In Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House, a group of former theater collaborators reunite at the bar they once frequented together. They’ve since all gone their separate ways, some making good money in TV; others have cobbled together livings from various odd jobs. But when their sad-sack friend Dick (played by Shawn himself in the New York premiere of the play) arrives late to the party, face bruised and crusted with dried blood, the play reveals its insidious side. At first, Dick acts as if nothing has happened, but then, when pressed, he earnestly explains, “I was beaten, rather recently, by some friends, but you see, I actually enjoyed it very much, in the end. Really, it was great. No—I loved it!” Dick does what just about all the play’s characters will go on to do: compulsively excuse horrible ideas and horrible actions. Act like nothing happened. Act like everyone else is making too big a deal out of something. The play glides along so blithely that its evolution into a genuinely frightening horror story might catch you by surprise. A year after it premiered in New York, the ensemble cast, led by Shawn and Matthew Broderick and directed by Scott Elliott, recorded their performances for the podcast Intercepted. It works beautifully as a radio drama, especially since one of the most perverse and hilarious pleasures of this play is to hear those voices argue so pleasantly and so reasonably in favor of cruelty, as if they’re kindly injecting you with a needle full of poison.

—Lucas Hnath, author of “Old Actress”

I’ve been following the rise of Julia May Jonas since her debut novel, Vladimir, came out last year. When I learned that Jonas had written a new play, Your Own Personal Exegesis, I leaped at the chance to see it at LCT3. Exegesis is a memory play—a reconstruction of the memories of one of the characters, Beatrice (Annie Fang). Set at “Redacted Church in Redacted, New Jersey” in 1996, it follows the church’s youth group, which meets on Friday nights for Bible study, danceathons, and performances of liturgical plays. Beatrice is the group’s youngest member. There’s also Chris (Cole Doman), the “Jock Rebel Sensitive Everything guy”; and Brian (Savidu Geevaratne), who was raised in the church and lusts after Addie (Mia Pak), whose disordered eating causes her to grow lanugo and eventually sprout black wings. Overseeing the group is Reverend Kathy Redacted, or Rev. Kat, as she’s known to her students. Her name and the name of the church, which are literally blacked out on the church bulletins the audience is given as we’re ushered to our seats, are our first clues that something sordid is in the offing. Having read Vladimir, in which the narrator develops a passion for a younger colleague in her department, I expected a similar story of illicit desire. Exegesis is cleverly and precisely structured, beginning with a call to worship followed by an invocation, a reading of the New Testament, a presentation of tithes and offerings, a confession of sins, and so on. At select call-and-response moments, the audience is directed to read aloud from the bulletins in our laps. We complete a circuit of knowledge, and maybe something more. Ultimately, the play’s concern with how an authority figure might wield charismatic power over her charges put me in the mind of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Considering Rev. Kat, Beatrice says, “She frightens me … She say[s] what other people don’t want to hear because they don’t want to hear it.” Others, though, fall for her faster than you can say “benediction.”

—Rhoda Feng

Mary Manning’s portfolio for the Winter issue of the Review documents a summer spent in Italy. Their collages are perfect expressions of the special kind of vision you have on vacation, when everything—pizza receipts, sidewalk seating, wildflowers—looks new and exciting, strangely saturated. Manning’s work not only captures but literally incorporates their world in order to rearrange it, ever so gently, at an angle: in Ciao!, there’s a cantaloupe wrapper and a bag from a pharmacy, plus photographs of their friends, of a Nicola De Maria fresco, and of a performance of a Trisha Brown dance. Manning was born in Alton, Illinois in 1972 and lives in New York City. In 2006, they began sharing digital photographs of their everyday life on their blog alongside scans of objects and links to the work of musicians, filmmakers, writers, and other artists they admire. Today, their work appears in print and on gallery walls across North America. The book Manning was preparing last summer, Grace Is Like New Music, a collection of images spanning ten years of their work, will be published by Canada Gallery in February. We talked about looking at images nonlinearly, as well as Italian graphic design, postmodern choreography, and bags (paper and plastic).

INTERVIEWER

Do you take photos differently when you’re on vacation?

MANNING

In our new Winter issue, Belinda McKeon interviewed Colm Tóibín, the author of ten novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of essays and journalism. “In the autumn of 2000,” he told her, “I taught a course at the New School called Relentlessness, and I chose to teach translations of some ancient Greek texts, and Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Ingmar Bergman, Sylvia Plath. The class was very useful because it gave me a bedrock of theory about what this sort of work was doing. … Once you have that certain authority, you can actually write a plainer prose.” We asked Tóibín for his syllabus from that class, along with a short introduction, as the first in a new series we are launching called Syllabi.

I am interested in texts that are pure voice or deal with difficult experience using a tone that does not offer relief or stop for comfort. Sometimes, the power in the text comes from powerlessness, whether personal or political. Sometimes, death is close or danger beckons or violence is threatened or enacted. Sometimes, there is a sense of real personal risk in the text’s revelations. Sometimes, there is little left to lose. All the time, the tone is incantatory or staccato or filled with melancholy recognitions.

Euripides, Medea

Sophocles, Electra

On the two year anniversary of the day when right-wing terrorist radicals attempted to overthrow American democracy, it seems fitting to talk a little bit about the groups across the country working to ensure democracy remains a fundamental right for every single person in this country. We’re deep into the second year of seeing books by and about queer people and people of color being demeaned, belittled, and ripped from public library and school shelves, thanks to groups — and people affiliated with groups — like those who attended the insurrections. Anyone doing this work knows, of course, this isn’t about the books. It never has been and never will be, and no amount of pleading that these people read the books or spend any time in the classroom will change their minds. They’re part of a well-funded cult.

That said, this is the year people who are fighting for the rights of all demand to be heard.

Over the last year, several grassroots parental and professional anti-censorship groups have worked hard to have a voice in local, state, and national politics related to book banning. These include groups like Florida Freedom to Read Project (who’ve offered incredible tips on beginning a local anti-censorship group), the FREADom Fighters in Texas, Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship, North Hunterdon-Voorhees Intellectual Freedom Fighters (New Jersey), and Moms For Social Justice (Tennessee). This is but a tiny fraction of the groups out there doing the work to protect the freedom to read and intellectual freedom. Now is the time to not only find the other groups doing this work across the country but to share that information more broadly others who are ready to fight for the rights of all can do just that.

Like with the database of groups banning books shared here, this database will require input from those who are working toward anti-censorship goals. Moreover, it might include groups that have a wider scope than just ensuring books are not banned — groups like Defense of Democracy, Students Rights Coalition, PEN America, and EveryLibrary fall into this category.

If you’re part of one of these anti-censorship groups or know of one in your area, let’s hear about it. This database will not be shared publicly, as some of the questions will include personal information. But the list of anti-censorship groups, their locations, and their web presence (social media or websites) will be shared in the coming weeks to help connect people who are eager to join in the fight.

For a while, I thought I was an expert at recognising by the cover alone if a book was a young adult novel or a novel for adults. Then, one day, I picked up an audiobook I was absolutely convinced was YA, but got to such steamy scenes, that I had to stop in my tracks to reevaluate everything I thought I knew about book covers. I learned my lesson.

Of course, while all this sounds like a mere lack of attention on my part – an assumption that all YA covers look one way while adult novel covers look another – it is interesting to note that I, like many others, often have a tendency to associate illustrated covers with YA, or with romance novels.

Our editor Kelly has written an excellent analysis on the illustrated cover trend in romance, and what that says about women’s interests, so you may want to read it as a thought-provoking addition to this quiz.

But onto the quiz! Because, after my steamy scene incident (which I consider a happy accident), I started to pay more attention to covers and learned to assume less and look for signs more. And I’ve been seeing some progress in my game of spotting YA vs Adult based on the cover alone.

Are you willing to test your own detecting senses?

Paperbacks are the ideal book format for me. There’s no screen glare. There’s no figuring out how or where to store a dust jacket. There’s simply a flexible binding and cover that allow for folding and curling pages. I know — many of you likely flinched at the idea, and that’s fine. You can keep your books as pristine as you prefer. For me, I love giving my books a workout and putting them to use. As we settle in for the long cold season, I invite you, whatever your preference, to stock up on some new winter 2023 YA paperbacks. They’re perfect for your side table and for toting to your reading space and getting snuggly with.

Find below some of the most exciting YA paperbacks hitting shelves this winter. Because of the paper sourcing challenges still impacting publishing, some of these dates may shift or change, but this is the closest to accurate as possible, per publishing catalog information. Some of these books are paperback originals, meaning they’ll only ever release in paperback, while others are first releases in paperback of books that have already been published in hardcover. I’ve stuck to first books in a series only, so know there are additional paperback releases of series books that are not the start of those series. First titles in a series are marked with a *.

You’ll find something of every genre in this roundup, making your winter 2023 YA paperbacks a wealth of choices. Descriptions for the titles below come from Amazon because much as I wish I’d read all of them, I have not, and this is a sizable list. This is one of the rare times I do that, if only because of how lengthy the list is.

Note: you may need to toggle your view when you click the link to access the paperback edition.

Winter 2023 YA Paperback Releases

January

3

Book censorship in school libraries continues to rise. A Texas school district pulled 41 titles from the shelves, including the Bible, to put them under further review. Missouri passed a bill that makes any text with “visual depictions” of “graphic material” illegal to have available in schools. This has caused the removal of many graphic novels. Some groups, like Moms for Liberty among others, have suggested giving books a rating system, like movies. Julia Rittenberg explains in depth why that won’t work. Kelly Jensen reports extensively every week on censorship news around the United States. Weekly, I check in about what is going on in an effort to stay informed for when the books in my library will inevitably be challenged and possibly banned. It’s important I stay apprised of the falsely named “culture wars” around book banning. 

This got me thinking: What would a school library look like if it didn’t have any books that could be considered offensive? What kind of books would be removed and what books would be safe to remain? 

Obviously, religious books would need to be removed so as not to offend observers of other religions and pacifists. More than that, many religious texts are full of “graphic material” deemed unfit for the shelves of a school library. In the Bible, there are instances of incest and polygamy. Both deeply inappropriate for children to read about. More than that, there are graphic descriptions of violence. One story in the Old Testament, for example, describes how a woman kills a man in his sleep by driving the stake of a tent through his temple, fixing him to the ground. This story directly follows an account of 10,000 warriors killing an entire people in battle, not sparing a single soul. Similarly, the Quran suggests that its followers capture any non-believers and kill them unless they pray to Allah, repenting, and pay Zakah a portion of their savings. 

Likewise, fantasy books would have no place in a school library. Most fantasy contains magic or some sort of witchcraft. Definitely not okay in case it offends those who don’t believe in magic or think that witchcraft is evil. These books often get violent, too. They can be full of epic battles, deception, and spies. There are dragons and quests. It’s inappropriate to suggest the existence of mythical beings or to encourage children to go on adventures that could cause them to question authority or learn about themselves. 

Inspiring young people to develop critical thinking skills is dangerous territory. If they start to think critically, then they might learn to disagree with what they’ve been taught. That offends innumerable parents, religious groups, authority figures, and educators. Better go ahead and take out all the coming-of-age stories and books about learning independence. This removes most young adult, middle grade, and children’s realistic fiction. 

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