When I first started reading, I was only recommended books with a clear plot line. I would be compelled by my curiosity to keep reading. I would want to know how the story unfolds and the events that move it along. Some books I wouldn’t be able to put down because the chapters would end with cliffhangers, and others because I was too engrossed in that world of high fantasy. After a year or two of reading this way, I found my way to books with a less compelling plot or sometimes even no plot at all. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed them just as much, if not more, than those with the plot as the center of the story. I have read a ton of “no plot, just vibes” books since, and I adore them. I like sitting with a character-driven narrative and appreciate how the story ebbs and flows along with the tides in its characters’ hearts. I like being immersed in a person’s thoughts, idiosyncrasies, irrationality, insecurity, and just their way of life. I like getting a look into quieter, more introspective perspectives as opposed to a thrilling plot that keeps me on the edge of my seat.

Here’s a list of “no plot, just vibes” books that I’ve read and enjoyed. The vibe could be anything from being a millionaire in New York to living in a one-bedroom apartment as a family of four in Mumbai to defying all concepts of time and space. It can be about teenagers figuring out their lives, or a grown man trying to see where his marriage went wrong, or a family navigating the immigrant experience.

I hope at least one of these brings you to the vibe you’re looking for!

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors We get on a journey with Cleo and Frank, or Cleopatra and Frankenstein to each other. She’s a young British painter, and he’s an older self-made millionaire. They end up talking 90 minutes before New Year’s Eve in 2006. By the time it’s 2007, their witty remarks have turned into full-blown flirtation. They get married impulsively, and their life is permanently alerted. Their close-knit friends and family are taken along for the ride. The story moves through its characters, their quirks, compulsions, insecurities, successes, and downfalls. The writing is sharp, and even though most characters might not be very likable, they read very real.

1.

Once I had to go to Disney World with my small children. On the way to the airport our taxi driver exhibited signs of Obsessive Disney Disorder—when he found out where we were going he started obsessively describing and listing and explaining everything that had to do with Disney World, even though he was a grown man.

We stayed at the Portofino Bay Hotel, a Disney-owned property that is a replica of the storied village on the Italian Riviera. There were imitation Renaissance churches and Mediterranean piazzas clustered around a fake harbor with old Fiats parked on the cobblestones and fishing boats moored in the fake bay. Outside cafés ranged on the harbor, serving espresso under green-and-white striped awnings. Italian cypresses were planted along the pools. If you didn’t know it was a Disney replica of a real place, it would have to be characterized as being extremely tasteful and lovely. So you did tend to get confused between: Is this a theme park of Italy or is it just lovely and pleasant.

There is a REAL Florida out there that is TRULY historic. I madly drove out to find the REAL Orlando, forgetting my phobia of freeways. After almost getting killed (horns blasting at my side, cars swerving out of my way), I did find the real Orlando. It is situated on several lakes lined by turn-of-the-last-century Victorians and bungalows. I went to the history museum. The number one industry in central Florida is cattle. Has anyone in Florida ever seen a head of cattle? No. But maybe that was before Disney.

In Franz Kafka’s first published story, “Description of a Struggle,” the narrator is sitting in a drawing room at a rickety little table, eating a piece of fruitcake that “did not taste very good,” when a man walks up to him. The man is described as an “acquaintance,” but we soon realize he is a double, or another part of the narrator’s self. The acquaintance has fallen in love and wants to boast about it. “If you weren’t in such a state,” he scolds, “[you] would know how improper it is to talk about an amorous girl to a man sitting alone drinking schnapps.” The comment seems to threaten an unchecked appetite. What would the lonely, schnapps-drinking man do if tempted by the girl? The struggle that follows, metaphorically speaking, is between the sides of the protagonist’s character—on one side, the man who desires to stand apart from society and guard his creative self, and on the other, he who wishes to fit in and reap the pleasures of fruitcake and amorous girls.

The tension in Kafka between appetite and its fulfillment is a crucial aspect of the writer’s work. Kafka’s characters are often hungry—the performer from “A Hunger Artist” has made starving himself into an art; Gregor Samsa from The Metamorphosis slowly stops eating and wastes away. But their hunger is often not for the foods of this world. Gregor refers to himself as hungering as for “an unknown nourishment.” The hunger artist’s last words are a confession that fasting was not difficult for him because, he says, “I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” Instead the characters seek the deeper forms of sustenance—emotional, societal, sexual, spiritual—and don’t find them.

Today we are publishing a previously unpublished poem by the poet, critic, and editor Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz was hailed as a promising short story writer and poet in the generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman; a longtime editor at the Partisan Review, he was the youngest person ever to win the Bollingen Prize in 1959. (Some of Schwartz’s poems and letters were published in the Review in the eighties and nineties.) The poem below was discovered without a date, but is immediately recognizable for its recasting of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from an alcoholic’s perspective. This riff is made poignant by the fact that Schwartz’s later years were characterized by mental illness and alcoholism. He died, largely isolated, at the Chelsea Hotel in 1966.

Whose booze this is, I ought to think I know.
I bought it several weeks ago.
It stands there stolid on the shelf
Making me feel lower than low
Reminding me how I am low,
Making me think of Crane and Poe.

My fatlipped mouth must think it queer
To stop without a single beer,
To stop without a single beer
The deadest day I ever spent
In boredom and in self-contempt,
Sober, sour, discontent.

My fingers have begun to shake,
My nerves think there is some mistake.
The only other thought I think.
Is how I failed to be a rake,
A story which should take the cake.

We are thrilled to announce that The Paris Review has won the 2024 ASME Award for Fiction, marking the second year in a row that the magazine has received the honor. The three prizewinning stories are Rivers Solomon’s “This Is Everything There Will Ever Be,” a disarmingly warm portrait of “just another late-forties dyke entirely too obsessed with basketball, dogs, and memes”; “My Good Friend,” Juliana Leite’s English-language debut, translated from the Portuguese by Zoë Perry, a story written in the form of an elderly widow’s Sunday-evening diary entry (“About the roof repair, I have nothing new to report”) that turns into a story of mostly unspoken, mutual decades-long love; and James Lasdun’s “Helen,” in which a man writing about his parents’ upper-class milieu in seventies London—the time of the IRA’s mainland campaign in Britain—stumbles upon the journals of a family friend, a woman who lives in what the narrator calls a “state of incandescent, almost spiritual horror.” All three stories will be unlocked from behind the paywall this week, and you can also listen to Rivers Solomon’s story on our podcast here. Enjoy!

Paul Yamazaki has been City Lights Bookstore’s chief buyer for over fifty years, responsible for filling the shelves of the San Francisco shop with the diverse range of titles that make City Lights one of the most beloved independent bookstores in the United States. Founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 and once a hangout for Beat poets, today the bookstore and publisher specializes in poetry, literature in translation, and left-leaning books relating to social justice and political theory. Yamazaki was the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2023 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community and has mentored generations of booksellers across the United States. This interview was compiled from conversations held between Yamazaki and friends of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

INTERVIEWER

What a joy it is to be here with you today at City Lights on this foggy Saturday in San Francisco. Walking in the front door, I feel like I instantly know where I am. How do you choose which books to put in the browser’s line of sight, how to signal what the bookstore stands for?

PAUL YAMAZAKI

America has a perfect round ass. We watch her mount a McMansion staircase from a low angle, the framing as deliberate as it is haphazard. The camera is handheld. America has been ironing; the green polo shirt she was pressing, however, looks like it was made from the kind of polyester blend that’s spared wrinkles no matter how badly you treat it. She carries the green shirt in one hand. With the other she grips the metal railing for balance. Her stilettos click loudly on the terra-cotta tile. Each step is measured. In the background, a sparse but funky beat.

The home in which America Moore performs is Mediterranean, or maybe Tuscan. The walls are a luscious cream with butterscotch undertones. Iron balusters with rounded knuckles adorn a winding staircase spanning at least three floors. The statement windows flanking the staircase are tall, narrow, and arched. The camera struggles to compensate for the sunlight beaming through them, resulting in blown-out portions of the image. America disappears momentarily behind a support beam that’s been drywalled over and painted the same tea-stained-paper shade as the walls. There’s a potted fern at the edge of the frame.

The action between America and her costar remains contained to the staircase, though we catch glimpses of a living room suite beyond the fern. Two cream sofas with wooden feet are arranged opposite each other, creating a conversational setup. Between them is an oval coffee table placed on a rectangular area rug that’s an ebony shade of brown. In some frames, in which just a corner of the rug is visible, it could be mistaken for soil strewn on the tile floor. It’s difficult to discern the material of the coffee table, as one of the decorative objects resting on it produces a glare that obscures most details. Perhaps it’s polished mahogany. The configuration of furniture positioned to face the table includes a Biedermeieresque upholstered stool the performers also avoid, though it is perhaps the piece that would best accommodate a scene. We know America doesn’t live here. Most likely someone has rented the house for the shoot.

—Whitney Mallett 

I shouldn’t have been surprised that the hedge fund analyst knew me better than I knew myself. It was his job to predict distant developments, covert motives, hidden risks, and shortly into our brief relationship he turned his powers of divination on me. After I told him I was writing a novel about finance, he suggested that I’d been drawn to him partly for mercenary reasons: that I was, in a word, dating him for research. He took it in stride—he lived and breathed all things mercenary—but he did issue a polite warning.

“Never put anything I tell you in writing,” he said.

I’d like to think that, in his predictive genius, he also knew I would eventually ignore this warning.

***

I like the ashes on Ash Wednesday. I am at best a lapsed Catholic though it would be more accurate to say that I never really began, just that I was raised against the backdrop of already-faded-Catholicism and its associated traumas, now transmuted and passed on in their mysterious ways to me. I inherited also the pining and the predilection that many Americans have for certain things to do with Ireland. In San Francisco, I used to drink afternoons after I got off work at an Irish bar in Noe Valley, the Valley Tavern, or a different Irish bar downtown, the Chieftain, or sometimes come to think of it an Irish bar on Guerrero with big windows where my friend Graham and I used to like to watch the rain. San Francisco is a more Catholic city than most people think, and more Irish too. More Irish American, which is really what I am talking about: girls in red school uniforms and tennis shoes outside the Convent of the Sacred Heart, looking forward to football games Friday nights at St. Ignatius, the high school by the church where my feet were washed as a kid on Holy Thursday. The gold beads strewn on the street after St. Patrick’s Day parades, orange-and-green bumper stickers for a united Ireland overlaid with 49ers insignia. There are things like that everywhere, I know. But then there is the way the fog rolls in in the afternoon, bone-chillingly damp, and the washed-up light on the pink facades in the Richmond, the looming lonesome palm trees lining the meridians. And the illuminated signs for old-school strip clubs as you drive into North Beach and the Tenderloin—or the one I always liked that read JOEY’S ICE CREAM ESPRESSO SAUSAGE WASH AND DRY. Now I have lost the thread of religion. Really I am just watching the movie of my childhood again. I have a memory of dust motes floating around in a shaft of light and trying to catch them in my hands, one long afternoon, or maybe many afternoons, or never. It’s just an image.

The ashes are an image too—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Images like those that appear in Cheever’s journals, which are essentially liturgical, always marking the coming and going of Lent and Easter, because that is what gives a year order. He makes lists: “The calendar of flowers, gin bottles, steak bones.” I meant to say something about sacrifice and self-denial, but I am also just making lists of things I have seen. Another year has gone by and it has not been an easy one. Many times I think of those Irish bars in San Francisco, their promise of interior and quiet and calm, and the allure of darkness in the afternoon. Cheever writes about the way the impulse toward self-destruction can be, at the beginning, as small as a grain of sand. “Do not drink. Do not et cetera, et cetera.” So there is something about self-denial after all. Last February, this time, I was driving south from Mendocino, past surf motels with vacancy signs. California feels washed out this time of year, eucalyptus bark stripped off all the trees, the sensation of erosion present. Yet there is effulgence too, even in this season, when it rains or is supposed to. One year in the hills north of the city: remarkable yellow blooms coating the hills like a carpet and everything brown for once astounding green. In “Ash Wednesday,” T. S. Eliot writes of those “who walked between the violet and the violet / Who walked between / The various ranks of varied green.” I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—a phrase that comes to mind, strangely, all the time, though I must remind myself of its coda: I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. (Are you, after all?) I picture a valley between two steep jagged cliffs, maybe I saw one in an illustrated children’s Bible, and between the cliffs in shadow, a long stretch of grass on a long road with no clear end, but it is after all a vibrant endless green.

 

When I was another boy, I was the boy next door. He was Jase, short for Jason: generic, but with a nickname just off enough to seem real. My lover—I call him Famous, which he is to me—became Jase’s best friend, Chris, a name that needs no explanation. Jase and Chris weren’t quite boyfriends, not like we were in real life, in which we worked very hard to be boyfriends. In real life, we had to stay below the radar of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We had to figure out what domestic meant, as in home and as in argument. We were known to many for being adorable and codependent. IRL, we were gay. Because the way we were identified became an identity. Maybe that’s how it works, for me anyway: I don’t seek out identity but consider my position and articulate it like a mime feels their box.

Online, I could shake it off altogether.

Jase was just a body organized around his lickable ass, thick and juicy. If you could smell over the internet, you’d get high off the fumes. He did not have mammoth pores on his nose, like real me, or baroque ingrown hairs. He did not lose his erections. He was either unavailable or rock hard.

I claimed I was nineteen and that Chris had just turned eighteen. We were maybe six years older, and mid-twenties is a long haul from teens. We did not live in San Francisco—too fruity. I said somewhere near Santa Cruz. Lying close to the truth helped me feel convincing.

$2.99 Cinderella Is Dead by Kalynn Bayron Get This Deal

$2.99 Monster: A Graphic Novel by Walter Dean Myers, adapted by Guy A. Sims & ill. by Dawud Anyabwile Get This Deal

$2.99 The Blackwoods by Brandy Colbert Get This Deal

$2.99 Freedom! The Story of the Black Panther Party by Jetta Grace Martin, Joshua Bloom, and Waldo E. Martin Jr. Get This Deal

$1.99 Finding Jupiter by Kelis Rowe Get This Deal

$2.99 My Week With Him by Joya Goffney Get This Deal

$2.99 Pride by Ibi Zoboi Get This Deal

$1.99 Piecing Me Together by Renée Watson Get This Deal

$2.99 The Chosen One by Echo Brown Get This Deal

$1.99 Friday I’m In Love by Camryn Garrett Get This Deal

$1.99 When You Were Everything by Ashley Woodfolk Get This Deal

$2.99 Promposal by RaeChell Garrett Get This Deal

$1.99 You Bet Your Heart by Danielle Parker Get This Deal

$2.99 I’m Not Supposed to Be in the Dark by Riss M. Neilson Get This Deal

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

And the Nominees Are…

Award season rolls on with the recently revealed longlist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The ten nominees range from commercial hits (Emma Cline’s The Guest) to critical darlings (Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X) to the unicorn that manages to be both exceedingly popular and exceedingly good (James McBride’s Heaven & Earth Grocery Store). I’d love to see McBride take home the trophy—and the $15,000 prize money—and continue his run of overdue recognition. I’d also like to know what the National Book Foundation thinks of PEN’s claim that this is “the most prestigious annual peer-juried literary prize in America.”

It’s an Adaptation Nation, and We’re All Living in It

A new trailer touting Apple TV+’s 2024 lineup includes more than a few page-to-screen projects.

Among the adaptations featured are: 

Masters of the Air, airing now, based on the book by Donald L. MillerManhunt, a 7-episode limited series about the search for Lincoln’s killer, based on the Edgar Award-winning book by James L. Swanson, out March 15.Franklin, starring Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin, based on Stacy Schiff’s A Great Improvisation. Coming April 12.The Big Door Prize, season 2, coming April 24. Based on the novel by M.O. Walsh.Dark Matter, based on the novel by Blake Crouch. Coming May 8 with what sounds like some pretty significant changes.Land of Women, helmed by Eva Longoria, based on the Spanish-language novel by Sandra Barneda. Coming this summer, date TBA.Lady of the Lake, a Natalie Portman vehicle based on Laura Lippman’s novel Lady in the Lake, date TBA.

The Kids Are All Right

TikTok may be melting their brains, but it’s also driving Gen-Z to read A LOT, and when they do, they’re reaching for physical books. They’re reaching for “hot girl books.” They’re reaching for “sad girl books.” They’re continuing the time-honored tradition of trying to brand reading as sexy. And you know what? When a 22-year-old supermodel launches her book club by selecting a complex work of literary fiction written by a poet, I can’t be mad about any of it.

Welcome to Read this Book, a newsletter where I recommend one book that needs to jump onto your TBR pile! Sometimes, these books are brand-new releases that I don’t want you to miss, while others are some of my backlist favorites. We are well into some of the buzziest books of the season, but don’t let this one fall off of your radar. Lovers of Such a Fun Age rejoice — Kiley Reid’s next book is finally here!

Come and Get It by Kiley Reid Kiley Reid’s debut novel Such a Fun Age was longlisted for the Booker Prize and chosen as  Reese’s Book Club pick. With both critics’ and readers’ love of this book, the bookish world has been buzzing about her next book, Come and Get It. After sitting out for a year, Millie is back at the University of Arkansas to finish out her senior year. As a resident assistant, she’s responsible for helping the dorm residents settle in for the upcoming school year. If she can just get through her last year and graduate, she’ll be able to start her life and buy a house. At least, that’s the plan. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting writer and professor, offers Millie money to let her interview students, Millie thinks, what’s the harm? What follows is a wild series of events full of college drama. Reid excels at dialogue, giving readers pages and pages of conversations with different residents of the dorm. These young women discuss their rich daddies giving them allowances, clueless about their own privilege. Other girls have to fight for funding for their education; while others are given scholarships they are barely qualified to receive. Nicole Lewis performs the audiobook, giving a stellar performance of the different characters’ dialogue. In another narrator’s hands, the pages of dialogue might have become dull or overdone, but Lewis’ narration makes these sections of the novel shine.

This is the sixth and final piece in a series of posts that offer insights and calls to action based on the results of three recent surveys conducted by Book Riot and the EveryLibrary Institute. The surveys explored parental perceptions of public libraries, parental perceptions of librarians, and parental perceptions of school libraries. The first post in the series emphasized how data overwhelmingly supports libraries and library workers. The second looked at how what’s happening in school libraries is foreshadowing the future of public libraries. The third, on why library workers need to be their own advocates of the library, and the fourth, on the erosion of trust in professional library workers despite parental trust in those same professionals. The fifth piece explores how deeply ingrained intolerance is in America and how that manifests in book banning.

Somewhere between 2016 and 2018, a major shift happened in our internet experiences. Algorithms began to take over what were once chronological timelines across social media.* With that shift, users no longer only saw posts from friends, family, or groups to which they belonged. Instead, algorithms predicted user behavior based on prior engagement with content. If you clicked on and liked or shared a particular news story, the algorithm would learn that and serve up more stories like it to your feed. Access to Facebook or Twitter or Instagram was free to you as a user, but only in so much that you did not pay for it with money. You paid for it with your data, used by those social media companies to attract advertisers.

Several outcomes from this shift have happened, and two of them are especially relevant to our moment in history around book banning. The first is that algorithms have impacted local news. The downfall of local news since 2000 has been well-documented — somewhere around one in four local newspapers have shuttered between that year and 2020. This closure has meant local stories, including the reports on happenings at the local school and library board meetings, have gone untold or, if they are told, they are locked behind a paywall. The papers that remain either through good luck and those which have been absorbed into larger media conglomerates have had to play the game online to get their news in front of readers. Stories and headlines alone no longer do their job to catch attention. They need to compel readers to engage with the content via likes, shares, and comments in order for those stories to show up in more feeds. You might “Like” your local paper on Facebook or follow them on Twitter, but unless you’re doing something with their stories, you are probably not seeing them show up in your feed. Thus, a shift to cover the most outlandish has been crucial, not because the stories are important or impact the lives of a community. They’re crucial because they solicit the engagement those outlets need in order to even get their work out there.

The second big outcome of the shift to algorithms is that echo chambers online have gotten even bigger. Because engagement is what fuels the algorithm, anything you might be commenting on, sharing, or clicking, is going to package that data and help serve up more content like what you’ve seen. This is why it can be shocking for folks who are otherwise smart and well-informed to learn about something that has really been all over the news. A lot of times, when people online say, “Why has no one been talking about this?” the reality is that they have. That work just has not crossed into every feed.

Echo chambers borne from the algorithm create tunnel vision for people. If you’ve clicked and are compelled to share how angry you are about a new anti-trans law being proposed in your state legislature, the algorithm is going to serve up more news that is similar, both within your state and beyond. You will likely not see the stories of the activists on the ground fighting those bills or who have successfully codified trans rights in other states unless you are also engaging with that work.

Because I write about sex for a living—and because I maintain an online database of sex ed resources for parents and other caregivers—publicists often send me stuff that is sex- and sex ed-adjacent. You know. PMDD devices. Lazy eye lifts (?). Every CBD product known to man. (Seriously. Stop sending me CBD pitches.)

On top of all these, there are also the middle grade novels with themes around sex ed or puberty or menstruation. In the past, I’ve rarely read them, as I don’t often include fiction in the Guerrilla Sex Ed database. But as my child has hit the tween years and has started to read chapter books (I mean, primarily Warrior Cats and Wings of Fire, but still…), I’ve taken to flipping through them, screening them to see if they might be appropriate for my child.

In doing so, I’ve realized what, deep down, I already knew: fiction has a lot to teach us, and some of those middle grade novels totes count as sex ed.

A publisher recently sent me Ali Terese’s Free Period, a middle grade novel about menstrual equity. It was absolute fire.

When I first cracked it open, I did so with the intention of possibly saving it for my 9-year-old. After all, some kids start menstruating at that age. But then I got super into it, and I realized this book deserves to be in my database of sex ed books…which means I should probably consider other fiction titles, too.