Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

 

From Water by the Persian mystic Rumi (1207–1273), translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori (New York Review Books):

The Garden’s scent is a messenger,
arriving again and again,
inviting us in.

The setting: sixties Paris, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, full of rich men’s sons, and their daughters, too. On my mother’s side there were four sisters, just as on my father’s side four brothers, the same madness on each side of the family, because families are always mad. She was the youngest, born in a château. When they met she was living in a large apartment on the rue Bonaparte, with the sister closest in age, the one who’s going to die of alcohol and pills. Overdose or suicide, hard to tell in these cases. The building belonged to her family, to their family, to my family, in the entrance hall there was a marble bust of an ancestral baron and they had cousins on every floor. Her own father, my grandfather, died when she was fourteen, he was also an MP, a government minister even, but he had been dead for a long time. Her mother, my grandmother, lived in the southwest with her dogs, and came to Paris from time to time to see what was happening. There were arguments, tears, scenes. Everyone in that family was violent. Aristocracy makes you crazy. Not because of the inbreeding, but because of faith. Faith that it is possible to be noble. In that family they raised children like they raised horses, to be beautiful. Being beautiful meant lots of different things. The rest was of no importance.

After the bac, after all those years at boarding school with the nuns, she signed up for classes at the Sorbonne, and she was stopped in the street. They offered to take her picture, she posed for magazines, walked in runway shows, became a model, there was something terrifying in her beauty, for everyone, for her as well.

When she comes to pick me up from school, ten or fifteen years later, that is what I see. Among the other mothers, normal and ridiculous, she is taller, thinner, with her big coats and sunglasses. Even the fat unruly spaniel at the end of his leash makes her look only more royal. She could have gone around walking a pig and everyone would find it perfectly normal, even sublime. Everyone makes way for her when she walks down the street, it’s like they feel compelled to bow to her, or to carry the hem of her coat, or to adopt the most sophisticated protocol, like in the empire of China in the first few pages of René Leys. I am amazed they even manage to address her directly, they even sometimes call her tu. She calls everyone tu. She is very warm. Never a snob. Keep it simple, she says to anyone who never manages to be. Proust’s Duchesse de Parme. They all fall under her spell. Everyone. I see it. It grabs hold of them. It’s physical. They are no longer quite themselves. My friends, my friends’ parents, the baker, a bum, it doesn’t matter who, she turns them all to jelly.

When I am with her, I watch things happen, it never fails. The way they desire her. A crazy, respectful desire. You don’t fuck a queen up against a wall. You may think of nothing else, but you don’t touch her. You hope that she will lower herself to your level. That she will lower herself and fuck you. My mother always enjoys it. She parades her sovereign desire throughout the world. To be her child is to be sexual before anything else, because she is. To get hard and to come, to be frustrated and perverse, voyeur and pimp, calm and furious. I am a witness or an accomplice, I watch people fall beneath her gaze, I am the favorite son or daughter, I am the crown prince, tu quoque mi fili, you too, my child? I delight in it I am enraged by it, I am waiting for my hour.

When Henry James decided to come to America in 1904 and 1905, his elder brother, William James, was not immediately pleased. William said that while his wife, Alice, would welcome his visit (she and Henry had a firm bond), he felt “more keenly a good many of the désagréments to which you inevitably will be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you.” There follows an account of how traveling Americans ate their boiled eggs, presumably in hotels and on trains, “bro’t to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten with butter.” As a source of physical loathing, this seems a bit excessive: one might linger over William’s attempts to keep Henry’s visit at bay. William’s letter seems more to the point when he notes: “The vocalization of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ignobly awful … It is simply incredibly loathsome.”

William’s discouragement provoked from Henry a declaration of his determination not to be deterred from coming. “You are very dissuasive,” he wrote to William. Henry, in a plaintive reply, noted that whereas William had traveled much, he had not been able to—he not been able to afford it nor to leave the demands of producing writing for money. It’s as if Henry must plead for his brother’s approval before he can travel back to his native land. And yet the pleading is accompanied by Henry’s self-assertion, he’s thought it through, analyzed the consequences. There is so often in their dialogues this deference of the younger brother to the elder, mixed with self-assertion, an insistence that the pathetic younger brother does know what he’s doing. I suppose we might, in contemporary psychobabble, call Henry’s relation to William passive-aggressive. William’s to Henry, though, has a tinge of sadism that we will see take more overt forms. His response to Henry’s desire to travel home is a strange mixture of welcome and repulse, a recognition of their sibling bonds along with the sense that they bind annoyingly, that he’d rather not have his brother around.

William’s wife, Alice Gibbens James, was much more openly hospitable to Henry’s announcement of the proposed visit. She and Henry seem always to have had a warm and understanding relationship. William claimed that marrying Alice had “saved” him—from what exactly, it’s hard to specify. He had many bouts of depression as a young man, and it has been suggested that he suffered from a self-punishing guilt about his masturbation. Yet while married to Alice, he managed to be absent often, trekking in the Adirondacks or traveling elsewhere. Henry apparently remarked on what he thought was William’s neglect of his wife; according to William’s biographer, Henry told his Chicago hostess that Alice was “the finest woman living, only criminally sacrificed.” It’s not clear whether this is simply the comment of a man who never married and understands little of the daily negotiations of a long-standing marriage, or if it speaks of a truth about William and Alice’s relationship. Reading Alice’s biography, one is struck both by William’s psychological neediness and by his frequent escapes from home on various trips. It seems odd to us today, for instance, that William managed to absent himself following the birth of each of his children. And, in general, Alice seems to have borne the brunt of all the child care and household management as well as of William’s demands for sex—his absences seem to have been his way of handling birth control—and his volatile temper.

Alice, as Henry was the first to note, married the whole James clan, and took on its vast responsibilities, including assuming the management of Lamb House when Henry fell into his deep clinical depression in 1910, and then tending to him on his deathbed. One gets the impression that Alice alone was able to understand the brothers in ways neither of them alone could understand each other. When Henry set out on his American trip, he announced that he could not stay with people, that he needed the privacy and luxury of a hotel. He made a few exceptions: Minnie Jones in New York; Edith Wharton in New York and Lenox, Massachusetts; Dr. William White in Philadelphia; the Vanderbilts at Biltmore in North Carolina, for instance. But the main exception was William and Alice, in the house they had built on Irving Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in the rambling New Hampshire farmhouse in Chocorua, New Hampshire, where Henry went upon his arrival in 1904. Cohabitation with William seemed to be without major friction, no doubt because Alice reigned in both places, and also because Henry was a devoted uncle to Harry and Peggy and their siblings.

We make the best and the worst use of time by relegating it to postponement, deferral, waste, irrelevance; we send it out and away from things that can be thought or done; we estrange time from reality and thus from life’s activities; and in the process we either liberate ourselves or find ourselves stranded, and it’s probably the latter.

Just as baboons, ill at ease and querulous as the sun sets, move about restlessly and shout to no effect, so humans in March, the twilight of winter, grow irritable, anxious, and uncomfortable as the long familiar routines of everyday life deplete rather than sustain interest, energy, and appetite. Reality, lacking energy, begins to lose credibility; the past, running out of reality, begins to lose possibility. Lola quickly laughs sardonically when she spots the title of a book on display in the window of the bookshop on Higher Ave. March: A Comprehensive History of Humanity. Universality for Idiots, she thinks. Unity—coherence congealing into a whole—is illusory. Tony van Heuvel, nonetheless, refusing to blink a way out of a state of willed self-deception, gazes out a window into the midground of trees blown by the wind as if expecting to see the perpetual play of time with truth though there’s nothing but mist to be seen between the boughs. With what goals do we engage in introspection? There’s always the grand plenitude to come, the promised comedy when everything comes out, but this is just another labyrinthine day in the life, etc., with fence fibers half buried in rain. The past of the man of the hour recedes by the minute, the past of queen for a day has lost relevance. Her past is only a receding dim version of the woman who repeatedly steps slightly away from the life she has led, leaving dull fragments of it behind. What we have is a sequence of parts that can be unified only (mis)conceptually by an imagination bent only on eliminating details, the devilish essentials that are the sine qua non of reality. It’s only with a pencil drawn over a rough ridged surface that the illusory continuities on which a coherent imaginable life is predicated can be seen. Continuities are lost, only commas remain where long sentences and full paragraphs used to fill some time across some space. Penelope moves among her suitors or Penelope sits by day and again by night at her loom, she is either performing domestic labor or, as one fifth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher proposed, she projects “an image of the faithful labors of the philosophers.”

A woman is awake, she can’t sleep, no need to know why, she’s restless, wagging, maybe imagining herself giving a speech, speaking out, no need to know the cause or content, it may not be the reason she’s awake, wagging, restless, raging, maybe she woke just to reprimand the night, to whip the horses of the night, never to repeat. Humans may always have similarly hated, raged, enjoyed, marveled, worried, disdained, feared, and loved, not to mention shivered, sweated, danced, wept, sat, pissed, swallowed, laughed, slept, and fucked—we are unbeautiful beasts all of a kind—but given the vast amount that the things that repeatedly press on human thought haven’t changed, isn’t it likely that over time thinking minds have stayed the same? Some ants drown in a toe-deep creek and it’s because of just such incidents that Democritus “developed a thorough critique of the trustworthiness of the senses.” Though we make use of our different senses to coordinate our resulting sensations so as to figure out and focus on what’s present, what’s going on, we can’t similarly coordinate our emotions, our moods. And where anaphora doesn’t naturally occur, we invent it. Wakened by a siren at an early morning hour, I look out the window at two red emergency trucks and, with their flashlight beams playing over the side of the house, five firefighters in black invested with the right to look back at me. Neither ambivalence nor doubt nor uncertainty nor skepticism will secure us any immunity from that. Night: that is the name of the horse that over and over Lola imagines riding through long insomniac hours. Raccoons emerge from a drain pipe into the dark, chortling, giggling.

1.

The mind is always too simply seeking meaning, trying to boil some beautiful thing down to its conceptual essence.

What can stun the mind into quietness? What can briefly flummox the mind in its quest to reduce everything to a concept?

Well, a work of art can.

A painting in Blair Hobbs’s new exhibition features a cut-out drawing of Flannery O’Connor in a pearl choker and purple V-necked dress. She’s flanked by drawings of peacocks and poppies; a birthday cake on metallic gold paper floats above her head. It is titled, like the exhibition, Birthday Cake for Flannery. The number 100 sits atop the frosting, each digit lit with an orange paper flame—marking O’Connor’s hundredth birthday, today, March 25. Glitter and sequins, gold thread and fabric scraps everywhere.

The image is candy to my eyes. I grew up in a stripped-down fundamentalist Protestant church—think Baptist but with a cappella singing. Violence and grace, sin and redemption, idolatry and judgment: When I read O’Connor’s stories for the first time, in high school, I recognized her religious concerns as my own. Fifteen years later I moved to Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where O’Connor’s Southern milieu—backwoods prophets, religious zealots, barely concealed racism and classism—was my literal backyard. I raised chickens in homage to her, then repurposed the coop as my writing studio, where I drafted a collection of stories wrestling with Christianity and sexuality in the American South.

Hobbs, who lives in Mississippi, has been making collage art since she retired from teaching at the University of Mississippi. Her first show, Radiant Matter, was an exploration of the ways her body underwent transformation during treatment for breast cancer. Birthday Cake for Flannery is her second series of collage paintings. Last month I drove from my current home in Chattanooga to Atlanta to see the seventeen paintings in the show. They weren’t installed yet, but Spalding Nix, who owns the gallery, and Jamie Bourgeois, the gallery director, hosted me for a preview.

Jamie unwrapped the paintings one by one. Every canvas—plus one creepy little sculpture wrapped in illuminated wire and encased in a thumbtack-lined shadowbox, meant to evoke the “mummified Jesus” in O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood—is an exuberant explosion of color and found materials illustrating O’Connor’s best-known stories: “Revelation,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Displaced Person,” “A Temple Of The Holy Ghost,” “Parker’s Back,” and “Good Country People.”

Occasionally, when we were small, our father spoke to us of geography.

Daddy is from a place called Palestine, he said, in a lesson captured by my mother on the family’s camcorder. In the footage, my father sits in a small rocking chair, brown eyes intent, a little shy. My younger brother and sister are absorbed by the array of blocks on the floor, but I am close to my father’s feet, my fluffy blond head thrown back, mouth pink and agape. He holds up a globe, his fingers sliding toward a sliver of brown and green. He tilts it toward me to reveal cramped lettering: Israel/Palestine.

I hop up to look, my nose nearly skimming the painted plastic as I squint at the hair-thin ink. I am vaguely aware of a thing called countries, loosely grasping that these are places full of people that are like—but unlike—me. There is no mention, today or any day that I can recall up to that point, of the first half of that forward-slashed name, that thing called Israel. There are no tales of shed blood, no wistful tributes to a lost homeland. My father simply hops his fingers, jumping decades and tragedies. Due south, he points to an orange oblong slab of land. That’s Saudi Arabia. That’s where Sittoo lives. My father uses the فلاحي word sittoo—honored lady—our dialect’s term for grandmother. I squint again, trying to see her.

My grandmother, like these countries, feels important and vague. It would be one year before she came to live with us and two years before we uprooted and moved to Jeddah, her adopted city by the sea. In our lesson, my father did not linger, did not try to bridge the difference between Jeddah and Palestine. Instead, the video shows him smiling, rolling the world to my left. He lands on a green sprawl labeled the United States. His finger taps another dot, Chicago, which clings to a lake shaped like a tear.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Nora Fulton’s poem “La Comédie-Française” appears in the new Spring issue of the Review, no. 251.

 

How did this poem start? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

I wrote this poem in September 2024, but it was a reflection of a three-day seminar I’d attended the month before. The seminar, organized by two brilliant friends, Matt Hare and Sam Warren Miell, was about the French film production company Diagonale, and focused on the work of its central director, Paul Vecchiali. Of the films we watched, Encore and Corps à cœur were especially on my mind while writing. Both are romantic melodramas, but they undercut that tendency in lots of interesting ways—I think I find them moving precisely because they undercut that part of themselves. The seminar focused on the way that Diagonale functioned as a collective of people who would take up different roles in each film, both in front of and behind the camera. This was likened to the troupe established by Molière, to which the title of this poem refers.

Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it?

Welcome to your Saturday edition of Today in Books. Here’s a look at all the news from the world of books and reading we covered this week.

As we close out the first quarter of what is turning into the longest year in a nonstop series of long years, let’s take a few moments to look back at the biggest book censorship stories so far. Some of these stories will have links to read further, while others will be short summaries of what’s been going on. In an era where the news on book censorship is only continuing to escalate in number and in speed, pausing to catch up on the biggest stories helps give perspective on what’s come before, where we are now, and what to anticipate in the coming months.

From Individual School Bans to State Legislation

Though not a new phenomenon–and indeed, one written about here for years–this year’s collection of book censorship news makes something startlingly clear. What began as targeted attacks on individual books in individual schools, school districts, and public libraries has pushed upward to state-level legislation targeting these institutions and their staff. Just the number of librarian criminalization bills in 2025 alone shows how many state legislatures have folded to rhetoric spewed by high-level officials, as well as those on the ground.

None of this stops at the state level, though. The states are testing grounds for what the goals are at the federal level, as you’ll see shortly.

Utah and South Carolina Amp Up State-Sanctioned Book Bans

I recently shared my suspicions about the consequences of a lack of media literacy. The critical skills that allow people to apply context, curiosity, and proof of validity when consuming information have never been more important. A quote from Sam Wineburg, PhD bears repeating:

I’ve come to believe that reliable information is to civic health what clean water and proper sanitation are to public health. Never has so much information been at our fingertips as it is today. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on one thing: our educational response to this challenge.

What better place to start than the library? Whether it’s through the school or the public library system, there is a wealth of information available to help learners of all ages, and it falls to librarians to make these resources easy to find and navigate.

Stephen Graham Jones is one of the most prolific authors, and this makes me extremely happy because his books are awesome. His latest novel is no exception: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is deliciously disturbing.

Now, I’ve read my fair share of vampire novels, but this one definitely leaves a mark on the body of literature about sun-averse, sharp-fanged, generationally-wealthy blood hunters. If you’ve read any Stephen Graham Jones before, you’ll be happy to know that he’s in fine form once again. (If you haven’t read SGJ yet, where on earth have you been? Get thee to a bookshelf quick and grab literally anything this man has written!!)

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones The novel opens with a frame narrative. It’s the story of a woman named Etsy teaching at a university and trying to earn tenure. When she’s granted access to a newly-unearthed journal from over a century ago penned by her great-great-grandfather, she seizes it as an opportunity to secure her job status. But what she discovers in this journal is nothing she could have expected. Her ancestor, Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne, opens his tale amidst a series of disturbing murders in 1912 Montana. As the local authorities attempt to discover the killer in their midst, Arthur begins hearing the confessions of a new member of his congregation–a Native American man called Good Stab. As Good Stab’s incredible tale unfolds, it brings 19th century colonial histories of genocide into the 20th century. Deeper and deeper into the past we go, and as we do, SGJ’s inventive and bloody tale unfolds with increasing suspense. This is one of those books you don’t realize you can’t put down until you try to.

Howdy once again! Every other week or so, I collect some of the most intriguing comics-related headlines in one spot. Here is this week’s round-up.

News from DC and Marvel

Even as Superman is set to enter the public domain in less than a decade, the long, messy legal battle over who owns him right now staggers along with a new lawsuit concerning overseas copyrights.Speaking of which, a stage play about Superman’s creators, Jerry and Joe: Birth of a Superhero, will be performed in Rhode Island this May.NPR’s review of Daredevil: Born Again highlights a larger trend of superhero adaptations acting like they’re ashamed to be superhero adaptations.Stranger Things‘ Sadie Sink has been cast in 2026’s Spider-Man 4, but her role remains a mystery. The rumor mill suggests she will be playing Jean Grey, but only time will tell if that’s right or not. Get your bets in now, I guess!Playing the Penguin wasn’t enough for Colin Farrell, apparently. He is now up for another DC role: Sgt. Rock.

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News from the Wider Comics World

The Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics is open for submissions until May 1!Fans of the One-Punch Man anime can finally breathe a sigh of relief. After a six year gap, Season 3 will finally arrive in October of this year.The manga series Claymore is heading for a live-action adaptation on CBS. The show’s executive producer is Masi Oka, best known as the time manipulator Hiro Nakamura on Heroes. Whether he will also play an on-screen role is still unknown.HBO’s head of comedy talked a bit more about the cancellation of The Franchise, their superhero-film-themed satire, and why it might not have connected with audiences.Here at Book Riot, we revealed the cover and provided a sneak peek at Marker Snyder’s upcoming middle grade graphic novel First Kiss With Fangs.

Severance is one of the most-talked-about television shows of the year. The Apple TV+ series starring Adam Scott, created by Dan Erickson, and directed by Ben Stiller is all anyone can think about. Especially after the season 2 finale.

It’s no surprise the show has been such a hit with horror fans. The thought of not having control of your own brain? The idea of a company doing things to you that are out of your control? Absolutely horrifying.

Unsurprisingly, these concepts have been played with in quite a few horror novels as well. Here are a few of the best horror novels like Severence to keep you entertained while you wait for season 3. Don’t worry. Ben Stiller promises the next season won’t take another three years to premiere!

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris A lot of book lovers have dreams of snagging a job in the publishing industry. But much like Lumon, Wagner Books is potentially hiding some dark secrets. Editorial assistant Nella was the only Black woman at Wagner Books before Hazel arrives. Nella at first hopes to find an ally in Hazel, but something about her seems off. Then Nella starts receiving threatening notes at work telling her to “LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.” Nella is determined to figure out what’s really going on at Wagner and how Hazel is involved.

Lakewood by Megan Giddings Imagine taking on a job that promises to take care of your every need. The only catch is you have to basically sign away your humanity. Lena Johnson takes on a new job as part of a secret program in Lakewood, Michigan. They pay well. They take care of all medical expenses. They offer employees a free place to live. She just has to agree to participate in the company’s strange experiments, and she can’t tell any of her friends and family about what she sees there. She’s told the work their doing in Lakewood will change the world, but at what cost?

Welcome to your Saturday edition of Today in Books. Here’s a look at all the news from the world of books and reading we covered this week.

In response to the increase in attacks against trans rights, a group of crime fiction writers partnered with the Transgender Law Center to raise money to support them in their work to “champion the right of all transgender people and gender-nonconforming people to make their own choices and live freely, safely, and authentically.”

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

Around this time last year, the USB hookup in my car stopped working. I started to listen to the radio more and began to buy CDs again, something I hadn’t done much since I was a teenager. Greg Mendez played a concert in Nashville, and before he went on, I bought two from his merch table: his self-titled album from 2023, and Live at Purgatory, from 2022. I put them in my car. I try not to skip songs on either one. But I am happy when I hear him introduce the sixth track on Live at Purgatory, “Bike.”

It’s a short song. Mendez sings the lyrics only once. This is what I hear, which is different from what I see on Genius but is the same as in a handwritten lyric card I can partially see in a picture on Bandcamp:

I wanna ride your brother’s bike
I wanna stab his friends sometimes
I wanna tell a million lies
I wanna steal your partner’s heart
I wanna turn your pain to art
I wanna cry in your mother’s arms
I wanna wear your daddy’s jeans
I wanna drink the way he did
I wanna smoke menthol cigarettes
and I wanna fight
I wanna fuck on ecstasy
I wanna love, but what’s that mean?
I wanna go back on EBT

Those words take a little more than fifty-five seconds. It’s instrumental for a minute more. I only recently realized how short it is. It was a strange realization, because I love this song and talk about it to my friends, and would have thought I would have already noticed that it was so brief, or that it doesn’t have a chorus, or a bridge, or even more than one verse. But by the end of the lyrics, I am often so struck by his voice and by the way his voice says these things—which in his mouth are so beautiful, even if they are not necessarily beautiful things to say—that my mind has gone into outer space, and I guess the rest of the song, or its absence, has been lost on me.