At the start of a new year, I’m always hopeful — nay, overzealous and unhinged — about how many books I can actually read in the whole year. But it’s so much fun to flip the page, start brand-new, and dive right into the challenge! And when I get behind on my reading goals, reading challenges and readathons are a great way I make up some time and knock out a few of my reading goals. I also like to participate in readathons that will help expand my reading into more diverse and inclusive spaces. Focused readathons do just that — help readers spend time finding and reading books that broaden horizons and may not be at the top of bestseller lists but should be read widely all the same. 

Readathons happen all year long and are hosted all across the internet, from influencers and bloggers to big pop culture sites, like Pop Sugar’s annual reading challenge and Book Riot’s own Read Harder challenge. But if you’re looking for more readathons to try your hand at, there are plenty out there. 

Here are six readathons happening throughout 2023 to help you tackle your toppling TBR piles and stretch your reading goals to branch you out of your comfort zones.

The Unread Shelf Project Readathon (Yearlong 2023)

Whitney from the Unread Shelf Project hosts this annual readathon to help and encourage readers to tackle their existing TBR piles at home without adding to the stack. Featuring beautiful printables, lists, and challenges, this readathon is perfect for readers who have a giant backlog of books and are ready to do something about it.

Anyone can participate at any time, and with no set limits on number of books, types of books, or hours needed to complete, this is a great challenge to jump in at any time to tackle whatever reading goals you may have.

It’s 2023, horror fans! Which means we have a whole new year of horror books to look forward to reading. January is starting off with a bang with a bunch of great new horror novels to choose from. Seriously, these books are a great way to start off a whole year of horror. Will you be adding them all to your TBR for the month? I know I will.

Before we get into the books, let’s talk about some of the trends we’re seeing for horror in the first month of 2023. First of all, looks like oranges, reds, and yellows, are the vibe for cover designs. Are the hot pink and bright purples of 2022 horror over? I guess we’ll have to keep an eye out on horror to come to track that.

What else can you expect from your January 2023 horror novels? Ghosts. Claustrophobia. Unreliable narrators. Haunted houses. Bad dreams. Dark memories. Dark gothic vibes. Ghost hunters. Monsters. Creepy hotels. Vampires. Fights for survival. These books include many of the horror tropes we’ve come to know and love. But there are plenty of surprises within these pages as well. What kind of surprises, you ask? You will have to read all eight of these January 2023 releases to find out!

Ah, January. Sure, it’s the start of a new year, new beginnings, and all that, but it’s also the start of a whole new year of new releases to look forward to. Think of all the fabulous books that will be released in 2023! (My wallet is crying and I’m sure my already overflowing TBR pile isn’t too happy, either).

It might also be the start of some new reading challenges or some new reading resolutions, or you might just want to explore something different. Lucky for you (and for everyone, really), January nonfiction is full of different options. It’s the perfect opportunity to grab a book that looks interesting, sit by the fire with a cup of coffee or hot cocoa, and layer on the blankets while you read the day away.  

There’s a personal essay collection about pre- and post-transplant life, a book exploring what it’s like to be mixed race and issues of belonging and acceptance, memoir/cultural criticism about alcohol’s role in our culture and what happens when you don’t partake, a reported memoir about stuttering, and much more.

This is not a comprehensive list of every nonfiction book being released in January, but these are the ones that especially caught my eye. Let’s take a look!

I have had a few of Mel Bochner’s slogans stuck in my head ever since I visited Peter Freeman Gallery to see a exhibition of his work, Seldom or Never Seen 2004–2022. Bochner—a conceptual artist known for his colorful, text-based paintings—first rose to prominence with a 1966 show called Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art. How good a title is that? (The show included a fabricator’s bill from Donald Judd.) The same cheeky spirit inflects his retrospective at Peter Freeman. Most of the works are text-based, brightly colored, and employ a cartoonish Comic Sans–esque font. In one, against a bubblegum-pink background (pictured above), he spells out clichés for death, which get more and more Looney Tunes as they go on: “Die, decease, expire … give up the ghost, go west, go belly up … screw the pooch, sink into oblivion.” On other canvases, the text is literally filler—white melting into blue, with the words blah, blah, blah dripping into nonsense. Bochner is playing with language, having a way with words, flickering between the register of the cliché and all the possibilities clichés can offer. It’s all a lot of fun. My very favorites are a canvas with writing so thin and light it appears to be in pencil, and one on which is written the perfect joke-warning, which I have since passed along to others: “Don’t make me laugh.”

—Sophie Haigney, web editor

Recently, after once again experiencing the bad behavior of a man—boring in the nature of its badness though nevertheless dispiriting—I once again turned to Take Care of Yourself, by the French artist Sophie Calle. The work was first exhibited as a multiroom installation at the 2007 Venice Biennale that incorporated photos, paintings, drawings, video, audio, and text. The project began when Calle received a breakup email from a man anonymized in the work as “X,” with the titular sign-off. “It was almost as if [the email] hadn’t been meant for me,” Calle wrote. So she shared the email with 106 women (107 participants, if you include a parrot who clawed apart a printed copy of the email), enlisting them in an endeavor reminiscent of a group chat’s collaborative evisceration and consolation in response to such situations. She asked that the women “analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me. Answer for me.”

And they did, using their skills as, among other things, tarot readers, Talmudic exegetes, psychiatrists, puppeteers, clowns, anthropologists, cartoonists, magicians, ikebana masters, mothers (such as Calle’s own), et cetera. An editor critiques the email’s convoluted syntax and obfuscatory language, which frames the man as a victim of his own nature and of Calle’s prohibition of infidelity. A lawyer analyzes it as a broken contract. A diva sings it as an aria. A poet reconfigures its language. The collection of responses is a masterpiece of women not only talking back but transforming what they’re talking to. It’s hilarious, over-the-top, and magical.

The following is drawn from Franz Kafka’s 1911 notebooks, to be published by Schocken Books in a new translation by Ross Benjamin in January 2023. Benjamin’s translation preserves the diaries’ distinctive writing, inconsistencies and all.

      My visit to Dr. Steiner.
A woman is already waiting (upstairs on the 3rd floor of the Viktoria Hotel on Jungmannsstrasse) but implores me to go in before her. We wait. The secretary comes and holds out hope to us. Glancing down a corridor, I see him. A moment later he comes toward us with arms half spread. The woman declares that I was here first. Now I walk behind him as he leads me into his room. His black frock coat, which on lecture evenings appears polished, (not polished, but only shiny due to its pure black) is now in the light of day (3 o’clock in the afternoon) dusty and even stained especially on the back and shoulders. In his room I try to show my humility, which I cannot feel, by looking for a ridiculous place for my hat; I put it on a small wooden stand for lacing boots. Table in the middle, I sit facing the window, he on the left side of the table. On the table some papers with a few drawings, which recall those from the lectures on occult physiology. A magazine Annalen für Naturphilosophie covers a small pile of books, which seem to be lying around elsewhere too. Only you can’t look around, because he keeps trying to hold you with his gaze. But whenever he doesn’t do so, you have to watch out for the return of the gaze. He begins with a few loose sentences: So you’re Dr. Kafka? Have you been interested in theosophy long? But I press forward with my prepared speech: I feel a large part of my being striving toward theosophy, but at the same time I have the utmost fear of it. I’m afraid, namely, that it will bring about a new confusion, which would be very bad for me since my present unhappiness itself consists of nothing but confusion. This confusion lies in the following: My happiness, my abilities and any possibility of being in some way useful have always resided in the literary realm. And here I have, to be sure, experienced states (not many) that are in my opinion very close to the clairvoyant states described by you Herr Doktor, in which I dwelled completely in every idea, but also filled every idea and in which I felt myself not only at my own limits, but at the limits of the human in general. Only the calm of enthusiasm, which is probably peculiar to the clairvoyant, was still missing from those states, even if not entirely. I conclude this from the fact that I have not written the best of my works in those states.—I cannot now devote myself fully to this literary realm, as would be necessary, and indeed for various reasons. Leaving aside my family circumstances, I couldn’t live off literature if for no other reason than the slow emergence of my works and their special character; moreover, my health and my character also hinder me from devoting myself to what is in the most favorable case an uncertain life. I have therefore become an official in a social insurance institute. Now these two professions could never tolerate each other and permit a shared happiness. The least happiness in one becomes a great unhappiness in the other. If I have written something good one evening, I am aflame the next day in the office and can accomplish nothing. This back-and-forth keeps getting worse. In the office I outwardly live up to my duties, but not my inner duties and every unfulfilled inner duty turns into an unhappiness that never leaves me. And to these two never-to-be-balanced endeavors am I now to add theosophy as a third? Won’t it disturb both sides and itself be disturbed by both? Will I, already at present such an unhappy person be able to bring the 3 to a conclusion? I have come Herr Doktor to ask you this, for I sense that, if you consider me capable of it, I could actually take it on.

A month ago, Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, made his now infamous “I am Spartacus” speech at the World Cup’s opening press conference. “Today I have very strong feelings, today I feel Qatari, today I feel Arab, today I feel African, today I feel gay, today I feel disabled, today I feel a migrant worker,” he said, before adding, “Of course, I am not Qatari, I am not an Arab, I am not African, I am not gay, I am not disabled. But I feel like it, because I know what it means to be discriminated, to be bullied.” Two days before Sunday’s final, he returned to the microphone to announce, a bit prematurely, that this had been the “best World Cup ever.” It pains me to say it, n terms of pure football, and especially given the galactically great final—a game that will remain, as everyone pretty much agrees, unsurpassed in the annals of football history—he was right on the money.

At the beginning of England’s penalty shoot-out against France in the quarterfinals, English fans were back at the Battle of Agincourt, the whole country ready to channel Laurence Olivier or Kenneth Branagh and “cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George,’” when the local penalty pathology kicked in. In the 1996 Euro, Gareth Southgate, currently England’s manager, had famously missed a vital penalty against Germany, weakly side-footing the ball toward the goal. The next day one of the tabloids ran the unforgiving headline “‘HE SHOULD HAVE BELTED IT’ SAYS SOUTHGATE’S MUM.” This time, Harry Kane did belt it. The result was the same. Kane’s ball went way over the bar, effectively ending his country’s chances of beating France in the quarterfinals. England had probably otherwise deserved the win, on the merit of its second-half performance and in the wake of some egregious decisions from the referee Wilton Sampaio, along with the mystery that is VAR (video assistant referee). All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears. Harry lifted the top of his shirt above his chin and bit down on it.

Harry Kane is in good company. All the greats have missed completely or have had penalties saved, including Messi in this World Cup and the last one, and Ronaldo in 2018. But at least they were the obvious choices for the job. Harder to figure is why Virgil van Dijk, one of the world’s truly dominant center backs but not particularly well-known for his goal-scoring abilities, insisted on taking the first penalty for the Netherlands in their shoot-out against Argentina this year. No doubt he wanted to play the captain’s role, steady his team’s nerves, and lay down a marker for the rest of them. The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing. But I retract my criticism. The miasma of despair that hangs over missed penalties is the cruelest epilogue a game can have.

Only the fourth-ever African and first-ever Arab team to make the quarterfinals, and the first of both to make the semis, Morocco was the darling of this tournament. Playing with guts, flair, and imagination, and led by an unflappable manager in Walid Regragui, Morocco dispensed with those colonizers Belgium, Spain, and Portugal (was there ever a more towering header than Youssef En-Nesyri’s against Portugal?) before coming up against France in the semifinals. The Moroccan team played their hearts out: Jawad El Yamiq’s splendid first-half overhead kick hit the post; Azzedine Ounahi, who was superb all tournament, had a shot cleared off the line; several times Kylian Mbappé took off on one of his electric runs down the wing, he was upended by a hard, effective, borderline-yellow-card tackle. In the end, however, as with Messi in Argentina’s semifinal against Croatia, the superstar had the last word: Mbappé dinked past defenders in the box before laying off a pass for Randal Kolo Muani to finish for a 2–0 France lead. The great sea of red and green in Al Bayt Stadium, borne up on the tidal wave of global support for the underdog, worked itself up with whistles for France and chants of siir! (go!) for Morocco, as if to prove conclusively that a state of wild frenzy can be achieved without the consumption of alcohol. But France held on.

The Paris Review‘s Winter issue cover, Snowfall: winter in Roseboom #4, by the artist Uman, looks from different angles like a field of floating Christmas lights, a confetti drop on New Year’s Eve, and a winter storm touched with a kind of bright magic. Uman worked on it over a period of four years, dabbing bright color on the canvas until, as they told me in our conversation, it felt a bit like “the mothership.” Born in Somalia in 1980, they grew up in Kenya and moved to Denmark in their teens. In 2004, they came to New York, where they continued to work in collage, painting, and sculpture before moving upstate. They are largely self-taught, and their signature style is bright, geometric, and vivid. We talked about their economical attitude toward paint, the process of making Snowfall, and their sheep.

INTERVIEWER

Have you always thought of yourself as an artist?

UMAN

The sadness of thinking about a year in reading is how little of it endures! As I try to recover lost time by rereading the terrible handwriting in my journal I find so many abandoned or forgotten books, and even the ones that remained in my memory are now reduced to an image or a sentence or a feeling—but maybe this is universal, and therefore not so sad.  

The book that stayed with me the most this year was Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy, not just because of how moving it is and how it performs such relentless moves with doom as she details her struggles with external demons (family, class, addiction) but because I still don’t understand exactly how she accomplished this. Whenever I’ve tried to define it in conversation, I end up saying something hopelessly abstract, like, “The series invents its own authority.” This hopelessness made me want to come up with a corresponding new aesthetic category, something that would precisely and permanently define the compulsive.  

In a very different mode: I keep remembering images from Jean-Patrick Manchette’s crime novels, which I read this summer in some of NYRB Classics’s reissues. My favorites, perhaps, were No Room at the Morgue and Nada, which aren’t so much noirs as rapid phenomenologies of politics. There are dense technical descriptions of guns and scenes of people waiting in dark rooms, but operating through these minute details is a sense of a larger system.  

These, I’ve realized sadly, are the memories of reading I’m left with now. But maybe this awareness of forgetting has been prompted by an experience I loved at the beginning of the year—listening, online, to Alice Oswald’s lectures on poetry at Oxford. The first, from 2019, is called “The Art of Erosion,” and uses the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick as an example of a writer with a way of working that she admires. It wasn’t only her argument about poetry and erosion that I found both moving and invigorating, her idea that there is a poetry that builds up and a poetry that uncovers or erodes; it was the use of Herrick—someone so apparently outmoded and forgotten!—as her model for thinking through those subjects. Of course, I’ve forgotten many other aspects of those nighttime lectures. So much is already eroded at the moment of listening, or reading. How any writer makes something survive—even for a year—is still a mystery.   

Making its rounds on social media over the past two weeks is a story from The Atlantic about the end of high school English class. It’s not necessarily what you think it might be. The author, a high school teacher in Berkeley, California, explores how ChatGPT, a conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) system, might radically alter the future of English education. Students can, for example, feed the system a prompt for class and develop an essay with the help of the AI, never needing to do the actual work of writing and editing from scratch themselves. While sure, AI could make cheating a lot easier, this reads a lot more like a problem of an insular wealthy community in the backyard of Silicon Valley than one that would radically change English classes outside that bubble.

A quarter of Americans still do not have broadband internet access at home. This segment of Americans includes young people who are in school. Can AI impact those students utilizing it at school? Absolutely. But the fact of the matter is, this shouldn’t be the concern of the shifting face of high school English classes. Censorship should be.

Censorship, happening across the country at never before seen speed by right-wing Christian nationalists, fueled by group think, by big pocketbooks, and well-connected politicians, is the true threat to what a high school English class offers. English, which explores reading and literacy, teaches writing and critical thinking, and dives into the art and science of rhetoric, is being irreversibly changed by the current climate of censorship. Regardless of whether a book has been pulled from curriculum or from school library shelves, educators are at the mercy of adults who are making a hobby of creating chaos via challenges, via undermining their expertise, and via actual threats to their safety. We’ve seen quiet/silent censorship become more talked about in the wake of all this, but all we can ever know about how widespread such soft censorship is that it is impossible to measure. Unless educators fess up to changing curriculum, to avoiding certain conversations in the classroom, or not recommending or sharing certain books, then that censorship goes unnoticed. Critical conversations that help form the basis of English education, including argumentation, evidence that supports said arguments, and introduction to a wide range of ideas meant to be discussed openly and frankly, are halted when “Critical Race Theory” or “Social Emotional Learning” or “Pornography” or “Grooming” are casually tossed about by white supremacists demanding education look exactly as they want it to. English that is whitewashed, falsified, and fabricated.

To worry about AI changing English classes is to ignore the enemy already sitting in the classroom. It is to ignore the fact that there are students across the country, in vast numbers, who do not have access to books or reading outside of the classroom. Who do not have access to books with people who look or act or think like them because a few white women declaring themselves the experts on what is and is not appropriate said so. It is akin to suggesting that banning books is a good thing, actually, since it’ll “sell a lot of books.” Indeed, some banned books see sales increase, but that statement overlooks the actual issue. Banning books is intellectual suppression. Banning books is revoking First Amendment rights.

At the end of the day, students lose when their access to books of all kinds is restricted.

Since about 2014, I’ve always kept an eye on Pantone’s Color of the Year. I like this idea of a color defining or giving shape to an upcoming year, much in the way I like thinking not about resolutions but about words or phrases as a means of organizing the next 12 months. Over the years, I’ve found some Pantone Color of the Year choices to be excellent — 2018’s Ultra Violet was great, as was 2019’s Living Coral — while other choices have left me really underwhelmed — the choice of Gray and Yellow for 2021 felt a little bit too much like a 2011 Pinterest Wedding Board to me, and the choice of 2020’s Classic Blue just…boring. It’s neat to see where and how these colors do or don’t trend throughout the year. What can we expect from the Pantone’s Color of the Year 2023, Viva Magenta? It’s a bold, energetic blend of red, purple, and pink and, in my opinion, one of their best choices. It’s a very alive color.

Keeping Viva Magenta in mind, I thought it would be fun to create a palate of books across genres, voices, and categories that utilize the color (or something very similar to it) as the focus of the book cover. This is your roundup of Viva Magenta book covers. Grab one or several and read your way through the Pantone color of the year. I definitely plan to grab some of these…and maybe a notebook in this vivid color, too.

I’ve tried to credit cover designers where possible. This is the regular plea for publishers to put this information right on your landing page for each of your books to give the credit where it’s due.

You’ll notice something interesting here, as I did while poking around for these covers: Viva Magenta is a VERY tough color to match. Because it has a range of tones, even the swatches for the color are different, one being more pink and one more purple. Your screen resolution will make a difference here, and in some cases, the cover’s take on Viva Magenta goes more one direction than the other. The effect, of course, remains.

Yesterday, I was standing in front of my desk, piled high with books I had checked out from the library or received for review, trying to decide what to read next. I shifted from foot to foot and gave myself a pep talk. “Pretend you are a normal reader. You’re just picking whatever book looks interesting. You can read whatever you want.”

-record scratch-

You’re probably wondering how I got here. Why am I not a normal reader? What does picking out something to read feel like such an intimidating task that I need to psych myself up and put myself in the right headspace? Well, we start with a kid who loves reading, and we end with an adult who has built their life around books to the extent that reading has become a minefield of expectations and guilt.

It all started with a book blog, which was supposed to just be fun. I was going to record everything I read and share it with people. But then I had a much better idea: I could create a book blog just for bi and lesbian books, since that’s what I wanted to read more of. I could talk about queer women books with people! How fun.

And when I started the blog, something miraculous happened: people started giving me free books. They were self-published ebooks sent from the author, but free books are free books! And well, if someone is going to write a sapphic book (still a rarity back then) and send it to me, the least I could do was read and review it. Besides, now I had a blog to maintain, which meant new content, which meant I needed to be reading more (bi and lesbian) books.

Podcasts have become an integral part of our everyday life. We listen to them while doing chores and carrying out errands, while driving or taking public transportation, and sometimes (though this is mostly dedicated to our very favorite podcasts) we simply sit and enjoy them without doing anything else. It’s been predicted that, by the end of this year, there will be 424 million podcast listeners worldwide. I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s truly a mind-boggling number.

I don’t want to say that podcasts have completely replaced the radio — they haven’t, and many podcast listeners also follow radio programs. They are, however, being chosen more and more, especially by younger generations who didn’t grow up with the radio. In addition to that, anyone with the means to access the internet and purchase some basic tools can now start their own podcast, and there are dozens of books teaching them how to do so. In a way, it’s been a great equalizer: who gets a platform to project their voice? A lot more people than before. According to Daniel Ruby from DemandSage, as of June 2022, there are over 2.4 million podcasts with over 66 million episodes between them.

I’m not sharing books about podcasting here. Rather, I’ve chosen eight books where podcasts and/or podcasters play a large narrative role. Some of them are fiction whereas others are memoirs, but they all have one thing in common: the art of putting a podcast together is integral to the story or characters/narrators. Shall we?

I do not like to be scared. Seeking out media that is designed to be scary — books, films, TV shows, or, I don’t know, music videos? — is something I will never understand or choose to do. I also do not like gore. I can handle some violence in my books, if it serves a purpose, and sometimes I can get behind body horror. But blood and guts is not my thing. Please keep your graphic descriptions of murder to yourself.

Given these two facts, it makes sense that I’ve spent my entire reading life avoiding horror, right?

Wrong.

Horror is a tricky, slippery genre. Until recently, I treated horror (the genre) as a synonym for scary (the adjective). I assumed all horror books were scary, or gory, or both. I’ve been challenging myself to read outside my comfort zone over the past five years, and so I’ve tried mysteries and the (occasional) thriller, all sorts of nonfiction I never thought I’d love, and lots of weird speculative fiction. All of these forays into new-to-me genres have enriched my reading life in countless ways. But horror remained firmly on the no-go list. Risking boredom, or confusion, or simply not vibing with a book is one thing. Risking not being able to sleep for a week in the house where I live alone is something else entirely. I felt justified in my decision to write off horror as a genre. I do not want to be scared. Therefore, I do not read horror. Simple.

I can’t remember why I decided to pick up Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth. It’s queer, which, of course, made me want to read it. But it’s also categorized as horror. When you look it up on Goodreads, “horror” appears at the top of the genre list. Twice as many users have labeled it horror as have labeled it fiction or historical fiction. I was wary. I asked a book friend who reads a lot of horror how scary it was. “Not very,” she told me. I was still wary — a horror book! I had never read one! — but I decided to try it anyway.

Despite all the candles, tinsel, gifts, and pie, Americans consistently rate the holidays as the most stressful time of the year. That holiday stress may be compounded by family relationships — depending on what kind of family you have. With that in mind, I’ve pulled together a list of the best and worst fictional families to spend the holidays with, so we can all have a laugh before your least-favorite uncle begins his annual political tirade.

Hate the holidays? You’re not alone. This season has a way of magnifying family dysfunctions. Everyone’s trying to make the season magical, but let’s face it: many, many things about the holidays are mundane at best.

It might be tempting to say it’s best to avoid going home for the holidays, but that comes with its own unique stressors. Dealing with the hurt feelings and unhealed trauma that arise from — or lead to — severed family connections is difficult any day. It’s even worse when you’re surrounded by cozy visions of happy parents and kids opening presents in matching PJs, however.

If you aren’t going home for the holidays this year, please remember that you’re not alone. More than 25% of American adults are estranged from at least one close family member. Your feelings are valid, no matter what your reasons were for cutting ties, and I wish you nothing but the best in making your own holiday traditions.

From classic literature to comedy manga, here are the best and worst fictional families to spend the holidays with.

We know that books about books are popular with readers – and, by extension, so are books about book clubs. This particular category is about more than the power of books in a person’s life: it’s about their power to facilitate connection and community. Isn’t this largely why people join book clubs? We want to discover new books and gain knowledge, yes, but we also want to express ourselves in the company of other book lovers. Books about book clubs capture this desire and fulfill it.

Even knowing this, I was a little surprised by the abundance of books where book clubs play a main role. In many of the titles listed below, book clubs aren’t only settings: they’re catalysts, whether for plot advancement or for character growth. Granted, it may be a little self-centered (I mean, we don’t get to ‘Dante writing self-insert fan fiction where he’s praised by Virgil’ territory, but we are readers who enjoy reading about other readers). But it’s fascinating, too. It makes me wonder about this need to bond over this thing we love.

The books I listed here all delve into that need. They’re mostly fiction, but the appeal of book clubs (and their power) are very real.

In the new Winter issue of The Paris Review, Belinda McKeon interviews the writer Colm Tóibín, author of ten novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of essays and journalism. Tóibín also writes poetry—“When I was twelve,” he tells McKeon, “I started writing poems every day, every evening. Not only that but I followed poetry as somebody else of that age might follow sport”—and we are pleased to publish one of his recent poems here.

The Morris Minor cautiously took the turns
And, behind us, the Morris 1000, driven by my aunt,
Who never really learned to work a clutch.

I remember the bleakness, the sheer rise,
As though the incline had been
Cut precisely and then polished clean,

And also the whistle of the wind
As I grudgingly climbed Mount Leinster.
All of us, in fact, trudged most of the way up,

1.

Some people live more history than others: born in Heidelberg in 1895, the German literary giant Ernst Jünger survived a stint in the French Foreign Legion, the rise of the Third Reich, two world wars, fourteen flesh wounds, the death of his son (likely executed for treason by the SS), the partition of Germany, and its reunification, before his death at the remarkable age of 102. Perhaps no historical rupture had a greater influence on his thinking, however, than the rise of industrialized warfare across both world wars. A soldier as much as a writer, Jünger memorably declared in his diaries in 1943 that “ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians.” Articulating the consequences of this transformation became the central obsession of his work.

Jünger’s fascination with the ways in which technologically driven projections of power would reshape traditional civilian life and geopolitics has secured his legacy as an unignorable diagnostician of the modern epoch. He is today to industrialized warfare what his contemporaries Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer were to the rise of mass-produced culture: all three drew connections between technology’s assault on the inner life of the individual and fascism’s weaponization of the mob. Yet while Kracauer and Benjamin, prominent voices of the Weimar socialist left, denounced fascism from the start, Jünger was very much a man of the right. Though he continues to be widely read, his significant literary achievements can be contemplated only with ambivalence. He remains one of Germany’s most celebrated and controversial writers—by far the most interesting ever to have emerged from the interwar right.