Julian Maclaren-Ross’s 1947 novel, Of Love and Hunger, is a defiantly unedifying English comedy about a vacuum-cleaner salesman trying to keep his chin up in the gloom of prewar Brighton. Its not-quite-forgotten (if never-exactly-acclaimed) author has been on my radar ever since I learned that he was the model for the bohemian novelist character X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. That monumental roman-fleuve of English life happened to be a significant inspiration for a project of my own—a novel about the seventies London I grew up in, an excerpt of which appears in the new Summer issue of the Review—so when I found myself trying to think of a book that one of my middle-aged characters might have read in her youth, the Maclaren-Ross novel sprang to mind, and I finally read it. As it turned out, I don’t think my character, a tortured soul who tends to find everything “ghastly,” would have enjoyed it. She would have found the seedy boarding houses and tearooms and pubs that comprise its setting “ghastly”; she‘d have found the petty swindling and debt-dodging antics of the protagonist and his fellow salesmen “ghastly,” and she’d have found his unapologetic romance with the wife of an absent colleague “too ghastly for words.” But I couldn’t get enough of it. There’s nothing obviously brilliant about the writing or plotting, both of which tend toward the studiedly humdrum. (“Two more cars passed, then a bus.”) But somehow its little throwaway visions of fleeting bliss snatched from abiding squalor got under my skin. I haven’t enjoyed a novel so much in ages. 

—James Lasdun, author of “Helen”

Recently, I’ve been listening to old demo tapes by the Cure on repeat. I like hearing the rough and sometimes fragile beginnings of their songs. A demo feels more like it’s breathing—it’s not fixed. It has been through fewer hands and there’s something enthralling about that. The song is still thinking. The demo for “Six Different Ways” sounds underwater but the essence is there—maybe even more than in the finished song. There is a thinness, a wobbliness, and a directness to the recording—a distinctly temporary quality—not perfection—not in tune always. More the act of making a root.

If you are contemplating self-destruction, please tell someone you trust. Immediate counseling is available 24-7 by dialing 1-800-SUICIDE or 988.

A Sunday afternoon in early spring. We’d spent the morning quiet, in separate rooms—me in my office, writing; Molly on the bed in the guest room, working too, so I believed. I’d pass by and see her using her laptop or reading from the books piled on the bed where she lay prone, or sometimes staring off out through the window to the yard. It was warm for March already, full of the kind of color through which you can begin to see the blooming world emerge. Molly didn’t want to talk really, clearly feeling extremely down again, and still I tried to hug her, leaning over the bed to wrap my arms around her shoulders as best I could. She brushed me off a bit, letting me hold her but not really responding. I let her be—it’d been a long winter, coming off what felt like the hardest year in both our lives, to the point we’d both begun to wonder if, not when, the struggle would ever slow. I wished there could be something I might say to lift her spirits for a minute, but I also knew how much she loathed most any stroke of optimism or blind hope, each more offensive than the woe alone. Later, though, while passing in the hallway in the dark, she slipped her arms around me at the waist and drew me close. She told me that she loved me, almost a whisper, tender, small in my arms. I told her I loved her too, and we held each other standing still, a clutch of limbs. I put my head in her hair and looked beyond on through the bathroom where half-muted light pressed at the window as through a tarp. When we let go, she slipped out neatly, no further words, and back to bed. The house was still, very little sound besides our motion. After another while spent working, I came back and asked if she’d come out with me to the yard to see the chickens, one of our favorite ways to pass the time. Outside, it was sodden, lots of rain lately, and the birds were restless, eager to rush out of their run and hunt for bugs. Molly said no, she didn’t want to go, asked if I’d bring one to the bedroom window so she could see—something I often did so many days, an easy way to make her smile. I scooped up Woosh, our Polish hen, my favorite, and brought her over to the glass where Molly sat. This time, though, when I approached the window, Molly didn’t move toward us, open the window, as she would usually. Even as I smiled and waved, holding Woosh up close against the glass, speaking for her in the hen-voice that I’d made up, Molly’s mouth held clamped, her eyes like dents obscured against the glare across the dimness of the room. Woosh began to wriggle, wanting down. The other birds were ranging freely, unattended—which always made me nervous now, as in recent months a hawk had taken favor to our area, often reappearing in lurking circles overhead, waiting for the right time to swoop down and make a meal out of our pets. So I didn’t linger for too long at the window, antsy anyway to get on and go for my daily run around the neighborhood, one of the few reasons I still had for getting out of the house. I gripped Woosh by her leg and made it wave, a little goodbye, then hurried on, leaving Molly staring blankly at the space where I’d just been: a view of a fence obscured only by the lone sapling she’d planted last spring in yearning for the day she wouldn’t have to see the neighbors. 

*** 

I read Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence two ways: first as a new work by a friend, written through and about what I know to have been some of his most harrowing years, during which he recovered from a near-fatal bus accident in Morocco, and also as the second collection of a phenomenal early-career poet with a dangerously skilled command of craft. I read it as an intimate reader, and as a distant one, and both times, I experienced a sense of introduction. When we talked on Zoom, Charif told me the book “feels like a birth,” and that feeling of birth, or rebirth, permeates Trace Evidence, as a deepening and an extension of the questions in Shanahan’s first collection, and as an announcement of self and purpose that feels brand new.

—Morgan Parker

PARKER

I love the last line of “Trace Evidence,” the book’s titular poem: “For us here now I will be the first of our line.” It’s such an exhilarating sentence. Can you tell me about that idea of deciding to be a beginning?

Four weeks sharing a room in San Francisco, four weeks since I decided not to go back to England. Gabe wasn’t sleeping. A quarter tab of acid for his breakfast. Spliffs throughout the day, booze and blue raspberry C4 preworkout all through the night. He was recording an album, working on his set, making a website, building a 24-7 open-source radio live-stream at a free hackers’ space, and not finishing anything.

I was trying to write but spending a lot of time crying on the hot roof of the apartment building when he wasn’t around. He found me up there one afternoon at the end of one of his twelve-hour stints at the hackers’ space. Two straw hats, a beer, two cups. “I know you like to drink out of little cups!” He smiled and the inside of his mouth was blue from the raspberry preworkout. How do you hate someone as much as you love them? He said he’d been looking for me because he had a great plan. A childhood friend in the city was driving down to their hometown and we could get a ride. I could meet Gabe’s parents; go to the beach; see the fields, wildflowers, and back roads. So beautiful this time of year. I wondered if it might save us. “It’s God’s country,” he said.

We arrived at his parents’ the following morning, after a four-hour drive south. A low ranch-style house on a wide road of low ranch-style houses. Gabe said it was too nice a day to be stuck inside, so he took me around the side and we climbed straight up onto the roof: “I know you like roofs in California!” I did like roofs in California. The front and back yards of gravel, wood chip, and pebbles, interspersed with the occasional palm tree or redwood. At the end of the road was the main street, a couple of stores, a steak house, and a taqueria. Beyond, fields of lemon trees and mustard grass and farmland that stretched a few miles inland, up to a range of golden hills. Above us, the sun shone like the grill of a new truck.

The house was full of knickknacks and shells and crystals and string lights. A “Be Grateful” sign by the coffee maker. A “Be Grateful” mat by the front door. A canvas in the kitchen printed with a picture of three fluffy ducklings and the words “I have joy down in the bottom of my heart.” It was hard to make out how many cats there were. And then Birdie, the overweight chihuahua, waddled in from the hallway and charged at Gabe, baring his red gums and gnashing tiny, pointed teeth. Gabe told me the dog was the spawn of the devil and the root cause of all the issues that existed between him and his parents. I already knew that the issues between Gabe and his family had begun when Gabe had gone to college in Santa Cruz five years before, found drugs, wouldn’t get a real job, and kept having to move back home when he ran out of money.

The pandemic seemed like a good time to read the ninety-odd novels of Balzac that comprise The Human Comedy. (Which you can get on your Kindle for ninety-nine cents, by the way.) I was definitely obsessed with Balzac in my first youth. Some lines and ideas of his were then emblazoned on my brain: the ruthless mastery an artist must have over his material to boldly cut and shape it; “the impetuous courage of the South;” the “tenacity of purpose which works miracles when it is single-minded.”

Once, in my first youth (I probably got the phrase “first youth” from Balzac), I was having dinner with my brother, Nick Lemann, and about a dozen of his friends, all journalists like him; I was sitting right smack in the middle of the table, and I was, as I recall it, the only girl. They kept talking about politics, of course, and I wasn’t interested in politics at all and still know nothing about them, so eventually I fished out a Balzac novel from my purse and started pointedly reading it in the middle of dinner at the table, amid their conversation. It was like saying, You can be interested in politics, I am interested in Balzac. 

I have no regrets about it. I was making a point! The scene is emblazoned on my brain. It was the only way I could assert myself in that context! It got their attention.

—Nancy Lemann, author of “Diary of Remorse” 

There’s a shortage of good signs en route to the Preakness Stakes, the annual horse race in Baltimore best known as the Kentucky Derby’s older, less attended sibling. By good, I mean the useful types that tell you where to go. There are plenty of other kinds: ads stationed outside delis; DIY posters offering lawns, driveways, and other car-size surfaces as extremely pricey parking options; at least two hotel-related banners on propeller planes; and sandwich boards affixed to roving scalpers, which read, counterintuitively, I NEED TICKETS. The result is a ring of confused, directionless traffic around the track, where it’s easy to forget that everyone has come for a spectacle essentially premised on speed.

The lack of organization at the Preakness is appropriate; horse racing is America’s least centralized sport. There is no MLB or NFL or NBA or NHL for this game. There is a panoply of jockey clubs, trainers groups, state racing boards, owners associations, and veterinarian organizations. The racing rules change from state to state. The racing seasons change from track to track. Even the kind of race a horse runs may fluctuate with the weather. This tradition of casually maintained chaos is almost a point of pride. In 2020, when Congress passed the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act (HISA)—a modest attempt to standardize antidoping rules across the industry—it was met with three years of bitter infighting, five federal lawsuits challenging its constitutionality, and most recently, an exquisitely melodramatic public letter from the U.S. Trotting Association that opens with a Thomas Paine quote. That is to say, it’s in the spirit of horse racing that, this past Saturday, as I approached the venue, I had no idea where to go or who was in charge, and neither, seemingly, did anyone there.

The venue was Pimlico Race Course. Of the many contrasts to be drawn between the Derby and the Preakness, most land in the former’s favor. The track is one of them. The Kentucky Derby is run at Churchill Downs—a 147-acre complex in Louisville whose 170,000-person capacity, hexagonal twin spires, and $121 million Bush Jr.–era renovation make it one of the largest, most recognizable, and most opulent race courses in the country; Pimlico isn’t even the nicest option in Maryland. It’s the second oldest racetrack in the U.S. and doesn’t look a day younger, though parts of it technically are. The original clubhouse—a “Steamboat Gothic-era” “rambling wooden Victorian confection,” as one Baltimore Sun article put it—burned to the ground in a 1966 electrical fire, leaving only a horse-and-jockey-shaped weather vane behind. The newer clubhouse, built a few years before the fire, seems to take most of its architectural influence from high school gymnasiums and the DMV. It is also, however, awesome, if you like these things more for the money and big fast animals than for the antebellum theatrics.

The clubhouse was white, brick, and not entirely full. Live racing attendance has been on a downward slide since the Reagan administration, and the pandemic and the rise of online betting platforms have only sped up the process. In 2022, Pimlico’s owners—a company formerly known as the Stronach Group, now operating under the dubiously pronounceable name 1/ST—made a play for younger audiences by setting up a music festival just off the track. This sounds like a good idea, and last year, with Megan Thee Stallion headlining alongside Lauryn Hill, it may have succeeded in bringing the median age of attendees down by a decade (in 2021, it was sixty-five). This year’s bill featured Sofi Tukker—a dance music duo comprised of a girl named Sophie and a guy named Tucker, which broke out seven years ago with a single called “Drinkee”—and Bruno Mars, an artist with fifteen Grammys and, based on the turnout, maybe as many fans. Between Friday and Saturday, racetrack and festival, this year’s event drew just 65,000 people—barely a third of the 182,000 who came out in 2019.

This week, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón in conjunction with the Library of Congress announced that NASA’s Europa Clipper will be launching on its mission in October 2024 with “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” The poem, written by Limón, will travel 1.8 billion miles through the galaxy. It will be engraved on the space craft.

There has long been speculation of life on Europa beneath its ice-covered ocean. Whatever that life might look like is yet to be known, but the mission will provide vital information about the moon’s inhabitants, culture, terrain, and potential for supporting life. The Europa Clipper is expected to land on Jupiter’s moon in 2030.

More, you can have your name included as part of the mission. Anyone who’d like to sign the poem as it hurtles through space may do so at NASA’s Mission in a Bottle website. Every name included before December 31, 2023, will be engraved on a microchip to accompany the poem.

“Writing this poem was one of the greatest honors of my life, but also one of the most difficult tasks I’ve ever been assigned,” Limón said at an event held at the Library of Congress to announce the project. “Eventually, what made the poem come together was realizing that in pointing toward other planets, stars and moons, we are also recognizing the enormous gift that is our planet Earth. To point outward is also to point inward.”

NASA has launched similar projects before, allowing anyone who wished to send their name into space to do so with Artemis I and several Mars spacecraft. The current Mission in a Bottle efforts are similar to the Golden Record sent aboard the Voyager, which sent into space an array of sounds and images from across the globe into space.

This week, book banners showed up to the Douglas County Public Library board meeting in Colorado to protest books in the system’s collection. It is not the first time they’ve done it, and it’s also not the first time counter protestors have shown up to push back. None of this is news nor is it all that interesting; at this point, it’s pretty standard, even if there are still folks choosing to ignore this is happening in their own back yards at their public library.

What is more interesting than that, though, is looking at how these crisis actors are presenting their message and courting people to their cause. Propaganda works when an uninformed public — usually folks who aren’t engaged in the inaccurately named “culture wars” online — sees it and is appalled by what is presented. Good propaganda works because it’s convincing and presented in such a way as to appear authoritative. But y’all, this isn’t even close to good, and the book banning bigots do not even care. By presenting their false narratives in the most outrageous manner, they’re able to stoke anger and fear in new ways…and it is working.

But let’s break down what is truth here and what is spin (spoiler alert: it’s all spin). The purpose of sharing this is twofold: first, exposure matters since too many folks who care about the First Amendment Rights of all and the freedom of access are putting their heads in the sand and not looking at this stuff and second, this will help in your own talking points with friends, family, board meeting members and attendees, educators, and legislators, debunking fact from fiction.

Because sorry, that’s your job, too. You can’t not look and pretend it is not happening.

I don’t know about you, but in the last few years, my attention span has shrunken to an abysmal size. Or as author Ann Patchett put it: my “attention span has shrunken like a sweater accidentally thrown in the dryer.” I went from being able to read a hundred pages in one sitting to reading three pages and then getting distracted by… well, anything. A notification on my phone, the distant sound of a car horn, a bird flying past my window. My brain helpfully chiming in to remind me that I need to do laundry. My cat embarking upon a life-and-death battle with imaginary enemies.

It’s bad, folks.

I realized that this had become a real problem I needed to solve when I stood up Cat Sebastian for a Facebook Live at The Unusual Historical Romance Book Club. My brain, scattered at the best of times, somehow managed to mix up the dates of the week. I only realized what had happened the next morning, when I received a DM from Cat asking if I was all right.

That did it. I booked an appointment with my doctor and started Googling ways to improve one’s attention span. And, y’know, one’s memory. Forgetting what day of the week it is seems like the kind of thing to finally kick you into motion.

And as it turns out, it seems that I’m not alone. In December 2021, while working on an article about this topic (the first article I read when I went searching), David Oliver tweeted a question: “Do you feel like this COVID era has hurt your attention span? i.e. you can’t focus on a movie but you can watch a 30-minute show?” The responses ranged from ‘yes’ to ‘pick another topic’, but most were in agreement: the era of COVID has, indeed, affected how long we could concentrate either on movies, books, or even work.

The book The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern doesn’t exist.

Sure, you may have read the book The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, (The “Good Parts” Version) by William Goldman, or watched the movie adaptation. Each version uses a frame narrative with the narrator skipping to “the good parts.” Still, some readers search for The Unabridged Princess Bride in person and online. Ironically, an abridged audiobook exists, furthering the myth that Goldman’s full novel is the “abridged” version.

The Princess Bride is a hilarious example of metafiction: fiction about writing fiction or satirizing its conventions. I’m glad no “unabridged” version exists. The book narrator omits tedious scenes, like Buttercup packing a suitcase. He also offers asides to readers about the cultures of the fictitious countries Florin and Guilder. In a fairy tale like this one, hints provide worldbuilding without overwhelming the story.

In Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian science fiction and fantasy novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Lauren Olamina founds a new religion called Earthseed. Its religious text, quoted throughout both novels, is also titled Earthseed. The fictional religion says humans will outgrow Earth and populate other planets. Earthseed draws on fears of climate change and societal collapse. No wonder some readers assume the Earthseed book is real.

Sometimes, nonexistent books become so popular, authors try to set the record straight. In Rosemary’s Baby, the 1967 horror novel by Ira Levin, All of Them Witches by J. R. Hanslet is a nonfiction book with profiles of infamous witches. It’s an important plot device that doesn’t exist outside of Levin’s novel. Many fans wrote to Levin for help finding copies of this nonexistent book. As Levin wrote back apologetically to one fan: “you are one of a number of people whom I have unwittingly sent on a wild goose chase.” The rock band All Them Witches is named after the fake book.

Cats and books: it’s a pairing that goes together as well as eggs and bacon, peanut butter and jelly, or, if you’re British, a cup of tea and a biscuit. Sure, cats wake us up at 3 a.m. because they demand to be fed, but they’re also undeniably cute when they want to be. As far as I’m concerned, if cosiness were a picture, that picture would be of me reading in a comfy armchair, with — yes — a cup of tea, a blanket on my lap, and a cat purring beside me.

I know I’m not the only one to associate books and cats because not only are there lots of books about cats, there are also lots of books about cats and books.

This is what makes it tricky to rank fictional cats because I obviously want to give all the bookish cats the highest position on the list, but that’s not really how rankings work. Still, I’ve made a valiant effort. This ranking is entirely subjective, based on factors like how much I enjoyed the book, how much the cat features in it, and how lovable the cat character was.

When I think of award-winning graphic novels, two immediately come to mind. They are Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series. Although I’m not as well-read in graphic novels as some, I’ve read both of those. I absolutely adored them for very different reasons. People recommend Bechdel’s memoir so often and so I imagine you may have run across it before. If you haven’t read it yet, just now that it mentions suicide. Oseman’s series also has an emotionally abusive relationship and mentions past experiences of homophobia and bullying. Both are superb reads that I highly encourage every reader to pick up.

For me, I seem to go through phases. For a while I won’t read many graphic novels and then suddenly I’m reading a ton. And then something changes again, and I’m back to reading things without many pictures. It’s odd. However, I find that graphic novels are always a good addition to my reading rotation. So that leads me to my list: you never know when an award-winning graphic novel might be just the thing for your reading life. I have some fantastic ones to recommend below if you need ideas of where to start.

There are also a variety of awards in this list. I tried to choose both the best known ones and some more obscure awards to keep you guess– I mean reading. Definitely reading.

Let’s dive into 20 must-read award-winning graphic novels with something for every kind of reader.

Magical realism is such a powerful genre. The surreal feeling of magical happenings in a realistic setting tends to make a story stick with you for longer than the average novel. In a world where hooking students on books is a constant battle, these tantalizing tales build enthusiasm for reading. It’s such a joy to connect young readers with stories that transport them in a wondrous way. The wonder is not just for kids. As an adult, some of my favorite books are middle grade magical realism novels.

I will never forget the first time I read When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. I finished in the middle of the night, teary and touched, and unable to put into words exactly why this book had affected me as it had. That is the power of magical realism — something unspoken but deeply felt.

Below I’ve gathered some middle grade magical realism books, many of which I frequently recommend in my elementary school library. While middle grade novels are typically geared towards kids in 4th through 8th grade, accessing these books on audio greatly increases the range of students who can enjoy. Whether you’re looking for something to recommend to a specific reader or a read aloud to entice a group, this list is an excellent place to start.

On Monday night, the Miami Heat beat the Boston Celtics in definitive fashion in Game 7, winning the Eastern Conference Finals on Boston’s home court. It was a Heat fan’s fantasy. Caleb Martin played like a sleek god with magic powers. The three-pointers looked easy. With few shooting fouls, the game flowed swiftly and without controversy. For a Celtics fan, it must have been a slow nightmare, beginning with Jayson Tatum’s ankle roll in the first possession and ending with the starters on the bench, resigned to a nineteen-point loss. It was the opposite of the chaotic Game 6 of the series, which was one of the most thrilling and heartbreaking games I’ve ever seen.  

Game 6 began with the Celtics continuing their momentum from their win in Game 5. They looked skilled and confident. Jaylen Brown hit his first five shots. The Celtics led for most of the game. Miami’s Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo had a rough shooting night, but Caleb Martin, Gabe Vincent, Max Strus, Kyle Lowry, and Duncan Robinson kept them afloat. Watching with my husband and our friend, I spoke with conviction about an ambiguous injury I was sure Jimmy was dealing with. I wondered if someone had kidnapped his daughter and ordered him to throw the game. “Get the ball to Caleb Martin!” I yelled, though a few weeks ago that name meant nothing to me. 

Jimmy came alive in the fourth quarter. The Heat were trailing by two with sixteen seconds to go. In what seemed like the last possession, he was fouled while shooting a three. The clock stopped at 2.1 seconds, but after the Celtics’ challenge and the replay, the refs put more time on the clock. Jimmy made all three free throws, putting Miami up by one. The Celtics had the ball with three seconds to go. Derrick White inbounded it to Marcus Smart, who missed a three, and with a tenth of a second left and Max Strus trailing him, White looped around to the basket, grabbed the rebound, and in one deft motion, banked the ball in. It was a stunning, gutting loss. How could the Heat possibly recover? White’s putback replayed in my mind in the hours after, and the next day, and the next.      

I don’t like roller coasters, or scary movies, but man do I love the frenzied, fish-flopping-on-land feeling of the last minutes of a painfully close playoff game. It is an experience of great art that creates an agonizing giddiness I’ve never felt from anything else. If a game is close when the fourth quarter begins, it’s like being given a decadent dessert. A perfectly ripe fruit. Suddenly everything feels crucial. How many fouls does Player A have? When will Player B get their shot back? 

Before my father died in 2001, I knew that I loved him but only dimly. I didn’t really feel it, and to the extent that I did, I experienced it as painful. When he was dying I almost didn’t go to him. When I was trying to decide whether to go, someone asked me, “Do you want to see him?” And I said, “That’s hard to say. Because when you’re with him you don’t see him. He doesn’t show himself. He shows a grid of traits but not himself.” Still, I decided to go. The death was prolonged. It was painful. Because of the pain, the “grid” that I referred to—my father’s style of presentation—could not be maintained. A few days after I arrived, my father lost the ability to speak more than a few words at a time. But his eyes and his face spoke profoundly. I saw him and I felt him, and I loved him more than I thought possible. I was stunned by both the strength of my feeling and my previous obliviousness to it, and by my realization that, if I had not come to see him, I would never have known how real my feeling was or how beautiful it was to say it and to hear it said.

I recall that, at the time, I had a mental picture of this experience that looked like one of those practical joke containers disguised as a can of nuts or something; you open the lid and a coiled cloth-covered spring leaps out at you—it felt that startling. This image was followed by another mental picture, an image of human beings as containers that hold layers and layers of thought, feeling, and experience so densely packed (“the body remembers everything”) that the (human) container can be aware of only a few layers at a time, usually the first few at the top, until and unless an unexpectedly powerful event makes something deep suddenly pop out, throwing some elements of the “self” into high relief and disordering others, hinting at a different, truer order that was there all along.

My father wanted to stay at home and so he did; he suffered in his own bed almost up until the end. There was only one hospice worker coming in a couple times a day to give him care plus morphine, which wasn’t strong enough and to which he became quickly accustomed. My sisters and I didn’t realize until quite late that we needed to keep upping the dose; he couldn’t speak by then, though he grimaced in rage and pain.

One of his few visitors during this horrible time was a minister named Amory Adamsen. He was a minister with some kind of half-assed training as a counselor. Before my parents separated, my mother requested that they try counseling. I think she requested it because she’d been going to AA meetings for years and had the lingo down cold; she probably thought she’d be seen as this reasonable person while he’d be seen as a mad, pawing bear, and she’d have official permission to dump him. But my father would agree only if it was a Christian counselor, even though he wasn’t a Christian, and so Mother came up with this Adamsen person. All I knew about him was that (according to Mother) he considered my father the “least introspective person” he’d ever met and that he’d also quite avidly read my novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin, which is about, among other things, a girl being raped by her daddy. He even came to a reading of that book I somewhat cluelessly performed in Lexington (on Mother’s Day!); he gave me his full pious and slitty-eyed attention while my poor father wandered the aisles. Now here he was at the house with my father upstairs dying. Apparently, he and my dad had kept up contact long after my parents’ separation, going to basketball games over the years. Although the prick hadn’t returned my father’s last call about a game, here he was, smiling at everyone, hugging, dispensing comfort, looking around. He told my father he was sorry about missing the game, which I do not think my father gave a fuck about at that point. He told him he’d sure enjoyed getting to know him. Then he mingled with my uncle and his wife, with me and my sisters. He kept singling me out with his eyes and finally asked if he could talk with me privately, that he had something to ask. So we went upstairs, shut the door, and he revealed that what he wanted to know was: Did my father really sexually abuse me? He said that he knew just how rude and inappropriate it was to ask, and he added that if I was offended, he was so sorry, he’d just drop it. I said that whether I was offended depended on why he was asking. If it was just curiosity, yes, I was offended. But if it was a moral concern and had something to do with what kind of prayer he wanted to say, that was different. He allowed that he was curious and that he knew it wasn’t his business and he was sorry. I maybe should’ve hit him and walked out of the room, but just so he would know, I said my father never did anything like that, what I wrote was fiction. Amory said he knew it, he knew my father was very moral, he was no sex pervert. I said, “Well, actually he was, but only a little, no more than average, really.” This confused the moron, but he got over that and said that even though he knew my dad was innocent, there was always this tiny question in his mind, and he was glad to finally put it to rest. He went on to declare, however, that even if I had said yes, my father raped me, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference, that he liked my dad a lot and would’ve made no judgment. We talked about how awful molestation is and how much of it there seems to be. He said my dad had worried about me. For example, he had always wondered why I didn’t get married and was concerned that I might be a lesbian. I told him that I was in fact getting married. He seemed disappointed. He went into my dad’s room to pray at him and I went downstairs to tell my sister Jane about this idiotic conversation. My sister said that although she had been planning to ask Amory to speak at the funeral, after hearing this, no way. We both decided not to tell our mother, who was easily upset about the subject of my writing just generally. Naturally Amory Adamsen wound up speaking at the funeral. I didn’t stay for that event so at least I didn’t have to listen to it.

The cover of our Summer issue, online next week and on newsstands June 13, features a drawing of a dog perched on its hind legs, midmotion—so much so that she appears to be almost sliding or dancing off the page as she reaches for a leash (or is it a length of ribbon?). The first thing I noticed about the cover—besides its chic abundance of white space, which seems to beg me to spill coffee or red wine on it—was the dog’s smile. Her eyes are closed almost beatifically, and her mouth is curved in that upside-down rainbow that anyone who has ever loved a dog will recognize. This is a cover that, appropriately for summer, will bring you joy. The canine in question is London, the guide dog of our cover artist, Emilie Louise Gossiaux. Gossiaux and I chatted on the phone about her unique relationship with London, her especially tactile drawing practice, and human-animal connection. 

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about our cover star, London. What kind of dog is she and how long have you had her?  

I don’t read my old work anymore. After a decade as a writer, I know exactly what it’ll make me feel—compassion, some pity; maybe there will be a phrase that I’ll admire, ­­­­but mostly I’ll feel self-loathing. Last year I came across my diary from a summer when, five years after having arrived in Oklahoma as a refugee from Iran, I was determined to win a national championship in Tae Kwon Do so I could get in to an Ivy League university. It was the summer of 1994, and I was fifteen. I kept the diary because I was lonely, weighed down by money worries and shame of being Iranian, desperate to perform my Christian faith. I was anorexic and addicted to Tae Kwon Do, which I practiced for six or seven hours a day. Writing in the diary was a self-soothing mechanism—I wrote down every kind word anyone said to me.

Reading it now, I feel gentler toward my old self, a version of me now nearly three decades in the past. I read her entries like I might read a daughter’s. Maybe when I’m seventy, I will read my forty-year-old self with similar compassion. The most interesting parts of the diary come at the end. After that summer, I returned to the diary in 1995, 1997, 1998, and twice in 1999, and in each entry I seem appalled by my voice in the one before it until finally I give up and stop writing in it altogether. There was no chance of sounding anything but stupid to the Dina of the following year, though she was the audience I was most eager to impress. The penultimate entry, from February 1999, during my sophomore year at Princeton, reads: “Note to Junior Dina: Don’t read this crap anymore.” Then, a few months later, scribbling a final entry on a locker clean-out notice: “I’ll always be a stupid kid. Good thing I realized that now.”

The following two pages are from a later entry, August 2, 1994.

Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and a book of creative nonfiction, The Ungrateful Refugee, which won the 2020 Geschwister-Scholl-Preis and was a finalist for the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Nayeri is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, an O. Henry Prize, and the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Granta.