Read any biography of Jack Kerouac and here’s essentially what you’ll learn: that in the summer of 1956 he spent two months in a mountaintop shack as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service in the North Cascades in Washington State, and nothing much happened. Mostly he was bored.

Jack’s experience on Desolation Peak marked the climax of his involvement with Buddhism and of a decade of restless travel; it’s the high point of his journeying and spiritual seeking. A voracious reader, he nevertheless chose to go up the mountain without any books, only his personally typed copy of the Diamond Sutra, which he planned to read every day and transcribe yet again, this time in language more accessible to American readers, in order to achieve the enlightenment that he was certain would result. The extent of his solitude, thus, was acute. There were no radio stations from the outside world to tune into. No electricity. No running water. And most radically for Jack, two months without alcohol. It was his last, best chance to change the trajectory of his life, to avoid the alcoholic downfall that accelerated a year later with the instant celebrity from On the Road’s publication and that would ultimately kill him at age forty-seven.

The following excerpts six pages from the one-hundred-and-eighty-page diary Kerouac kept during that time. 

In our new Fall issue, no. 241, we published Nancy Lemann’s “Diary of Remorse.” To mark the occasion, we asked writers to reflect on Lemann’s remarkable literary career.

In the early years of the revived Vanity Fair, I happened to be in Tina Brown’s office when the conversation turned to a dispatch Nancy Lemann had just filed from the trial of Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, which Nancy, a child of New Orleans, was covering for the magazine. Tina was dissatisfied, borderline exasperated: Nowhere in the article, she complained, did Nancy specify what the trial was about, what the actual charges were, and what the criminal penalties might be; it was all mood, séance atmosphere, and sketch artistry. This was not journalism as we knew it in the halls of Condé Nast. “I’ll talk to Nancy and get her to work all this in up front,” said Pat Towers, Nancy’s editor. In Towers’s comment, I caught an echo of something I once heard Nancy sigh aloud about: an editor’s suggestions regarding her latest novel manuscript, primarily its lack of story. “I guess I’ll have to go back and put in some plot,” Nancy had said—but of course you can’t retroactively implant a plot into a body of fiction as if installing a new transmission.

Starting with her first novel, Lives of the Saints, Nancy Lemann has spread her impressions across the page in a style that calls to mind smooth, panning camera shots. Lives of the Saints, Sportsman’s Paradise, The Fiery Pantheon, Malaise (what a title, so Françoise Sagan): they’re like pre-mumblecore movies with a more interesting ensemble of neurotics, a firmer point of view, and a shapelier sense of comedy. No Lemann scene is complete without several characters in various stages of disrepair or subtle agitation, in need of flotation devices to get through the day. Although Nancy was a protégé of Gordon Lish, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Walker Percy—a heady triad of influences and personality-pluses that might have easily overloaded her circuits—her literary voice from the outset was assuredly, distinctively hers. In temperament and sensibility, she seems to me closer to F. Scott Fitzgerald than any of her mentors—or perhaps she’s Scott and Zelda rolled into one, her work suffused with a longing for a lost glamour. And she has no imitators.

Unlike Scott and Zelda, though, Nancy and her autobiographical stand-ins are interested in comfort rather than luxury; they’re bohemian romantics with a fondness for familiar haunts and a taste for the shabby-genteel. I once made the mistake of chaperoning Nancy to CBGB, and as soon as she stepped through its grotty portal I sensed an inner freeze: punk was beyond the pale. For Nancy, bohemia was a blue-lit lounge leafed with fake palm trees, or a private social club where white-haired gents in rumpled seersucker beam benignly upon younger folks making tiny spectacles of themselves.

Henrietta Garnett was forty-one when her first and last novel, Family Skeletons, was published in 1986. She knew that her debut, a tragic gothic romance revolving around a complex constellation of family secrets, would face an unusual degree of public scrutiny: Henrietta was English literary royalty, the direct descendant of the Bloomsbury Group on both sides of her family tree. Her father was the novelist David “Bunny” Garnett, author of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize–winning Lady into Fox (1922), a book so highly regarded it was on the British high school syllabus when his daughter was a teenager in the late fifties and early sixties. Henrietta’s mother was Angelica Garnett, née Bell, daughter of Virginia Woolf’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. “I had been putting off trying to get anything published,” Henrietta confessed when an interviewer asked about her famous relations, “because I couldn’t help thinking that whatever I did it would never be as good as anything they’ve achieved.” Family Skeletons is a strange and singular creation: melodramatic in plot but elegant in tone, written in a cool and fluent prose that is utterly Henrietta’s own. The novel bears no resemblance to either Bunny’s or Woolf’s fiction; nevertheless, the story does contain more psychological traces of her family’s legacy—namely, of the uniquely disturbing personal dramas that shaped the lives of those who raised her and the public perception of the Bloomsbury Group.

***

Family Skeletons begins at Malabay, a grand old house in the wilds of Ireland. Our first glimpse of the rambling lakeside estate is early one summer morning: “The dew was heavy and glittered on every twig and leaf and blade of grass. The rain, so fine that it seemed to be suspended in the misty air, shone like the frail skein of a cobweb. The air was so moist, the leaves and grass so wet, the fish pond and the lake so scheming with reflections, that the division between land and sky seemed nebulous, amorphous and indistinct.” It’s a place that “gets into the blood” of those who live there. Ever since the death of her parents, seventeen-year-old Catherine has been raised at Malabay by her uncle Pake, a taciturn recluse still haunted by the torture he endured as a prisoner of war years earlier. Barring the household staff—Mick-The-Post and her cousin Tara, the only visitor Pake will allow—Catherine is completely shut off from the rest of the world. She measures out her days by riding her beloved horses, writing fanciful stories, and attending to the rather unconventional curriculum her uncle has devised for her education (translating the ancient Greeks features heavily). Given her naïveté, it comes as no surprise that she is in love with the handsome, older, and more world-wise Tara. That he returns her girlish affection is perhaps a tad less convincing, but it befits the almost mythic structures that organize this slightly off-kilter world. This incestuous undertone, which foreshadows certain revelations to come, is just one of a handful of nods to Wuthering Heights (1847). Although less headstrong than her nineteenth-century namesake, Henrietta’s Catherine is another skittish beauty, frequently compared to the animals she so adores. When Pake discovers that the cousins plan to marry, he explodes in a rage—but the lovers put this anger down to his general eccentricity and proceed regardless. Only three weeks after their wedding, in a traumatic reprise of her parents’ deaths by drowning years earlier, Tara is killed in a boating accident out on the lake. The teenage orphan, now a widow, is distraught; she lops off her hair, takes to her bed, and descends into a “wild and desperate misery.”

My favorite app is Find My Friends. If you do not know what this is, it’s an app that lets you share your location at all times with fellow iPhone havers. I have access to the locations of nineteen friends and they have access to mine. I also have two friends, both named Nick, who refuse to share their locations with anyone—but I have given mine to both of them out of loyalty, just because I like the idea that they know where I am. I like looking at the map of New York, seeing little bubbles with my friends’ initials pop up in the usual and the surprising places. Sara is at the office. Graham is at home. Ben is at the bar where he does trivia. This guy I met at a concert is in the East Village—who knows why he’s there? I realize this sounds really boring, and it is. But I love knowing where my friends are—that they’re exactly where they belong, or that they aren’t. Of course there are practical uses: there’s the chance you might be around the corner from someone, both at different bars, and have a serendipitous meetup. But I check Find My Friends constantly and impractically, as a little way of knowing where my friends are at any given time. I guess it makes me feel close to them in a stupid technology way, but I feel close to a lot of people in stupid technology ways. That’s why I spend so much time texting.

The best times to look are of course nights and mornings, especially on weekends. There’s a chance you might see that someone didn’t sleep at home! It would be indiscreet to mention this to them, or at least I never would, but it’s a fun little secret in your phone. I understand why many people think this is weird and creepy, but I am not one of them. Someone above the age of forty asked me recently how anyone in my generation has affairs, if we all know where others are at any given time. I told him I wasn’t really trying to have an affair. It was a good question, though, and maybe one day someone will put a location-sharing plot in a not-very-good novel: a man idly looking at Find My Friends only to discover that his wife is not where she said she would be. The house of cards that is life comes tumbling down, et cetera. That would probably be too tedious to put into a book, but it would happen in real life and it probably already has, possibly thousands of times. I will take my chances and try to avoid affairs.

The other night I met someone who asked for my number and immediately shared his location with me, indefinitely. I thought this was very funny and I shared mine back. We parted ways, and we might never see each other again. I just checked his location. Now he’s in Vienna! Life is full of surprises!

“I could hardly believe my luck in having found her,” Vivian Gornick writes of the persona she created for her pivotal 1987 book Fierce Attachments, a rich, genre-redefining portrayal of fraught maternal bonds that the New York Times has anointed the best memoir of the past fifty years. “It was not only that I admired her style, her generosity, her detachment—such a respite from the me that was me!—she had become the instrument of my illumination.” That shock of wonderment and good fortune is familiar to all Gornick’s readers, and especially to the many writers of nonfiction who still pass around The Situation and the Story (2001)—in which those words appear—like a talisman. It’s a thrill to read Gornick’s precise, elegant account of how a voice and a narrative are made, and to see that process so masterfully demonstrated in her own work is often (as she herself has said of reading and rereading the likes of Edmund Gosse or Joan Didion) to become “enraptured.” 

It’s in that spirit that the Review will present Vivian Gornick with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement, at our seventieth-anniversary Spring Revel on April 4, 2023. Her engrossing Writers at Work interview, which appeared in issue no. 211 (Winter 2014), was the magazine’s second ever to focus on the art of memoir. 

Gornick’s exceptional contributions to literature over the past several decades span autobiography, essays, and journalism. Her first book, In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt—the research and writing of which she described, with characteristic élan, for the Review’s short documentary series My First Time—was a finalist for the 1974 National Book Award. As a contributor to The Village Voice in the years that followed, she became a leading writer of the feminist movement while developing a unique style of criticism that blended literary analysis with clear-eyed observations of her own experiences. This style came to fruition in books including The End of the Novel of Love (1997), a groundbreaking collection of essays that debunked the insidious ubiquity of romantic love as a metaphor for happiness, and The Men in My Life (2008), a compassionate study of the struggle for inner freedom that is shared across genders. 

Following the Attica uprising in September 1971, Celes Tisdale, a poet and a professor at Buffalo State College, began leading poetry workshops at the correctional facility—the first at a U.S. prison to be run by a non-inmate and an African American. Poems written by his students were published in 1974 as Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica, by Broadside Press, the first major Black-owned publishing house in America. Below are several noncontinuous entries from the diary Tisdale kept during that time, beginning with his first day at the facility.

May 24, 1972

4:30 P.M.
“Anticipation”

vladimir nabokov said:

i confess i do not believe in time
in BEING AND TIME, poor heidegger
didn’t finish the time part in time
to publish it with the being part
so everything-now must be not-being
there is a pine needle stuck in the screen
the side nearest me must be the being side
the one further away’s the time side
nabokov only said the first line
even when you have nothing to do
there’s not enough time in the day

there are 5 stinkbugs on the back porch—the stinkbugs don’t make you feel good or likable. but the one beautiful tree we have that i can see is still fulsome. in years past it’s always been the best & most long-lasting foliage tree & now, even in this year of all the leaves blown down & drabness, as i see it, it’s a glorious tree between the locusts, acting as if there’s not a stinkbug around.

Clarence Larkin’s commentary on THE BOOK OF REVELATION is written LIKE THIS, crafted with occasional capitalizations to emphasize IMAGES and TERMS. Reading it doesn’t feel like being shouted at but rather kind and intimate, as though he’s DIRECTING our attention in the same way a CHILD is directed to look at CARDINALS and CATERPILLARS during NATURE WALKS. Larkin directs the reader to symbols like THE SEVEN SEALS, a kingdom made of STONE, and the NEW HEAVEN and NEW EARTH. As a writing style, its effect is in guiding the EYE to see ONE THING over another. Eventually we’re pointed to this: a vision of the New City. There shall be NO NIGHT there: they need no candle, neither light of the Sun; for the Lord God giveth them LIGHT; and THEY SHALL REIGN FOR EVER and EVER.

***

I grew up in Willoughby, Ohio, the supposed subject of the Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby” (1960), in which a man falls asleep during his daily commute and DREAMS of a train station for a UTOPIAN TOWN. The opening narration begins: “This is Gart Williams, age thirty-eight, a man protected by a suit of armor, all held together by one bolt. Just a moment ago, someone removed the bolt, and Mr. Williams’s protection fell away and left him a naked target.” A naked target, the episode suggests, for virulent daydreaming. It’s a cold winter, and Gart is an advertising executive so beleaguered by both wife and boss that his only respite is the commute he spends dreaming of a better place. As his life spirals horrific—his wife thinks he’s a coward, he fails at his job—Willoughby from the window waxes idyllic: parasols, pushcarts, summertime in 1888. It is a backward-looking fantasy, one he indulges in daily while sleeping.

I know. There is a big chance you have read the title, rolled your eyes, and clicked on this post to see what this nonsense about watching the movie first is about. I get it, and if presented with this concept myself a few years ago, I would probably have shouted a resounding no at whoever thought it was a good idea to even suggest it. 

Like most readers, I too used to fiercely defend always reading the book first, and as someone who usually prefers this order of things, I still mostly hold on to it.  This is because I expect movie adaptations to fall short in comparison to the book, so I prefer to enjoy the original medium first, the one with more information — and the canon perspective — before I dive into the movie, even if this means the movie might disappoint me.

Across the years, however, I’ve encountered a few instances in which watching the movie first and reading the book later was the right move, so please give me a few minutes of your time to convince you why a movie-first approach may actually be a better idea than starting with the book.

But when you are about to watch an adaptation that you haven’t read the book for, there is less at stake. So why not grab the movie first to understand if the themes and characters strike you as interesting?

Reading this quote, I immediately warmed up to Machado: I, too, skip prologues if I can help it, and I was glad to find a like-minded author in the book I had just picked up.

Then, I turned the page, just to find out Machado had had the audacity to start her book claiming not to read prologues but included one in her book anyway.

I haven’t read it.

We’ve made it to the home stretch of 2022, and while there’s still a ton of 2022 year fun to be had (hello, spooky season and the holidays!), we are winding down to the end of big release season with a lighter slate of offerings in our new YA comics and graphic novels releases. But don’t worry — there are still some excellent YA graphic novels and comics hitting shelves between now and January that you won’t want to miss! Think of it as a little breather between now and the first quarter of 2023 (spoiler alert: it’s gonna be a great one if you’re a comics fan!). PLUS, it gives you some time to get caught up on anything you might have missed from earlier this year!

Although the quarter is a little on the lighter side, it’s packed full of quality! Look for a great, new queer paranormal graphic novel co-written by Lumberjanes co-creator Shannon Watters, a fantastic memoir from The New Yorker cartoonist Liz Montague, a hard-hitting memoir from a survivor of a mass shooting, and a new addition to the Heartstopper world for those of you still watching the Netflix show on repeat!

The Library of Congress has named 23 U.S. Poet Laureates since the position was renamed in 1985, and they have named their 24th: Ada Limón, author of six poetry collections, five of which have either won or been nominated for a multitude of awards. Limón is only one of eight female poets laureate, and the seventh poet of color to hold the position. She is preceded by Joy Harjo, who served three terms.

Limón began her term in late 2022, and has not yet declared what project she will work on while she holds the position (part of what a Poet Laureate does). In the meantime, she has an impressive and gorgeous body of work to pour over, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. If you’ve never ready any of Adam Limón’s poems, this is the primer to start with.

Who is Ada Limón?

Before we dive in, a little background on one of the greatest contemporary poets of our time.

Ada Limón grew up in Sonoma, California, and now lives in rural Kentucky with her husband, their pug Lily Bean, and their cat Olive. She holds an MFA from the creative writing program at New York University, worked at various magazines during her time in NYC, and teaches poetry remotely at Queens University of Charlotte. She also happens to write lusciously beautiful and arresting poetry.

The recurring themes that Limón infuses her work with center around nature, our relationship with it and our observation of it; relationships, especially with her parents; identity; and chronic illness. She grounds her poetry in places: in the California of her childhood, the years she spent in New York, her life now in rural horse country. Her knowledge of growing things is so vast that she, at times, feels like a patient teacher showing us what flourishes in her garden and what flora and fauna live and thrive around her. She reminds us that we are part of a greater world that existed before us and will exist after us. Her work is heavily autobiographical, and she excels at plucking out a mundane aspect of life and polishing it to a shine, calling attention to that moment’s beauty.

Creepy season is in full swing, and it’s time to get those horror novel TBR piles ready. Of course, there are plenty of kinds of horror novels you could pick up to celebrate the best time of the year. You could go for vampires, zombies, monsters… but you know what kind of horror stories really give off fall vibes? Ghost stories. Specifically, haunted house books. Yeah, there’s something about stepping foot into a haunted house that really gives off Halloween season.

If you’re a fan of haunted house stories, you’ve probably read some of the classics, like The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and/or The Shining by Stephen King. But where do you go from there? If you’re feeling haunted house-y this season and you’re looking for what to read next, here’s an idea. Why don’t you build your own ideal haunted house, and based on that, you can read the haunted house novel that best suits your style.

Looking to know what other results you could have gotten? Here they are!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year — spooky season! I’m not usually one for seasonal decorating, but Halloween is the special holiday that gets me excited to pull out my skeletons and witch hats to spread the spine-chilling cheer. If you love books and the haunting magic of October 31, then these bookish Halloween decorations are just what you need to ring in the holiday spirit(s). We’ve got adorable, creepy, and downright jump-scare worthy home goods sure to fright and delight. And some of them may be so wonderful they make their way into your year-round decor!

The first section of these decorations are made of upcycled books reimagined as Halloween magic. From books carved into 3D art to gorgeous prints on old book pages, they’re a beautiful way of bringing new life to books that might have otherwise ended up in the trash.

If the idea of cutting up books or painting over their words makes you squeamish, scroll on by to see decorations inspired by the love of books and specific horror titles that have become Halloween classics. Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, and Stephen King’s works serve as some of the inspiration for these scarily wonderful decorations.

These book pumpkins can seamlessly make the jump from Halloween to Thanksgiving. $46+.

This book of spells comes with the witch built in! $36.

So why do book banners insist that they don’t ban books? Because the level of doubling down as book banning increases is, on one hand, impressive and on the other hand, is concerning about several key components of literacy.

Click through to see the Moms For Liberty member who cites BookLooks as a Moms For Liberty joint in order to get on a review team of a school library.

When we asked Terrance Hayes to make a playlist for you, our readers, he wrote us a poem. Of course he did. As Hayes told Hilton Als in his Art of Poetry interview in our new Fall issue, formal constraints offer him “a way to get free.” Many of Hayes’s poems derive their titles from song names and lyrics; others are influenced by the mood of a particular album or track. Music, he tells Als, “changes the air in the room.” This particular playlist-poem has a track for almost any kind of air—or room—you might find yourself in this week. Read and listen to “Occasional Soundtracks” below.

Soundtrack for almost any morning: “I’ve Got My Mind Set on You” by James Ray

Soundtrack for twelve minutes in the bathroom: “Mind Power” by James Brown

Soundtrack for grooming: “Look” by Leikeli47