillette and his friends sample their wares, drink wine, and eat from a buffet. A poet and pastry cook named Ragueneau banter-barters an apple tartlet for a verse. Then the poet and militia captain Cyrano arrives, and in a glorious, idealistic act, spends his year’s salary to get a bad actor kicked off the stage. The orange girls offer the hungry man nourishment, but he eats only a grape and half a macaron, staying to true to a kind of restraint that defines his character. Food, in other words, plays a major role in the play—one that culminates in act 4, when Roxane, the woman both Christian and Cyrano love, arrives at the Arras front in a carriage stuffed with a feast for the starving soldiers: truffled peacock, a haunch of venison, ortolans, copious desserts, ruby-red and topaz-yellow wine.

I’ve seen three versions of Cyrano this year—a 2021 movie starring Peter Dinklage, with an original score by the band the National; a staging of the play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starring James McAvoy; and the 1987 Steve Martin movie—and in none of them did I pick up on a food theme. Its absence, I thought, must mean something.

The original Cyrano de Bergerac was a period piece, set in 1640 but written in 1897 by a successful Paris playwright who has fallen into obscurity in our time. (I found only a single academic biography on Rostand, though his mustache alone deserves a tome.) The plot is a love triangle. Cyrano loves Roxane, but he believes she cannot return his love because of his huge nose. Roxane has a crush on Christian, because of his pretty face. Christian, tongue-tied and insecure, can’t provide Roxane with the intellectual stimulation she seeks, so he allows Cyrano to write letters to her, signing them as Christian. Roxane falls madly in love—but with which man? It’s a perfect romantic comedy that taps into universal themes. Anyone can identify with the lover’s fear that they cannot be loved due to a fatal flaw, physical or otherwise. But its influence on Parisian society in the late nineteenth century was highly specific.

Jordan Castro’s forthcoming novel The Novelist takes place over the course of one morning in which the protagonist tries to write his first novel. During this time, he sometimes G-chats and emails his friend, Li. Tao Lin’s Leave Society is about someone named Li who is writing a novel documenting his recovery from dominator culture. Castro and Lin have been friends since 2010. This conversation was composed from October 31, 2021 to June 8, 2022 on Google Docs and sometimes on Gmail and G-Chat. That material has been shortened and then reorganized freely to suggest thematic continuities, but also discontinuities, in the time, mood, and medium of the interview.

LIN

It’s December 19, 2021. Yesterday, I opened the galley of The Novelist and looked for something to quote in my tweet of a photo of it. I flipped around a little and saw and chose this: “I opened Gmail. Li had emailed me again. ‘Fuck off,’ the email said, simply.” I wonder what readers of that tweet—who know my novel’s main character is named Li—thought about that quote. In the context of your novel, the “Fuck off” is playful, causing the first-person narrator of your novel to grin. What’s your narrator’s name?

CASTRO

I did confide in a diary from the time I was nine or ten. I remember one diary well from this era—red plaid vinyl, with a strap and a fancy lock. The key was lost and the strap had to be cut. I gushed into spiral, lined notebooks in my twenties. Rereading any of these created massive disappointment, so I destroyed them—I am not sad to say. I feel anger toward them, about them. That little girl or the woman understood little or was unable say what she meant to say, and this is one reason I labor on with my fiction. Most of these daily jottings for stories in progress will remain forever lost or hidden, but this sketch work represents, for me, a purer form of diary. Here is one page from this morning.

Diane Williams is the author of ten books of fiction. She has a new collection of stories forthcoming from Soho Press next year. She is the founder and editor of NOON.

Maybe you know this, if you’re Catholic or hang around in churches: in paintings of Saint Lucy, she’s usually holding a pair of eyes. In most cases they’re on a plate, like some sort of local delicacy she’s about to serve up to a tourist. These are her old eyes, the ones she plucked out when a man wanted to marry her, because she wanted to marry only God. She looks down at them with her new eyes, the ones God gave her to say thanks. The version I like best is Francesco del Cossa’s, from 1473. In it, Lucy’s eyes hang drooping from a delicate stem, a horrible blooming flower. She pinches them gingerly, pinkie out like the queen. To me they look like the corsage I vaguely remember wearing at prom; later, who knows, she might put them in the man’s lapel, a consolation prize.

I have been drawn to this painting for nearly a decade, though my feelings toward it, toward Lucy and her two sets of eyes, have changed over the years. The first feeling was a slightly delusional but sharp sense of envy. I was seventeen or eighteen, seeing the painting for the first time in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and for as long as I could remember I’d wanted what Lucy had: to pluck out my eyes and get new ones. I believe this is the sort of fantasy often held by people with certain ailments, a childish notion that makes no sense but is still somehow grippingly tantalizing—like how the chronically congested dream of one triumphant nose-blow that clears them out for good, or those with bad backs imagine some kindly giant pulling them apart until every vertebrae gives a magical crack and their pain is banished at last.

I wanted new eyes because for almost as long as I could remember I had gotten frequent migraines, which were, I believed, caused by light. I won’t pretend that this is particularly remarkable or interesting to anyone but myself. (A memory: A doctor listens blankly as I describe the particular contours of my pain, how my head feels like a balloon and all I need is the prick of a needle. A small part of me hopes he will be fascinated, be spurred to action, and recommend a lobotomy on the spot. Instead he says, “Well, some people get migraines, yes,” and sends me home with a large co-pay.) But I will say this: the pain and ritual of these migraines, and the many futile measures I have taken daily to avoid them and consequently to avoid light, have been since childhood the unfailing constant of my life. I’ve worn sunglasses every day, sometimes inside. An unexpected flash is all it takes. The sun’s sudden gleam off an ocean wave, headlights passing on a dark country road; these are the things that have left me crumpled in bed, a damp towel over my face, writhing. It begins with a spell of blindness, my world tunneling down to black. The pain comes soon after. In old family vacation photos my face is always hidden. There we are on the beach in Maine: my brother and sister, my mom and dad, their faces shining, smiling, thrown open to the brilliant light of the world—and me, under a hood and a headscarf and Maui Jim wraparounds, some sort of NASCAR babushka.

***

In 1999, I traveled around Europe with a friend from college, going from hostel to sofa to hostel, sharing a bath towel, both of us with $350 Eurorail passes in our pockets. These passes would cover seven cities in twenty days. Correction: eight cities. Who could forget the eighth city?

I have no recollection of how it happened, but we boarded the wrong overnight train leaving Barcelona. We thought we were bound for Nice but woke up in Geneva. To be fair, there were no signifiers of our error in the dark. No, say, alps. When the train arrived, I checked the time and assumed it had simply run late. It had not run late.

My friend and I proceeded to get in a massive fight in the Geneva train station. I suspect it had something to do with who should speak to the ticket agent and my confidence in my bad French over her bad French. At some point, I stormed out of the station. What was my intent? For this to be the story of how I moved to Geneva? Probably. At that age, there is a kind of marriage between the logical act and the dramatic act. They consciously uncouple as you get older.

I have no idea why we didn’t just stay in Geneva, a city worth seeing, for a night, but we didn’t. Maybe we were punishing each other. Maybe we were too anxious to stay. This was before we had any money or way to get money and certainly before smart phones.

Today’s Featured Deals

In Case You Missed Yesterday’s Most Popular Deals

Previous Daily Deals

Furia by Yamile Saied Méndez for $1.99

Do You Mind If I Cancel? by Gary Janetti for $2.99

Witches Steeped in Gold by Ciannon Smart for $2.99

The Hellion’s Waltz: Feminine Pursuits by Olivia Waite for $1.99

Today’s Featured Deals

In Case You Missed Yesterday’s Most Popular Deals

Previous Daily Deals

Not So Pure and Simple by Lamar Giles for $1.99

Dare Me by Megan Abbott for $3.99

I Can’t Date Jesus by Michael Arceneaux for $1.99

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey for $2.99

If your memory about last week is hazy, no one can blame you. But it was less than two weeks ago since a massive misinformation-generation campaign caused people on both the left and the right to declare they were canceling their insurance through State Farm.

The story began on Monday via the National Review, a right-wing media machine. According to an email leaked to Consumers’ Research — a group that purposefully sounds like Consumer Reports but is instead a machine meant to generate outrage against “woke” companies — a leader in State Farm’s company reached out to Florida agents in January asking if they’d like to take part in a project to “help diversify classroom, community center and library bookshelves with a collection of books to help bring clarity and understanding to the national conversation about Being Transgender, Inclusive and Non-Binary.” Jose Soto, who wrote the email that was leaked, said that “The project’s goal is to increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support out communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children Age 5+.”

This story trickled down through the Moms For Liberty groups on Monday afternoon, generating the precise rage it was meant to elicit. Indeed, as of Monday afternoon, only the National Review and affiliates had begun to spread this news of the partnership; no reputable source – not State Farm, not GenderCool, not a single information outlet — had covered the story. The image below is of a Google search for “GenderCool” and “State Farm” on Monday, May 25, at 4:30 pm Eastern time. All of these sources are right-wing outlets.

Tuesday morning, State Farm trended on Twitter. The Washington Examiner — another right-wing outlet — shared the story that State Farm pulled out of the program because of backlash.

That morning, prior to the murder of 21 people in a Uvalde, Texas, classroom, the left began its outrage. They, too, would be canceling their insurance through State Farm.

I went to day camp from about 2nd grade through 8th grade. It was a religious summer camp, despite the fact then — and now —I’m areligious, but it was a way for me to socialize with other kids, get outside, and free my grandparents from a few hours of watching me. I loved it wholeheartedly, and though the option to stay overnight was one, I never took it. Instead, I stuck to singing Jesus songs, enjoying afternoon swims in the pool (including going off the diving board and conquering a fear as soon as I passed the advanced swimming test in 4th grade), and playing camp-wide games of capture the flag and red rover before heading home, sun-battered and chlorine-covered. I read my fair share of tween and teen summer camp stories during that time, and while summer camp in YA has definitely changed since the ’90s, one thing remains the same: camp is a killer setting and remains a popular spot for teens to fall in love, to experience heartbreak, and maybe to help solve a murder or two.

What is camp, anyway? It might involve camping or the wilderness, or it might not. Camp is less about hiking and biking and getting into the lake (like camping) and more about an organized summer program that’s supervised by older teens and adults. Camp has often served as a bridge for childcare during the months when young people are out of school but parents are still working. While it once was fairly focused on being set outdoors in some capacity, whether it was a day camp or a sleep away camp, it’s common now to see a million different types of camp. Some may never include being outside at all and instead focus entirely on a specific skill or craft for a designated period of time.

I’ll speak from the heart and say yet once again that listening to audiobooks is on equal terms with reading physical books. I acknowledge that the experience is different, but through audiobooks, I personally was able to open doors to book genres that I would not read on a normal basis.

One genre I rarely read before I began listening to audiobooks was nonfiction. I incorrectly assumed that nonfiction books were dull, but audiobooks made them come to life in my mind’s eye. For one, many (not all) nonfiction books are narrated by their writers. In fact, some of the best ones feel like a fantastic podcast, in which I feel as though I have a personal relationship with the writer/narrator. Their personalities and intentions are sometimes more accurately relayed while reciting their own stories than if I imagined their voices in my head.

I think nonfiction books lend themselves well to audio because the subjects the books address, which can be anything from immigration reform to the history of the Roman Empire, are almost always discussed out loud among people. That’s not to say that reading about these topics is unusual, but my most vivid memories of learning about these subjects are from discussions rather than book. I think that audiobooks bridge this gap, to where readers can feel as though they are in conversation about important topics relevant to their lives while also reading a book.

So the next time you’re on a hot girl walk or on a long road trip, consider giving these nonfiction audiobooks a try.

Should romance novels reflect realities or indulge fantasies? Well, it’s a bit of a trick question. Romances can certainly both reflect reality and indulge fantasy. How it does those things, and for whom it does those things are the more interesting questions to investigate.

I try my best not to be self-important or high-minded about my reading habits. Romances entertain readers because we enjoy tracing the arc of a relationship and getting deep into characters’ emotions, motivations, and actions. And some of us like reading about sex. Romance isn’t necessarily the first place to turn for moral instruction. That said, pop culture is powerful and worth taking seriously for how it reflects larger culture. What romance presents as realities and fantasies reveals some truths about our collective values and desires.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever said or heard something like this: “I have so many unread books at home and it’s so stressful! My TBR pile is out of control! When am I ever going to read all the books on my shelves?”

It’s a common refrain among book lovers. Though I, too, have always owned a considerable amount of books, this sentiment is one I didn’t understand until recently. When I used to hear people talking about how badly they wanted to make a dent in their physical TBRs, or how overwhelming it was to own so many books they hadn’t yet read, I’d scratch my head, confused. I figured I’d get to the books on my shelves eventually. Wasn’t that the point of owning books? To know you could read them whenever, now or 10 years from now? For a long time, it didn’t even occur to me to look at my own bookshelves when I wanted a new read. I’d turn to my digital TBR and the library. My books were just background noise.

Most of the books I collected in my teens and twenties were books I happened upon. For over a decade, I lugged boxes and boxes of books from apartment to apartment, unpacking them and reshelving them in each new place. A lot of them were classics I’d picked up in high school at library book sales. Others were dusty old books I’d snuck from the shelves of my childhood house. They were the kinds of books I thought I should read — books that seemed smart and worldly and important. Hemingway and Philip Roth and Henry James. Very few of them were queer.

I did occasionally buy a book because it spoke to me or because I’d read it and loved it. But I also bought books because I thought I should own them. One summer I bought Dover Thrift editions of all of Shakespeare’s plays. I have enjoyed reading Shakespeare throughout my life. But I never stopped to consider whether I actually wanted to own those books. I just decided it was something a Book Person would do.

I kept haphazardly collecting books and rarely got rid of any, because I like the way bookshelves look. Meanwhile, I kept reading. By the time I turned 30, my reading life had become unrecognizable — in the best possible way. I started reading more and more and more and more queer books. I found my way to bookish communities online, and those communities led me to new books, new indie presses, new genres. I was ravenous for all of this new lit. For the first time since I was a kid, I was reading books that spoke to me and challenged me and delighted me. I was reading for me — not for some dusty, narrow-minded idea of who I thought I should be — but for me: queer, weird, curious, constantly changing me.

Netflix’s Bridgerton series is so hot that it reignited sales for Julia Quinn’s beloved series of books AND set the internet alight with some of the best Bridgerton fan fiction (more than is humanly possible to consume). Okay — so some artistic license is allowed in this statement; however, it is not as big an exaggeration as you may think. Season 2 was even more popular than the first season, sitting in the Top 10 series on Netflix across 91 countries. The Netflix series differs very much from the original books, especially with Season 2. Some might even consider the series to be fan fiction itself. Whatever it is, it is fanning the flames, and we cannot get enough of the characters.

The great news is seasons 3 and 4 already have the green light, but it is a long wait until the next season starts. We have the best Bridgerton fan fiction to help scratch your itch if the books aren’t enough for you.

Warning: there is a lot. There are eight (8) Bridgerton siblings, which gives enough material to work with. Add additional side characters, alternative love pairings, modern vs. canon period timing, and the ever-popular full-blown family saga. Better put the kettle on and make yourself a nice pot of tea. We could be here for some time yet. 

A quick note about fan fiction: fan fiction will never take away from the source material and original copyright. It is a way for fans to explore more profound concepts, new relationships, or alternate settings. Yes, there can also be a lot of smut. If you are new to the fan fiction scene, get started with A Beginner’s Guide to Reading Fan Fiction here and the Best Fan Fiction Apps and Sites here. And if all of this Bridgerton fan fiction has you thinking about your own storytelling, here are some tips on How to Start Writing Fan Fiction here.