Some days after Barry’s death on December 25, 2020, I pulled every book of his I owned from the shelves around my apartment and stacked them on a corner of my desk. Then I walked down the hill to the used bookshop in the small Oregon town where I live and found several books of his I did not yet own. For a year, I picked at the stack, revisiting passages I recalled vividly or had forgotten. The words would come when I was ready, I figured, so I scribbled sentences on scraps of paper, lost them, found them, rewrote them, in an ambulatory manner I thought might have pleased Barry. He was the only writer who made me feel virtuous for my slowness, which I once heard him call “patience,” though I believe even Barry knew the fine line between virtuousness and slacking off. He had told me he sometimes admonished his students, “I cannot teach you discipline, and I cannot teach you hunger. You have to find those things inside yourself.” 

It was his request that I write this essay. Or maybe it was not a request, but a suggestion. He had asked it in a way so gentle, so lacking in urgency, that I would sometimes feel as if I dreamed it, but then I would relisten to a voicemail he left me, which I had saved, and there it was: “I’ve got a kind of favor to ask.” 

When I returned his call, he told me a man was writing a profile for the alumni magazine of the college Barry had attended. The man was interviewing some celebrated writers about Barry’s legacy, but it had struck Barry that these writers were all of his own generation or one below him. Did he even have a legacy if few young people read his work, he wondered? Was there any space for his work in the collective conscience, amid an economy of distraction and a literary world enamored with speed? This was two months before he died. I had known Barry only four months.

He asked me to “think about this,” in case the man writing the profile gave me a call, and maybe also to write about his legacy myself if I felt compelled. This is how he was, his profound gestures composed of language so light it seemed to drift off. I told him I would. 

I’ve always kept diaries in the style of a catch-all notebook: flipping through them reveals poems, dated journal entries, to-do lists, quotes from books, phone numbers, and overheard dialogue. I found this page in the middle of my diary circa freshman year of high school. I was practicing my grown-up-style handwriting and forgery of my mother’s signature in order to excuse myself, and sometimes my friends, from school. I was failing pretty spectacularly to be convincing, at least to my eye now, but as I recall it mostly worked. I was fourteen or fifteen and immensely frustrated that my teachers insisted on droning about mathematics and the branches of government and books by boring straight people when I had my own reading list to attend to, as well as drugs with which I was eager to experiment. At this point, I had already known for some years that I wanted to be a writer. At the end of the year, I would drop out to pursue a different sort of education.

Melissa Febos is the author of four books, most recently, Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Barbara Deming Foundation, the British Library, and others. She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

En route to a crime scene down back roads in rural Ireland, Sergeant Jackie Noonan briefly flips down her car’s sun visor to check out the sky. “That is some incarnation of sun,” Noonan announces to her fellow officer Pronsius, and though it falls over a landscape where cows “sit down like shelves of rock in the middle of the fields,” she deems it “equatorial.”

     “You know where Guadalajara is, Pronsius?” 

     “Is it the far side of Belmullet?”

Technically, she concedes, it is. A little later when she asks him, “You ever been anywhere exotic, Pronsius?” he replies, “I been the far side of Belmullet.”

My father, Ted Berrigan, is primarily known for his poetry, especially his book The Sonnets, which reimagined the traditional sonnet from a perspective steeped in the art of assemblage circa the early sixties. He was also an editor, a publisher, and a prose writer—specifically one who worked in the forms of journals and reviews. While his later journals were often written with the expectation of publication—meaning the journal-as-form could be assigned by a magazine editor—his sixties journals are much more internal. In these journals, he’s writing to document his daily life and his consciousness while figuring out how to live, and how to live as a poet, so to speak. These excerpts from his journals were originally published in Michael Friedman’s lovingly edited Shiny magazine in 2000. They were selected by the poet and editor Larry Fagin, who invited me to come to Columbia University’s library, where my father’s journals from the early sixties are archived, and work with him on the selection process. We were looking, as I think of it now, for moments of loud or quiet breakthrough—details, incidents, and points of recognition that contributed to his ongoing formation as a person and poet.

“The Chicago Report,” which narrates a weekend trip from Iowa City to Chicago to attend a reading by Kenneth Koch and Anne Sexton put on by Poetry magazine, was written in 1968 in the form of a letter to Ron Padgett, a close friend and fellow poet. It was later published in an issue ofThe World, the Poetry Project’s mimeographed magazine, as well as in Nice To See You, an homage book put together by friends after my father’s death in 1983. It may be recognizable as an affable, freewheeling, and at times incendiary piece of first-person satire, filtering the voice of “Ted Berrigan” through the voice of Ted as known by Ron, or vice versa. My father was a working-class Korean War veteran who didn’t feel comfortable in high-class literary circles but did engage them at times, with amusement and a kind of gentle predilection for disruption. 

—Anselm Berrigan

A couple of years ago, I sent my parents a chapter from the manuscript of a memoir I’d written. I couldn’t not send it, though I waited—partly out of cowardice and partly to prevent them from claiming a bigger editorial role than I could tolerate—until the copyediting stage, when it was too late to make substantive changes. While working on the book I’d been able to suppress any anxiety over what my family might think or feel about it, but once it was finished I remembered (you really do forget) that those it describes are not merely characters in a story but people in my life. And then, suddenly, everything I’d written about them was available for preorder. 

The memoir, which sprang from my attempt to reclaim property owned by my great-grandfather in Poland, was hardly a lurid tell-all. On the contrary: it was polite, restrained. The chapter in question was really the only one I felt nervous about, because in it I mentioned a falling-out and subsequent legal fight among my father and his siblings. On first reading my parents were, as I’d feared, hurt, embarrassed, betrayed, blindsided—but after some difficult conversations, we agreed that I could address their concerns by deleting a couple of sentences, altering a handful of words, and changing the names of my uncle and aunt, a gesture my parents felt would go a long way in demonstrating that my intentions weren’t to harm or disparage. This last request created an unexpected wrinkle—in the event that anyone sued me for libel, I would no longer be able to invoke the standard defense that it was all true—but I was fine with it, and the publisher’s lawyers, given how vague my account of the dispute had now become, eventually gave the go-ahead. So my father’s brother became “Hershel,” his sister became “Leah,” peace was restored, and the knot in my stomach loosened. But a few months later when I received the galleys, my mother read the sensitive section in context and wondered if Leah might after all have preferred to appear under her real name. I said it wasn’t too late to depseudonymize her if that was what she wanted, so my mother called Leah and read her the chapter over the phone. 

Leah, my mother reported back, was livid. Beyond annoyed or disappointed—she was furious, hoarse with anger. She doesn’t understand, my mother said, why you even have to publish the book. The problem, it emerged, didn’t have to do with how I’d portrayed Leah, who was barely mentioned—she got a couple of lines of dialogue and no description, as in literally not a single descriptive word—but with how I’d portrayed her mother, Bubby, my grandmother. Or more specifically—because Bubby was also barely in the book—how I’d portrayed Bubby’s sofa, and how that portayal, in turn, implicated Bubby. 

What it came down to was a throwaway line, a quip, in a paragraph describing the shiva after Bubby died, in 2005, while the family rift was still very much ongoing. The scene had stayed with me all these years, and I included it in the chapter because it was strange and tragic and funny, and so poignantly captured the tension between the siblings: three adult children, two of them not talking to the third, stuck on the same sofa for a full week as they received well-wishers. To quote the offending paragraph in full:

For close to seven decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a first book. Many of these writers—John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Jo Bang, Solmaz Sharif, and Diana Khoi Nguyen, among many others—have gone on to become leading voices in their generations.

This year’s competition received close to a thousand submissions, which were read by the preliminary judges, Sumita Chakraborty and Timothy Donnelly. After much deliberating, the final judges—Victoria Chang, Brian Teare, and Phillip B. Williams—awarded this year’s prizes to Jada Renée Allen, Sasha Burshteyn, April Goldman, and Kristina Martino. The runners-up are Jae Nichelle and Daniel Shonning. The Paris Review Daily is pleased to to publish the poems of this year’s winners.

The poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks wrote her third novel, The Bloater, in just four weeks in the autumn of 1967, which would have been impressive by any standards but her own. She had originally set out to finish it in half the time and had hoped it would earn her “a lot of red-hot money.” (Here, she fell short too). But the result was a dizzying, madcap story that was a hit with the critics. Again, most writers would have been over the moon with such a reception, but Tonks could never be so predictable. “It just proves the English like their porridge,” she once reportedly replied to congratulations from her editor. To borrow a confession from The Bloater’s canny narrator—a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Tonks herself: “I knew perfectly well what I was doing.”

Between 1963 and 1972, Tonks published two collections of poetry, six novels, a large body of literary journalism, and an experimental sound-poem. She was a serious stylist, writing in the tradition of French nineteenth-century novels and those preeminent portraitists of the modern metropolis: Baudelaire and Rimbaud. As a hip young thing, a fixture on the London scene, her writing captured the pungent, punchy essence of that city in the Swinging Sixties. But she was also an experimental writer and a pioneering mixed media artist; her 1966 “Sono-Montage” was made in collaboration with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the now-legendary musician and composer Delia Derbyshire (most famous for her electronic arrangement for the theme tune to the cult British TV series Doctor Who). Poetry readings “can be very boring,” Tonks told an interviewer in 1968—“I want to bring poetry into its own dramatically.”

As such, Tonks sat somewhere between the establishment and the avant-garde; as concisely summed up in this description in The Guardian in 1970: “She has a white Italian sports car, a French purple velvet trouser suit, and lives in a Queen Anne house in Hampstead.” Nowhere is her particular eclecticism more in evidence than in The Bloater, which documents London’s cultural vanguard with Tonks’s signature caustic humor and stylistic flair. Originally published in 1968, it sets the tone for the three novels that followed it—Businessmen as Lovers (1969), The Way Out of Berkeley Square (1970), and The Halt During the Chase (1972)—all of which are variations on the same theme: stories of the breakneck romantic escapades of young Tonks-like heroines.

***

Last year, when my mother moved apartments, I came into possession of a largeish Prada box full of my childhood diaries. They go from 1981—I was four, and dictated the diary to my aunt—up to the nineties. I still haven’t read most of them. (I think it was a handbag, and not a small one, that originally came in that Prada box.) It is hard work to feel love for one’s childhood and adolescent self. Reading this entry, for example, I feel ashamed at my eleven-year-old self’s American imperialistic attitude towards my grandparents, who hadn’t heard of a planetarium before but “liked it very much.” It’s interesting that I then apparently felt I had to explain the concept of a planetarium for the benefit of people “a million years from now.” The whole entry gives me a “dutiful” feeling, when I read it now. I think I used to feel like I had to be writing all this stuff down, maintaining a chatty, “delightful” style, explaining every last thing down to the speech patterns of my fifth-grade science teacher, and appealing to some kind of “universal” reader who would understand it all and give each detail its proper value (although apparently this person also wouldn’t know what a planetarium was). What even is a childhood diary—for whom do we keep it?

Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Its sequel, Either/Or, will be published on May 24.

I frequently feel saddened and angry that animals—whom I love, sometimes feed, and never eat—mostly ignore or even run away from me. For this reason, I enjoyed Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable’s animated film Penumbra, which stages a court case against a nonhuman defendant—“representing all animals or the animal as such”—that is on trial for crimes against human beings in contempt of human reason. The judge is an animal, the members of the jury are animals, too; from the beginning, power and numbers are on their side. There are two humans, but they’re dressed as creatures: “Juliana Huxtable,” the defense, is costumed in furry-esque bunny ears, which mirror the headdress worn by the prosecution, and “Hannah Black, genus homo, species sapiens” recalls the animal-headed Egyptian god Ra (in Derrida’s reading of Plato, the father of reason or logos). The CGI places human and nonhuman characters on a fair—and very low poly count—playing field of unreality. And so the debate begins.

But it’s really a monologue: Huxtable speaks only rarely; her nonhuman “kin,” never. Animals, here, are outside the realm of representation, in both the legal and the semiotic senses. It’s a canny dramatization of the absurd, unhappy impasse posed by the discourse of anthropocentrism, which, in its attempt to “decenter” people in favor of a more inclusive worldview, must also mute the capacity that enables discourse (and community, identity, thought) itself. This capacity is both subject and object, content and container, of Black’s breathless address. “Through the use of language,” she begins, “I will show you, and you will understand, and through doing so you will have to admit that you do not fundamentally sympathize with the principle of the animal, you respond to abstract concepts, you know how to come when your name is called.” 

Yet the dazzling avalanche of words that follows is less an airtight argument and more a poem with the rhetorical texture of a rant. Penumbra isn’t just an intervention in theory masquerading as video art; it brilliantly reveals, aesthetically, what analysis cannot: the illogic, the nonhuman, within language and hence within us. Black’s rapid-fire circumlocutions and cascading repetitions are actually impossible to follow; instead, they are reduced to an ebb and flow of breath and rhythm that wash, anxiously, over us. The animals, of course, refuse to respond to her questions, her attempts at taxonomy: “Do you deny that you practice cannibalism?” Legally, the word penumbra refers to constitutional rights inferred using interpolative reasoning; in science, it connotes the gray area between a light and a shadow. This trial is an arbitration of gradients via an indictment of law: a tragedy of reason that makes a mockery not just of justice, but at all of our attempts at living in harmony.

It’s a sign of our species’ self-hatred that most people in Sunday’s audience at Metrograph—where the film screened along with two others from the 2021 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement—seemed to interpret Penumbra as a celebration of the inevitable triumph of the inhuman. Maybe they’re right. And no one wants to sympathize with the prosecution! But I felt so bad for us, the tiny minority in a universe that, though sensate, is senseless. As Black’s character says, “We have tried to hold on to the collective being, but the animal refuses to speak to us. All that we know about brutality we learned from animals. We learned how to treat each other as food, we learned how to die indifferently.” Aprés nous, le dèluge, I thought, despondently, leaving the theater.

1

Several years ago, moving into an old but new-to-me apartment with bare white walls, I tacked a poster-size sheet of heavy paper above my desk. Over time, I began to randomly pin found photographs and scraps of stories and poems to this sheet—including a couple of reproductions of Ellsworth Kelly postcards, which I’d torn out of magazines. Every so often, my eyes would stray upward, and these flashes of color would slide into view. I had not thought of them again until very recently, when I heard of an exhibition curated from the four hundred postcards Kelly made and mailed at various points during his seven decades of making art.

I did not think much then about why they appealed to me. Some of the other images on my board were actual found photographs, as in ones I found on the street, including a glossy, black-and-white roadside image of a crime scene, probably photographed by highway patrol, then ripped in half. Like the collages I sometimes made on notebooks containing my first drafts, none of these pictures were meant as literal inspiration; they were just references for daydreaming, vague and strange enough that they might compel some unexpected sentence or train of thought.

In one of the Kelly postcards I’d pinned up, four irregular squarish panels of slightly diluted shades of blue, yellow, green, and red are pasted like a scrim over a landscape of a mountain and lake. They reminded me of endless things, like Baldessari dots that simultaneously redirect the eye elsewhere and draw it back to the point of obfuscation, piquing curiosity about what it conceals. In their pure arrangement of color, the postcards were pleasingly like the faded multicolored flags that flutter over used car lots, like the surprise patterns and colors of paint that emerge on adjacent boarded-up windows when old city buildings are torn down. They were both curtains and windows, shielding what lay behind them and opening into something else.