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.

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: 

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!

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.

Creating D&D campaign ideas from scratch can be exhilarating, fun, and also nerve-wracking. On the surface, there appears to be so much to think about, plan, prepare, and envision. However, in reality, as a D&D Dungeon Master (DM), you do not have to have a 500-page novel laid out before you sit down with your players. Yes, some DMs prefer to have most of their ideas, plot hooks, villains, and encounters all set and ready to go.

However, there are other schools of thought out there that posit it’s better to go session-to-session. This is based on the improvisational nature of the game and the unpredictability of players, if you plan TOO much, as a DM, you run the risk of railroading your players into scenarios that fit your story, not theirs. And it’s important to remember that a good D&D session should disrupt your carefully laid out plans as a DM. You shouldn’t have any idea what they are going to do and will need to act accordingly.

That said, there are some ways for you as a DM to create a framework of ideas that will help you be prepared. You can have a loose set of campaign ideas to get things started. We cover some D&D campaign ideas to get you started before your next adventures!

You, of course, can create your own library. I made one for our players, which I called “The Revelation.” It was a place where players could have maps made, conduct research on their downtime (for a fee, of course), and meet interesting and strange NPCs.

When I read Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, a novel about an interpreter at the International Court of Justice, I found myself underlining every page. Perhaps the identity crisis of the narrator—“I was repulsed, to find myself so permeable”—had transferred to me. Or perhaps the clarity of her sentences left me defenseless. I was instantly immersed. Like all of Kitamura’s fiction, Intimacies is about the psychic effects of inhabiting another person’s mind. The novel explores the narrator’s complicity as she voices the words of a war criminal and the personal crises of those around her. Can channeling others shape (or erase) our sense of self? And how does private grief deepen or prime a precarious selfhood? Even when she interprets the words of a victim, she concedes “the strangeness of speaking her words for her, the wrongness of using this I that was hers and not mine, this word that was not sufficiently capacious.”

My poems in the Winter issue of the Review grapple with the boundary between self and other, image and reflection. I wrote “Echo” not long after finishing Intimacies. Echo, whom the goddess Hera silences, is left repeating the last words of the object of her love, Narcissus. The effect is a kind of trailing-off, a depreciated self. Though Kitamura’s narrator also feels depreciated (“I realized that for him I was pure instrument”), the novel’s stunning end reconstructs the first person. Intimacies is that rare novel that, fittingly, reverberates in your mind.

—Callie Siskel, author of “Narcissus,” “Echo,” and “The Concept of Immediacy”

I came back from London on a miserable winter day, feeling fluey and gray, filled with an end-of-year, end-of-era angst that I saw reflected in the heavy skies and the mountains looming, gloaming, above Geneva.

In her Art of Poetry interview in our new Winter issue, Louise Glück expertly captures the psychodynamics between older poets and their perennially youthful students: “The younger person is reminding the older one of the early ferocity of their vocation,” she observes like a practiced analyst, while “the older person is a representative of stubbornness and persistence and sometimes a kind of majestic fatigue.”

Glück may not have assumed an air of majestic fatigue when I was her student in college three decades ago, but my classmates and I certainly all vied, often without success, to impress her with our ferocity. She was wry, unfazed by the world’s peculiarities—as I imagine she was in the first workshop she ever taught, at Goddard College in the sixties. “Goddard had a naked dorm and the class was held there,” she tells her interviewer, Henri Cole, “which didn’t mean my students were naked, but that the students who lived there were. When my class met, we would keep our clothes on, but it was weird to see these naked bodies going back and forth, not all of them fabulously beautiful, I might add, though they were all young.” I like to imagine the future Nobel laureate looking up from a page where some student had bared their soul to see others baring their bottoms out the window.

You can eavesdrop on the kind of advice Glück would give young writers, at once metaphysical and down-to-earth, in this issue: “Always, one thing to do, if you’re stuck, is to ask a ques­tion in the poem,” she reminds us. “A question shifts the mechanism of the poem.” For more insights into how poems happen, you can read our Making of a Poem feature with Farid Matuk, whose poem “Crease” you’ll also find in the issue. (“That near rhyme of love and of was tricky for me,” Matuk confides.) Or check out our Making of a Poem with the translator Aimee Chor, who brought Nadja Küchenmeister’s “feathers and planets” to our pages: “The English is in some ways very unlike the German,” Chor notes. “Wäscheständer does not sound like laundry rack, and quark is not really the same thing as cream.”

Also in our Winter poetry mix: more laundry, in Alice Notley’s “The Answer Is Awe”; three poems by Callie Siskel, another student of Glück’s; “defective goods” in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s “Water Becomes Water,” translated by Eleanor Goodman; a dead bird on a doorstep with “something / Moving inside of it,” brought to us by Dorothea Lasky; leporine fisticuffs, courtesy of Angela Ball; and an unsettling posthumous contract signed by Harryette Mullen, which concludes (hint hint) with the speaker’s promise “to pay tribute with offerings that confirm my commitment and extend my status as a faithful subscriber.”

It was 1990, and the man I loved had died. I was out all the time. I just couldn’t stay inside, and I was writing in a notebook in places where I could sit for a spell. A new shop opened on Broadway, a bakery that was also a café in the low eighties or maybe the seventies, on the east side of the street. You could sit there with a coffee and maybe—after God knows how long—you would also buy a muffin out of obligation and shame.

The owner hated his customers because he’d created the wrong kind of flock in us. We were a band of deadbeat loners, off whom rose different kinds of sadness that united us into a force. The owner was a loud and theatrical gay man I also felt for because he may have been as lonely as we were, and he was trying to establish a business. I don’t remember if he had a boyfriend. I remember the startling freedom of his contempt for us—and by us, I don’t mean the customers who came and left in a timely fashion and didn’t turn his place into a campsite. He would thrash about, sighing and slamming down the cups he bussed after one of us moved on. It was theater. The boss staged his show, and we were the audience.

In the spring of 2002, Geoff Dyer published a piece in The Threepenny Review called “The Despair of Art Deco.” It’s a wonderful piece about nothing, really, meaning it’s my kind of writing, in which for seven pages or so Dyer recounts a recent visit with his girlfriend to South Beach, Miami, where he plans to write about the art deco hotels that attract visitors. Instead, he sees his first dead body, or at least the soiled socks of a woman who has jumped from a balcony to her death on the sidewalk, careful to avoid landing on anyone.

Earlier on the visit, Dyer and his girlfriend are asked to take a photograph of a couple standing in front of the house where Versace was gunned down. The patch of sidewalk has become a site of what I would call “dark tourism.” Dyer doesn’t call it that, but he understands there is some attraction people feel to standing in proximity to where something gory and grisly has taken place, in order to feel the double thrill of not yet being dead and also being reminded that every life goes in only one direction.

Billows and soft extensions, the cream lapping through there, between solid graymass and float down to sea, and above that gray, more light, and off to the left, white light, then ruffles, and above, more and more gray. In another direction, blue with acrobatic twists, spreadings. Is that the aither high above that the Greeks thought divine?

Mountains uplift, spray down to water, cream’s reddening, blocks it off to the right.

Bastions, mirth, huge extensions, structures of no hand, silver too is penetrant.

[Maricao, Puerto Rico, September 4, 2004]

Here is Norman Mailer in his fine black boots, high-cut and shiny and very snug on the ankle, like something you might pick out if you were the prop master for an expensive production of Richard III. Sweating a bit under the TV lights, he seems to be doing an imitation of a scowl, as if to gesture toward his reputation as a guy who goes around scowling. He sits angled toward the host, Dick Cavett, who bends slightly away from him, as do the other two guests. One of them is Gore Vidal. Like Mailer, Vidal is doing an impersonation of himself. He strikes various languorous attitudes as the camera begins to roll, reclining deeper into his chair as Mailer leans forward, toying idly with his glasses and smiling as Mailer yaps and bares his teeth. A cat and a dog.

Compared to these two, both positively radiant with the excitement of showing off, the third guest seems to have been invited on by mistake. She is, basically, an old lady. She wears white gloves and a neat skirt suit, with a scarf knotted at her neck. She doesn’t say much at first, waiting patiently as, according to the description on the YouTube clip, “the infamous feud between novelist Norman Mailer and writer Gore Vidal comes to a head in a battle of wit, sarcasm, and condescension with the audience and Janet Flanner”—that’s her—“(reluctantly) in the front row.”

This is all wrong. First, if you have come to this old episode of The Dick Cavett Show to witness an invigorating exchange of white-hot barbs, you are in for a disappointing half hour. It’s not so much a mighty clash of intellect as two exceptionally vain men seizing the opportunity to come out with bons mots they have been practicing in the mirror for weeks beforehand. These include zingers like “intellectual cow.” It never really rises above this level and is often even more mortifying than that—five minutes in, Mailer affects an air of fascination as he wonders if Muhammad Ali “came out of a good (bleep) or a bad one.” He repeats this a couple of times, his delight in himself so childlike it is almost touching. Second, the suggestion that Flanner is a reluctant participant, in fact barely a participant at all, is inaccurate. She is evidently having fun, making droll remarks and winking at the audience; she, at least, is aware of the silliness of what is unfolding. She maintains her good humor for a solid fifteen minutes as the two men toss their dignity to the far winds, finally interrupting Vidal just as he is about to respond to Mailer’s accusation that his work smells of “intellectual pollution.”

It’s very odd, she says, that the two of you act as if you’re the only people here. “Aren’t we?” Mailer burbles. She gestures to the audience and says, “They’re here.” She points to Cavett—“He’s here.” She points at herself, doing a funny little mime of indignation—“I’M HERE, and I’m becoming very, very bored.” The audience bursts into laughter and applause. She blows a kiss at Mailer, and the applause increases. Mailer’s shoulders shoot up even higher, and he can’t rid his voice of a disconsolate note as he assures Flanner that he wouldn’t hit her, because she is “intellectually smaller” than he is. Flanner laughs uproariously.

I knew nothing about F. Scott Fitzgerald when I stumbled on Tender Is the Night in 1962. I didn’t know he’d struggled with the book for almost nine years, and that during his lifetime it never settled into a finished version. I was a naive and ignorant twenty-year-old, studying English and French literature at the University of Melbourne, an unawakened literary snob who had hardly read anything twentieth-century American in her life, and was weighed down by the mighty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European novels and poetry that we were to study for final examinations. I pulled the Fitzgerald off a shelf in the bookshop where I had a summer job. It was so delicious and joyful to read, I could canter through it with such bright and sudden pleasure, that it felt almost criminal. Secretly I knew it was way too enjoyable to be literature.

Two years later, practicing for final exams, we were given a page of prose to translate from English into French. I was a lazy student, barely keeping up, and I dreaded these exercises. I turned over the sheet of paper and was staggered to see that the passage was from Tender Is the Night.

On the shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stood a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel. Deferential palms cooled its flushed façade, and before it stretched a short dazzling beach. Now it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; in 1925 it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April; only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water-lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away. The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.

Deferential palms cooled its flushed façade? The bright tan prayer rug of the beach? I looked up at the lecturer, a scornful Frenchwoman in her forties. A sardonic smile crossed her face. I put down my pen and lowered my forehead to the desk. Did she think I was regretting all the classes I’d missed, the afternoons I’d spent down in the city watching Westerns and Bergman movies, or drinking and shouting in the beer garden with the architecture students? She was right: I hadn’t a clue how to translate these images—but faced with the impossible task, I was struck dumb for the first time by their depth and richness. She couldn’t have known what a gift she’d handed me. My boxed-in ideas of whose writing could be taken seriously had just been blown sky-high. She probably thought I was panicking, about to cry, but I was taking off my hat and bowing low. I was humbled, freed, and giddy with jubilation.