Earlier this summer, I shared the news that Brave Books — a right-wing publisher creating books with a pro-God, pro-“Liberty” conservative angle authored by right-wing “stars” like Kirk Cameron — planned to do a nationwide storytime on August 5. People across the country who follow this publisher made room reservations at their local libraries to host these events under the banner of “free speech.” Hosting such storytimes at the public library would “prove” how much they are needed.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists have loved playing victim these last few years. They continue to claim their beliefs are under attack and that places like public libraries have been at the forefront of purposefully silencing them and have turned to indoctrinating children with a pro-LGBTQ+, anti-white agenda. We know this to be completely false and fabricated, but truth doesn’t get many clicks on Fox News or other such outlets. Truth also doesn’t allow washed-up stars and proud homophobes and insurrectionists to perpetuate their persecution complex. The Brave Books storytime was the perfect opportunity to prove some kind of point about their rights being squashed and that the masses are demanding more books and events at public libraries aligned with a single-minded, right-wing hate agenda.

But…how did the event actually go?

There is nothing on Brave Books’s website to suggest it was an overwhelming success. There are no photos from events that took place across the country, though their website claims that they’ll be hosting this as an annual event “to promote free speech and traditional values in public institutions.” They may have hosted 300 events in 46 states but a few wingnuts renting a room and sharing propaganda does not a success make.

According to journalist Steve Monacelli in the Texas Observer, some of the Texas events had a solid turnout, but others had fewer than 20 show up; he rightly points out that these same “free speech” defenders are those actively seeking to get books removed from the very facilities which allowed them to use the space for their prayer circles and bigotry-based book sharing. Monacelli points out on social media that the leader of the largest event in Texas has been photographed with a confederate flag and has been interviewed by the January 6 commission, claiming to be a member of the Oath Keepers — a truly upstanding citizen to put in front of children that the same people claim need to be kept pure and innocent.

Over the past few years, Korean reality TV has been a source of inspiration for my writing. Reading the subtitles is an amazing lesson in dialogue. The random casts of participants are a fun study of group dynamics. These shows allow me to witness tender, precarious moments between lovers and strangers. They prove that the mundane and dramatic often go hand in hand. Watching them, I’ve cried, laughed, and shouted at the screen. I’ve become more aware of how we are all living a life of scenes, surrounded by and involved in a seemingly never-ending narrative.

Recently, my husband and I watched Single’s Inferno, a reality show in which young men and women glamp on a desert island. If they “match” with each other, or win challenges (like mud wrestling), they get to helicopter away to a fancy hotel for an overnight date. The stragglers cook together and end up bonding. These conversations encouraged me to write scenes in a less plot-centric way. Often in fiction, it can feel like there is no room to just “hang out.”

Change Days, meanwhile, is a show about couples at an impasse trying to decide whether they should stay together or break up. When the participants go on dates with new people, the viewer knows their backstories and partners, which gives added layers of context and raises the stakes. Watching the couples argue felt more relatable and expansive than watching shows whose participants have left their lives behind and are presented as clean slates ready for new futures. Getting this private peek into the complicated, painful, confounding, beautiful, terrible tangle of long-term relationships felt thrilling and sometimes overwhelming.

Scrolling around on KOCOWA (Korean-language Netflix, basically), I discovered His Man, a show in which eight single gay men live with one another and date one another. His Man felt groundbreaking to me. It showed me personalities and a kind of camaraderie that I’d never seen on TV before. One man sometimes did makeup for the others. There was a date on which both men wore flowers behind their ears. The show had a bizarre, funny rule: every night, the men were summoned one by one to a phone booth on the roof to call one of the others on his cell phone for a minute, without revealing his own name. Sometimes, a man would call his roommate on the show, and have to sheepishly return and face him after the call. Some men would receive many calls every night. Others never received any. By the end of the show, they’d all become great friends, even though some hearts were broken along the way.

Book lovers, take heed! Hundreds of hardcovers are on sale for 50% off at Barnes and Noble now. If you’ve had your eye on a bestseller or new release, here’s your chance to stock up. You’ll find both fiction and nonfiction for adults, YA titles, and kid lit, too. From memoirs and epic fantasy to mysteries and mythology, there’s something for everyone.

Below are some of the most popular titles offered. The prices listed factor in the sale. Happy book buying!

Walking into a Dead & Company show is more or less how you imagine it would be: there are nearly forty thousand people converging on a baseball stadium wearing some of the worst outfits you have ever seen in your life. “This is really a lot of different types of white people, huh?” a first-time attendee said as we walked into the show at San Francisco’s Oracle Park (formerly AT&T Park, SBC Global Park, and PacBell Park.) On the street, a white guy with dreadlocks offered us mushrooms. Another white guy with dreadlocks held up a sign that said, “Cash, grass, or ass—I’ll take it all.” A friend, stunned by the famous Northern California fog, bought an ugly tie-dye sweatshirt at a makeshift stand outside the stadium for seventy-eight dollars.

It was the first night of a three-night run of the final shows for this iteration of the Grateful Dead—the last tour ever, the last shows ever, though, as everyone knows, the Grateful Dead has been ending for nearly twenty years. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, everyone thought that was the end. In 2015, many of the original band members played a tour that was literally called “Fare Thee Well.” And yet, miraculously, it continued. But this time: Bob Weir is seventy-five, and John Mayer, the unlikely force behind this version of the band, has other things to get on to. At the very least, this is probably the last time they’ll ever sell out huge stadiums. So this was a major event that I had flown out from New York to see with five friends. I had been hearing for days that SFO was “like Bonnaroo for Deadheads.” On another friend’s flight in, the pilot told them they were flying over a wildfire in Colorado. “Wow, it’s literally ‘Fire on the Mountain,’ ” someone behind her said.

In line, everyone checked out the scene, craning their necks to see how good other people’s tie-dyes were. One guy was wearing a cape.

“Is that Andy Cohen?” someone asked.

We went to the lot. The lot, my younger brother observed—he was a first-time Dead & Co. show attendee—was “literally just a parking lot.” In fact it was a parking lot adjacent to the Port of San Francisco and near the SFPD headquarters, where I used to go for press conferences when I was a crime reporter. It was a vast parking lot, not far from the stadium where the second-to-last Dead & Co. show was going to start in two hours, and it was full of Deadheads.

The lot is the scene outside every show, known colloquially as Shakedown Street. It’s more or less an open-air drug market, that phrase that gets thrown around a lot to describe other parts of San Francisco; it is also the locus of the vestiges of real hippie culture. There is nothing like it anywhere else. There are vans that have been on the road for months, vans painted with psychedelic mushrooms, vans covered in stickers that say “Make America Grateful Again” and “Thank you Bobby.” People sell T-shirts, an endless array of T-shirts in every imaginable version of tie-dye. People sell quesadillas. People sell nitrous oxide—lots of it; in fact, the unmistakable hiss of nitrous and the constant popping of balloons is one of the most disconcerting features of being outside a Dead show. People sell funny hats. People sell, confusingly, a lot of rocks. I saw a sign next to a big box of rocks that said BUY 1 GET 1 FREE.

Being on the lot is basically just about wandering around and looking at stuff, so that’s what we did. One of my friends wanted to get a new Online Ceramics Dead T-shirt; another one wanted to buy a tiny ceramic mushroom to hold during the concert. My brother and I weaved in and out of some stalls, looking at shirts and stickers that said things like “Not like other girls” and “5-8-1977 was an inside job.”

“There was this apple last night that I was eating and I couldn’t stop eating it, I even ground up the seeds and then I think I was worried that I had arsenic in my body, so I got a bit disturbed during ‘Space,’ ” I heard one guy telling his friend, bent over a camping stove where he was frying some onions and nursing a beer.

Let’s start with the dark stuff. On Saturday night in San Francisco, after the second-to-last-ever Dead & Co. show, every single ATM near the ballpark was apparently out of cash, because people couldn’t stop buying balloons filled with nitrous oxide, huffing them on the street for just a few more seconds of feeling high. The bars nearby were overrun, quite literally, long after everyone should have been at home. People go down at shows—it happened right in front of us one night, the medics rushing in and carrying someone out. There are, not infrequently, overdoses. There is too much of everything, sometimes. “I’m at that point in a bender where beer isn’t really doing anything for me anymore,” I heard someone joke on day three of the three-show run.

It is not that easy to drink yourself to death, actually, which I know because I have watched a lot of people try, but I could imagine it happening to many people in the context of the long slide of years or decades spent following the band. I always think “There but for the grace of God go I,” and I really mean it. So many people are dead and gone, among them the Dead’s lead songwriter, guitarist, and singer Jerry Garcia, who was killed by his own addiction to heroin at the age of fifty-three. “Do you think of Jerry as a prophet or a saint?” my friend asked me on Sunday as we got ready for the last show ever. The mood was elegiac, though the fact of finality wasn’t really sinking in, which might be why we kept repeating it over and over. “I can’t believe it’s really the last one,” someone said, not for the first time. “What are we even going to do next summer?” my friend lamented. “Are we going to like … have to get really into Phish?” “We are NOT getting into Phish,” someone else insisted, though we all agreed we would probably go see Phish at Madison Square Garden in August.

We put on our last clean Dead T-shirts—we were all running low and trading with one another—and headed back to the ballpark. A few of us had decided last minute to upgrade our tickets so we could be on the floor. I had never been on the floor for a Dead & Co. show; we always don’t spend the extra money and regret it later, so this time, one last time, we were not going to make that mistake. I said I wanted to hear “Bertha,” and we got it, right away, and right away we knew that every single member of the band was completely on, locked in. Bobby, as my friend observed, was “really cooking.” Jeff Chimenti, Oteil Burbridge, Mickey Hart, also cooking. And Mayer—I have never seen him, perhaps, cook like that, leaning into every moment harder than I have ever seen him lean, and he always leans in hard, given that he is probably among other things one of the greatest living guitarists.

Last night I had a dream that Kim Kardashian and I were planning a lunch for a whole bunch of people. I have no idea who those people were. I just know that Kim and I had to plan a lunch together, a small one, maybe a lunch that would serve as a planning session for a second, larger lunch. It is my suspicion that in this dream I was working as a publicist, which serves me right, because I have been short with a few publicists in my life, though I do love a good publicist and appreciate that I myself would not be a good publicist. But in this dream I seemed to be holding my own.

Kim and I talked on the phone for a long time, making plans, debating salads, sandwiches, “small plates,” and the amounts of each that we needed. What would people drink? How many different canned or bottled drinks did we need? We said “uh-huh” and “mmmm” a lot. I was intensely bored but also aware that I was talking to Kim Kardashian. I could see Kim in my dream even though I was talking to her on a landline, a situation where you do not see the person you’re talking to. I was in the dream and watching it too.

I should have known I was in a dream because both of our phones were old-fashioned ones, with long coiled plastic cords. Kim’s phone was avocado green, mine bright yellow. Both of the phones in my house growing up—one attached to the kitchen wall, and one the kind you could walk around with, with an extra long cord, that was stationed in my parents’ bedroom—were white or off-white.

My story in the Summer issue of the Review starts with a character receiving a letter from a boyfriend of twenty-five years ago, and one of the Review’s editors, in search of recommendations for this column, asked if I’d like to write about a piece of epistolary fiction that inspired me. I was pretty sure there wasn’t a particular inspiration, is the thing, and when the editor’s email arrived, I had a flu and a few degrees of fever, so I put her request aside and got back on my sofa and under my blanket, returning to The Demon Lover and Other Stories, which Elizabeth Bowen wrote during World War II. My husband gave me the book more than a decade ago, and for some reason, it was finally calling out to be read.

The first stories in the book are sketches of Londoners dislodged from their identities by aerial bombings. A recent New Yorker article about disaster care describes the small items of function and decoration in people’s lives—pencil sharpener, teakettle, photo in a frame—as the “furniture of self,” and many of Bowen’s characters find themselves feeling uncanny and disenchanted after the loss of items that once made up their context and setting. In the middle stories, Bowen goes at the problem from the other end, writing about people unsettled by the unexpected return of things that once gave them context. A woman inherits a skeleton clock that she is told she cared for passionately as a child but has no memory of. Another woman, in a nightclub on a boozy date, hears a dance tune that her father used to try to sing. And in the title story, “The Demon Lover,” a third woman, returning to her bomb-cracked, boarded-up house to rescue a few items, finds a letter from the man she was engaged to during World War I—twenty-five years prior. 

The coincidental resonance/overlap with my own short story was eerie. Maybe I had read this story before and repressed it, the way Bowen’s heroine represses the memory of her skeleton clock? I don’t think so, though I’m at the age where that can’t be ruled out. Maybe twenty-five years is just a resonant interval, for me as well as for Bowen—it’s the time it takes for youth to turn into middle age. It’s also roughly the gap between World War I and II, which may be why it reappears in story after story of hers. As the reader advances through the collection, her stories turn out—more and more explicitly—to be ghost stories. A woman two-timing her husband starts to feel “disliked” by a presence in her bedroom. In perhaps the most beautiful story, “The Happy Autumn Fields,” a woman dozing in a bomb-shattered building dreams of having been another person altogether, in another century, and can’t shake the sense that her dreamed self is her real one. 

In a postscript to the collection, Bowen writes about why the past seemed more vivid during World War II—why it haunted the present—and her language is weirdly evocative of what it felt like to live through COVID. “In war-time many people had strange deep intense dreams,” she writes.