Before I can think how to begin, she rebukes me: “Concerning death, one might observe / that those with authority to speak remain silent …” (“Bats,” A Village Life). 

Flip the pages, to “Lament,” in Ararat, and once more, a reproof:

Suddenly, after you die, those friends
who never agreed about anything
agree about your character.
They’re like a houseful of singers rehearsing
the same score:
you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life.
No harmony. No counterpoint. Except
they’re not performers;
real tears are shed.

 Luckily, you’re dead; otherwise
you’d be overcome with revulsion.

A few years ago, I read a lecture by Chinua Achebe given in 1975, later published as an essay entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” While I greatly respect Achebe’s novels, his essays have often left me wanting. His voice reminded me of my grandfather’s, the intonations of a proud Nigerian man, rightly aggrieved at the dysfunctional state of his country, his continent, and its indefatigable life in the face of rampant, extractive exploitation by imperial powers. I feel that Achebe’s frustration can leave blind spots in his arguments, and the lecture in question—an outright denouncement of Conrad’s famed novel and its canonized status as “permanent literature”—was, I thought, an example of this. Achebe considered Conrad’s novel explicitly racist in its themes, in its depictions of the “natives,” and in the gaze of Marlow, Conrad’s primary protagonist, who Achebe believed wasn’t much removed from Conrad’s disposition.

Achebe questions the meaning of writing to our society, or the meaning of any art for that matter, when it can be so explicitly racist and go mostly unremarked upon by fans and critics alike, regardless of how beautiful the turns of phrase or evocative the depictions of the lush, sweltering alien landscape. I have a complex relationship with Conrad’s novel and agree with some of what Achebe put forth, but his argument felt incomplete. Achebe’s disgust is understandable, but I think one can see Conrad was also getting at a lack of vocabulary for this rich, intricate world, of atmospheres and new sensory and metaphysical experiences, at times in his prose defaulting to beautifully phrased but reductive tropes, which are still embedded in the unconscious of Western society today. As Achebe railed at Conrad’s reduction of complex cultures, knowledge systems, and languages, down to a dark, flat backdrop for Marlow’s descent into the pit of despair, and lamented Conrad’s objectification of West African bodies, I became hooked on an important and maybe even existential question—who was Achebe’s lamentation aimed at? Who was the primary audience for his words, written in English? And was there a moral authority to hear his appeal, and if so, what then?

I envision this moral authority: a shining round table, a collective ethereal body. I can picture where this body receives education, and what information and legacy bestow upon this body to uphold such cosmic authority. I peer at this body’s ancestral responsibility and how intricately woven its cultural history is with morality, technology, and progress—through religion, reason, language, war, and subsequent laws. I wonder, wouldn’t this same moral authority Achebe speaks to be the same that has canonized Conrad’s novel, lauding it as one Western literature’s great works?

Roughly around the time of Conrad’s birth, Anglican and Baptist missionaries from Britain began spreading the Christian word across Nigeria alongside armed colonial powers, and systemically implemented a proposed order and moral structure, offering bondage under the benevolent cloak of Christianity. They found innovative ways to suppress and diminish ancient local knowledge systems whilst leveraging the locals’  deeply inherent spiritual devotion. Tribal factions with differing religious and philosophical dispositions were difficult to control without the concerted imposition of particular moral principles through Christianity. Coordinating labor and governing over resource-rich lands was made easier by exploiting the tenets of local knowledge and sowing discord between tribes. Christianity has been significant to psychological governance, by imposing a moral condition and constraining culture, dissenting thought, or ways of seeing and being alien to the new “explorers” of this productive continent of vast cultural and environmental diversity.

I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven. It has always been this way for me, even as a child. I prayed often, sometimes the requisite five times a day in my Muslim household. But I did it out of a sense of duty to my living, not what might exist after my living.

I can’t control my own arrival to whatever the promised land may or may not be, because I don’t have the rubric in front of me. I have sometimes been a good person who does bad things, and sometimes I’ve been a bad person who does good things. The way the afterlife is most often discussed is by way of a scale that sorts into binary categories. I grew up with Muslims who insisted that every bit of food left on their plate after a meal would be weighed against them on the day of judgment. I considered this: arriving in front of the robed choir, a few grains of rice tipping the scale toward an irreconcilable level of bad, banishing me to some fiery underworld.

In early 2019, spinning through Red Dead Redemption for the first time, I became obsessed with the idea of a heaven for someone who wasn’t real. Someone I had come to love, but who only existed in a fictional realm. It was a private thought. Discussing love and sanctification like this seems foolish, probably a byproduct of my many newfound chambers of loneliness. I wanted not only a kinship with this not-real someone, I wanted to save them, and save myself in doing so.

Not only is this foolish, it also tilts toward what some might consider sacrilege. But if you will allow me to soften the message: what I am saying is that I’m not invested in my own entry into heaven, but I find myself required to believe in its existence nonetheless. If enough people you have loved transition to a place beyond the living, you might grow to hope that place is heavenlike. I want everyone I have buried to be in a place of abundance, a place beyond their pain. For me, being consumed by silence—and an obliviousness to whatever has become of you—is one definition of peace. I’m fine with that for myself, but not for my beloveds. Not for you, person I do not know and will likely never meet. I want an abundant dominion for you.

Nearly thirty years ago, during my junior year of college, I took a poetry writing class with Louise Glück. I’d never read any of her books, but I was aware of some undergraduate buzz about a visiting poet who’d recently received the Pulitzer Prize for a book of talking flowers. Her last house had burned down; her father had made his money in blades; she would need someone to drive her to Star Market for groceries on weekends. (I volunteered once, waiting nervously in the parking lot until she returned with a cantaloupe and asparagus.) The person I met in the classroom was frighteningly honest about poetry, and about being a poet. She said it was okay not to write—that she herself had gone several years without writing even a single poem—so it would be perfectly fine if we didn’t share any poems of our own with her that term. When we did turn in something for workshop, she mercilessly rooted out “mannerisms” in our poems; I became terrified of this critique, which only made my writing all the more mannered. She would linger over details like “angels in homespun linen” in a poem by Czesław Miłosz; almost three decades later, I still remember her wry grin of envy at that image. More than anything else, Louise loved it when something was surprising and, in retrospect, inevitable, as it is so often in her work, and in our lives—like the ending of her poem “Happiness”:

I open my eyes; you are watching me.
Almost over this room
the sun is gliding.
Look at your face, you say,
holding your own close to me
to make a mirror.
How calm you are. And the burning wheel
passes gently over us.

Glück’s death marks a line break, but not a full stop, to a timeless voice in the art of poetry. It’s a voice that resonates with the wonder and grief of ancients like Sappho and moderns like Dickinson—in other words, like Louise Glück.

The Pepsi-Cola Addict, written in 1981 by the cryptophasic teenager June-Alison Gibbons—who refused most communication with anyone other than her twin sister, Jennifer—is as idiosyncratic as one would expect. Preston Wildey-King—the Pepsi-Cola addict of the book’s title—lives in a tenement with his mother and his sister in Malibu, California. How Preston developed an addiction to Pepsi is unknown. This omission begs interpretation—readers must make their own projections onto Pepsi-Cola. Is it a sweet elixir that dulls the bitter taste of Preston’s fleeting childhood? Or a symbol of American overconsumption and excess? Gibbons doesn’t provide an answer, leaving us with a plot point as perplexing as the addictions we see every day. Sometimes a can of Pepsi is just a can of Pepsi. 

—Troy Schipdam, reader

Éric Rohmer’s 1986 film The Green Ray centers on a difficult person. We know that she’s difficult because, during a conversation midway through, she insists, multiple times, “I haven’t been difficult at all.” Her name is Delphine, and she’s a Parisian secretary who broke up with her fiancé two years earlier. While she craves human connection, she flees, sometimes literally, whenever it seems it might appear. In one of the film’s best scenes, she runs away from people who have the gall to invite her to a nightclub. In another scene, she stops to read a sign on a lamppost that says, “Retrouver le contact avec soi-même et avec les autres. Groupes et séances individuelles.” (“Reconnect with others and yourself. Groups and private sessions.”) She walks on.

When a friend tells her she’s sad, Delphine says, “I’m not sad.” She sublimates her loneliness into an obsession with having a good summer vacation. As the film opens, Delphine learns that her holiday plans have been upended: she’s been ditched by a friend who wants to travel with a new lover instead. “The three of us could go together,” Delphine suggests. She’s rebuffed. We soon see why: even when she’s not a third wheel, she’s hard to be around. A complainer who doesn’t enjoy much of anything, she’s resistant to offers of help and advice. When she learns that her sister and brother-in-law are going camping in Ireland, she asks her young niece, “It’s very rainy. Does that scare you?” At a dinner party, when the host has just served pork chops, she extols the virtues of vegetarianism.

After a nearly scandal-less summer of 2023, in the caustic August light, Ye West was spotted on a small boat in Venice, Italy, with his ass half out. His new wife had been giving him a blowjob in public. There were other patrons on the boat—it might have been a water taxi helping them from one place to the next. The couple appeared to be performatively oblivious to their surroundings. The boat became their black backstage, a transparent curtain between performance and private life, and it put me in the mind of Ye’s 2021 live performances leading up to the release of his tenth studio album, Donda. For at least one week, he lived beneath the Atlanta stadium where he was hosting the first two public listening parties to debut the album, which was still unfinished. The third performance, in Chicago, Ye’s hometown, also featured the installation of a replica of his childhood home, which he set on fire on stage, leveraging his Promethean dream against the serenity of fantasy. The album itself is not just an elegy for his mother, his martyr; it’s also one for him. He enacts his ego death by it, asks for forgiveness in advance, and retreats, “Off the Grid.” He’s ready to exercise his right to disappear into the next myth even as the old myth is not quite finished with him, not yet obsolete. In the Chicago version of this live listening show, he remarries Kim Kardashian and they walk offstage while the make-believe house keeps burning. Everything, even his family, is a prop on this set. This myth will not stop burning. And while Donda seems to genuflect and repent the loss of the maternal figure, the loss of the womb itself, the lack of access to that primal source of solace, there’s one line on the album that stands out to me as its deeper vendetta: “a single black woman you know that she petty.” Here, he denigrates the same power he uplifts. This is the same mother he laments; he’s hashing out lingering resentments. He’s just unsentimental enough to make a masterpiece that vacillates between grief and backlash. My favorite music begins and ends with this tortured erotic ambivalence; the most effective art is greedy about it, righteous and wicked at the same time, humble and opulent, minimal and spectacular, optimistic and despairing, unrepentant and begging for mercy.

Beneath the spectacle of the first Donda shows, there was a twin bed in a small prison-style rectangular space, with a digital clock and a flat-screen television on the wall. One ex machina–esque fluorescent light beamed from the ceiling. The floor was carpeted in bureaucratic gray, and on it the contents of one small suitcase were neatly arrayed like they might be in a college dormitory. There were also some free weights, which made it all look lonelier and more honest. A gray wardrobe held a few hanging garments. Ye was filmed in that room leading up to the second performance, doing push-ups, huddled with his collaborators and affiliates listening to and editing songs for the album, and yelling militant rehearsal commands as the show approached, a look of messianic drive and casual terror in his eyes.

“Make me new again, make me new again,” a section of the album entreats in a rap-gospel howl, a humble bridge between lyrics that land like mourning benches in a ruin. When showtime comes, Ye wears bright red on stage as if covered in blood, as if he wants to signify the lamb luring the wolf, yearning to be hunted, while his face is shrouded in a ski mask to feign anonymity. He doesn’t want to flash a Dizzy Gillespie grin, or a Louis Armstrong supergrin, or a Miles Davis minor scowl, or an Ellingtonian mélange of chagrin and glamor. Part of Ye’s regenerative capacity is this recovered stoicism after intermittent bouts of what some call mania and others assume is megalomania and others still dismiss as just another half-militant half-capitalist nigga shining in every direction at once. Maybe he hears the spirit of John Coltrane, who announces, “I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” He finds a static identity and the idolization it attracts oppressive, and maybe sometimes he self-sabotages or risks everything to escape this. In this album-long apology to his mother, he seems to repent to the audience too, and then to retract it all and go back to his secretive and ritualistic mourning.

Among the numerous accolades I received as a high school student was the honorific, awarded by the Hinsdale Central class of ’95, of worst driver. There’s something about cars, and driving culture at large, that’s never wholly agreed with me. Even now, when an Infiniti cuts me off on the freeway, I’m tempted to ram it in the name of eternity and of all language art.

Nevertheless, Olivia Sokolowski’s racy poem “Lover of Cars,” published in the new Fall issue of the Review, came to me as a revelation—a revved-up paean to “all those Stingers Jaguars Tiguans Fiat 500s / and San Remo Green Beemer i4s” in the showroom of the author’s imagination:

                                                                                  I want to wrap

my face tight with a silk scarf and spiral        down

Kelly Jensen is out this week, so Erica Ezeifedi and I are filling in on censorship news. Unfortunately, none of us can be Kelly, even with our forces combined, so we’re trying something a little different in the censorship news round-up. Instead of one big story and dozens of bullet points, we have each picked a few book ban stories this week to write a paragraph about — think Today in Books: Censorship Edition.

Welcome to my favorite month of the year! To paraphrase L.M. Montgomery, I’m sure glad that I live in a world where there are Octobers…and October book releases! This month has one of the biggest lists of new books hitting shelves, which means it’s really impossible to narrow it down to just ten. Please know that I hated leaving out so many great books, and you should definitely be on the lookout for new YA books by Isabel Ibañez, Aden Polydoros, Huda Fahmy, Christella Dabos, Brandy Colbert, Kosoko Jackson, Candice Iloh, Ryan La Sala, Tillie Walden, and so many more! (A handy tip? Check out our New Release Index for all the books coming out this month.)

I chose a nice mix of debuts, books by authors who might not be on your radars yet but definitely should be, and some of my personal most anticipated reads. Because it is October, after all, definitely be on the lookout for some of the spookier books for Halloween and seasonal reading, but know there’s something here for everyone —romance, thriller, contemporary, historical fiction, and even a holiday romance (because those holidays are just around the corner!).

So grab your favorite fall beverage and a cozy sweater, and get ready to read!

‘Tis the season for fall romance books. Leaf-filled streets, pumpkin spice lattes, and the looming threat of the holidays all signal the autumnal alarm.

In romance books, every season makes an impact on character development and plot. The fall often represents a period of growth and change. In a place with four distinct seasons, autumn readies the world for the cold of winter. Fall is both protective and bracing at the same time. It is my favorite season because no matter what is going on, the feeling of fall resets my attitude and gives me a welcome break from the summer heat.

I also think the fall season works well as a setting for romance books. Really, cozy autumn books are the perfect site for character growth through radical change. After all, when romance characters pursue happiness and radical joy, they often have to leave behind the people, things, and places that no longer serve them.

The books I present you with today set characters up in a time of change. These contemporary and paranormal romance books with fall settings offer all the coziness of the season. I hope you fall in love with them too.