As a new member of the Review’s team, it gives me great pleasure to bring you several equally new contributors in our new Winter issue. Some are celebrated literary artists, some are emerging voices, and others fall somewhere in between. Perhaps the most lofty among them is William of Aquitaine, also known as the Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony and the Count of Poitou—the earliest troubadour whose work survives today. For all his lands and eleventh-century titles, there’s a slapstick vibe to this unwitting contributor’s bio that I can’t help but find endearing. Excommunicated not once but twice, and flagrant in his affairs and intrigues, William survived more ups and downs than most modern politicians could ever pull off, and in Lisa Robertson’s agile translation, he speaks to us from the end of his earthly tether: “I, William, have world-fatigue,” he sighs across the centuries.

Much of my new job involves sifting through the slush pile for unexpected gifts—so you can imagine how tickled I was to see the world-weary troubadour dust himself off once again in another poem, by Luis Alberto de Cuenca, titled “William of Aquitaine Returns,” translated into a measured and colloquial English by Gustavo Pérez Firmat:

I’m going to make a poem out of nothing.
You and I will be the protagonists.
Our emptiness, our loneliness,
the deadly boredom, the daily defeats.

The legendary Tang Dynasty poet Tu fu also makes a debut of sorts, in an extended excerpt from Eliot Weinberger’s forthcoming “The Life of Tu Fu,” the “fictional autobiography” of a poet who witnessed the violence, famine, and displacements of civil war in eighth-century China. “Is there anyone left, under a leaking roof, looking out the door?” the poet asks. “They even killed the chickens and the dogs.” Weinberger’s wry, oracular Tu Fu describes a world that feels painfully familiar; it might be Ethiopia, Myanmar, or any number of modern conflict zones.

Elsewhere in our pages, the Ukrainian-American poet Oksana Maksymchuk sends an update from her own war zone, awaiting an enemy’s barrage of propaganda in a cellar lined with strawberry jam; from the couch, C. S. Giscombe shares a resonant scene from his subconscious in the reverie of “Second Dream”; Timmy Straw recalls losing themselves in a yellowing issue of National Geographic, with a nod to Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room”; and in “My Blockchain,” Peter Mishler walks offstage with a literary mic drop par excellence.

Making its rounds on social media over the past two weeks is a story from The Atlantic about the end of high school English class. It’s not necessarily what you think it might be. The author, a high school teacher in Berkeley, California, explores how ChatGPT, a conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) system, might radically alter the future of English education. Students can, for example, feed the system a prompt for class and develop an essay with the help of the AI, never needing to do the actual work of writing and editing from scratch themselves. While sure, AI could make cheating a lot easier, this reads a lot more like a problem of an insular wealthy community in the backyard of Silicon Valley than one that would radically change English classes outside that bubble.

A quarter of Americans still do not have broadband internet access at home. This segment of Americans includes young people who are in school. Can AI impact those students utilizing it at school? Absolutely. But the fact of the matter is, this shouldn’t be the concern of the shifting face of high school English classes. Censorship should be.

Censorship, happening across the country at never before seen speed by right-wing Christian nationalists, fueled by group think, by big pocketbooks, and well-connected politicians, is the true threat to what a high school English class offers. English, which explores reading and literacy, teaches writing and critical thinking, and dives into the art and science of rhetoric, is being irreversibly changed by the current climate of censorship. Regardless of whether a book has been pulled from curriculum or from school library shelves, educators are at the mercy of adults who are making a hobby of creating chaos via challenges, via undermining their expertise, and via actual threats to their safety. We’ve seen quiet/silent censorship become more talked about in the wake of all this, but all we can ever know about how widespread such soft censorship is that it is impossible to measure. Unless educators fess up to changing curriculum, to avoiding certain conversations in the classroom, or not recommending or sharing certain books, then that censorship goes unnoticed. Critical conversations that help form the basis of English education, including argumentation, evidence that supports said arguments, and introduction to a wide range of ideas meant to be discussed openly and frankly, are halted when “Critical Race Theory” or “Social Emotional Learning” or “Pornography” or “Grooming” are casually tossed about by white supremacists demanding education look exactly as they want it to. English that is whitewashed, falsified, and fabricated.

To worry about AI changing English classes is to ignore the enemy already sitting in the classroom. It is to ignore the fact that there are students across the country, in vast numbers, who do not have access to books or reading outside of the classroom. Who do not have access to books with people who look or act or think like them because a few white women declaring themselves the experts on what is and is not appropriate said so. It is akin to suggesting that banning books is a good thing, actually, since it’ll “sell a lot of books.” Indeed, some banned books see sales increase, but that statement overlooks the actual issue. Banning books is intellectual suppression. Banning books is revoking First Amendment rights.

At the end of the day, students lose when their access to books of all kinds is restricted.

Since about 2014, I’ve always kept an eye on Pantone’s Color of the Year. I like this idea of a color defining or giving shape to an upcoming year, much in the way I like thinking not about resolutions but about words or phrases as a means of organizing the next 12 months. Over the years, I’ve found some Pantone Color of the Year choices to be excellent — 2018’s Ultra Violet was great, as was 2019’s Living Coral — while other choices have left me really underwhelmed — the choice of Gray and Yellow for 2021 felt a little bit too much like a 2011 Pinterest Wedding Board to me, and the choice of 2020’s Classic Blue just…boring. It’s neat to see where and how these colors do or don’t trend throughout the year. What can we expect from the Pantone’s Color of the Year 2023, Viva Magenta? It’s a bold, energetic blend of red, purple, and pink and, in my opinion, one of their best choices. It’s a very alive color.

Keeping Viva Magenta in mind, I thought it would be fun to create a palate of books across genres, voices, and categories that utilize the color (or something very similar to it) as the focus of the book cover. This is your roundup of Viva Magenta book covers. Grab one or several and read your way through the Pantone color of the year. I definitely plan to grab some of these…and maybe a notebook in this vivid color, too.

I’ve tried to credit cover designers where possible. This is the regular plea for publishers to put this information right on your landing page for each of your books to give the credit where it’s due.

You’ll notice something interesting here, as I did while poking around for these covers: Viva Magenta is a VERY tough color to match. Because it has a range of tones, even the swatches for the color are different, one being more pink and one more purple. Your screen resolution will make a difference here, and in some cases, the cover’s take on Viva Magenta goes more one direction than the other. The effect, of course, remains.

Yesterday, I was standing in front of my desk, piled high with books I had checked out from the library or received for review, trying to decide what to read next. I shifted from foot to foot and gave myself a pep talk. “Pretend you are a normal reader. You’re just picking whatever book looks interesting. You can read whatever you want.”

-record scratch-

You’re probably wondering how I got here. Why am I not a normal reader? What does picking out something to read feel like such an intimidating task that I need to psych myself up and put myself in the right headspace? Well, we start with a kid who loves reading, and we end with an adult who has built their life around books to the extent that reading has become a minefield of expectations and guilt.

It all started with a book blog, which was supposed to just be fun. I was going to record everything I read and share it with people. But then I had a much better idea: I could create a book blog just for bi and lesbian books, since that’s what I wanted to read more of. I could talk about queer women books with people! How fun.

And when I started the blog, something miraculous happened: people started giving me free books. They were self-published ebooks sent from the author, but free books are free books! And well, if someone is going to write a sapphic book (still a rarity back then) and send it to me, the least I could do was read and review it. Besides, now I had a blog to maintain, which meant new content, which meant I needed to be reading more (bi and lesbian) books.

Podcasts have become an integral part of our everyday life. We listen to them while doing chores and carrying out errands, while driving or taking public transportation, and sometimes (though this is mostly dedicated to our very favorite podcasts) we simply sit and enjoy them without doing anything else. It’s been predicted that, by the end of this year, there will be 424 million podcast listeners worldwide. I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s truly a mind-boggling number.

I don’t want to say that podcasts have completely replaced the radio — they haven’t, and many podcast listeners also follow radio programs. They are, however, being chosen more and more, especially by younger generations who didn’t grow up with the radio. In addition to that, anyone with the means to access the internet and purchase some basic tools can now start their own podcast, and there are dozens of books teaching them how to do so. In a way, it’s been a great equalizer: who gets a platform to project their voice? A lot more people than before. According to Daniel Ruby from DemandSage, as of June 2022, there are over 2.4 million podcasts with over 66 million episodes between them.

I’m not sharing books about podcasting here. Rather, I’ve chosen eight books where podcasts and/or podcasters play a large narrative role. Some of them are fiction whereas others are memoirs, but they all have one thing in common: the art of putting a podcast together is integral to the story or characters/narrators. Shall we?

I do not like to be scared. Seeking out media that is designed to be scary — books, films, TV shows, or, I don’t know, music videos? — is something I will never understand or choose to do. I also do not like gore. I can handle some violence in my books, if it serves a purpose, and sometimes I can get behind body horror. But blood and guts is not my thing. Please keep your graphic descriptions of murder to yourself.

Given these two facts, it makes sense that I’ve spent my entire reading life avoiding horror, right?

Wrong.

Horror is a tricky, slippery genre. Until recently, I treated horror (the genre) as a synonym for scary (the adjective). I assumed all horror books were scary, or gory, or both. I’ve been challenging myself to read outside my comfort zone over the past five years, and so I’ve tried mysteries and the (occasional) thriller, all sorts of nonfiction I never thought I’d love, and lots of weird speculative fiction. All of these forays into new-to-me genres have enriched my reading life in countless ways. But horror remained firmly on the no-go list. Risking boredom, or confusion, or simply not vibing with a book is one thing. Risking not being able to sleep for a week in the house where I live alone is something else entirely. I felt justified in my decision to write off horror as a genre. I do not want to be scared. Therefore, I do not read horror. Simple.

I can’t remember why I decided to pick up Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth. It’s queer, which, of course, made me want to read it. But it’s also categorized as horror. When you look it up on Goodreads, “horror” appears at the top of the genre list. Twice as many users have labeled it horror as have labeled it fiction or historical fiction. I was wary. I asked a book friend who reads a lot of horror how scary it was. “Not very,” she told me. I was still wary — a horror book! I had never read one! — but I decided to try it anyway.

Despite all the candles, tinsel, gifts, and pie, Americans consistently rate the holidays as the most stressful time of the year. That holiday stress may be compounded by family relationships — depending on what kind of family you have. With that in mind, I’ve pulled together a list of the best and worst fictional families to spend the holidays with, so we can all have a laugh before your least-favorite uncle begins his annual political tirade.

Hate the holidays? You’re not alone. This season has a way of magnifying family dysfunctions. Everyone’s trying to make the season magical, but let’s face it: many, many things about the holidays are mundane at best.

It might be tempting to say it’s best to avoid going home for the holidays, but that comes with its own unique stressors. Dealing with the hurt feelings and unhealed trauma that arise from — or lead to — severed family connections is difficult any day. It’s even worse when you’re surrounded by cozy visions of happy parents and kids opening presents in matching PJs, however.

If you aren’t going home for the holidays this year, please remember that you’re not alone. More than 25% of American adults are estranged from at least one close family member. Your feelings are valid, no matter what your reasons were for cutting ties, and I wish you nothing but the best in making your own holiday traditions.

From classic literature to comedy manga, here are the best and worst fictional families to spend the holidays with.

We know that books about books are popular with readers – and, by extension, so are books about book clubs. This particular category is about more than the power of books in a person’s life: it’s about their power to facilitate connection and community. Isn’t this largely why people join book clubs? We want to discover new books and gain knowledge, yes, but we also want to express ourselves in the company of other book lovers. Books about book clubs capture this desire and fulfill it.

Even knowing this, I was a little surprised by the abundance of books where book clubs play a main role. In many of the titles listed below, book clubs aren’t only settings: they’re catalysts, whether for plot advancement or for character growth. Granted, it may be a little self-centered (I mean, we don’t get to ‘Dante writing self-insert fan fiction where he’s praised by Virgil’ territory, but we are readers who enjoy reading about other readers). But it’s fascinating, too. It makes me wonder about this need to bond over this thing we love.

The books I listed here all delve into that need. They’re mostly fiction, but the appeal of book clubs (and their power) are very real.

Over the course of Villa Albertine’s Proust Weekend, a series of talks, workshops, and readings celebrating the forthcoming English translation of the last volume of the Recherche and the centenary of Proust’s death, I ate more cakes per diem than usual: on Sunday afternoon, a miniature pistachio financier, a Lego-shaped and moss-textured cake that reminded me of the enormous chartreuse muffins at my college cafeteria; on Saturday morning, a crisp, disc-like, almond-sliver-sprinkled shortbread cookie with a hole, which reminded me of a Chinese coin; and, on Friday night, at a holiday party, a dish of Reddi-wip and sour cream studded with canned mandarin slices and maraschino cherries apparently called ambrosia salad. It reminded me of the music video for Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.” But these were really only preliminary research exercises for the episode in which Proust Weekend was to culminate: a “Proust-inspired madeleine event with surprise guests”!

In the meantime, I attended some panels. When Lydia Davis was beamed in to talk about her award-winning translation of Swann’s Way, I stared at the cat in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. In order to be properly Proustian, I knew, the center of an experience would be hidden in the margins of the event itself. The events of the Weekend transpired in the second-floor ballroom of the Gilded Age mansion that houses Villa Albertine, the French embassy–adjacent artist’s residency program that had organized the event. Most attendees were, I gathered, elderly residents of the Upper East Side and/or miscellaneous French people. The Payne Whitney Mansion seemed like a memory palace designed expressly for the contents of the Recherche: ceilings bordered by Rococo botanical motifs as rhizomatic as Proust’s syntax; or a purple-carpeted grand staircase bookended by two urns of exotic flora that reminded me of Combray’s psychedelically hued asparagus (“steeped in ultramarine and pink, whose tips, delicately painted with little strokes of mauve and azure, shade off imperceptibly down to their feet”).

On Sunday at four, Proust Weekenders would be getting an exclusive “first taste” of a special collaboration between Villa Albertine and the Ladurée pastry franchise: a madeleine-flavored macaron. I’m not sure why macarons were chosen instead of madeleines—perhaps because “macarons,” according to the president of Ladurée US, Elisabeth Holder, “are the supermodels of the food industry.” As I took my seat in the ballroom, I recalled all the Ladurée products I had consumed in the past year: most recently, rose petals suspended in a luminous pink jelly, on my birthday, which is also the date of Proust’s death; a turquoise macaron that I selected from a box of six others because I knew it was called the “Marie Antoinette”; half of the “Champs-Élysées Breakfast” served at Ladurée Soho (disgusting); approximately ten or twelve macarons of various colors, at an event for which I signed an NDA on an iPad at the door; and, last winter, an orange-colored macaron with a tiger printed on it. This last macaron, a Lunar New Year limited edition of some Asian flavor (mango? passion fruit?), gave me pause. Whenever I go into a Ladurée, the store is filled with Asian girls making their Asian boyfriends take pictures of them with their macarons—just like me. The franchise called Paris Baguette is actually Korean. The most recognizably Japanese fashions are strange perversions of those once worn at Versailles. Why do Asian girls love French things/sweets so much? I wondered, not for the first time.

Meanwhile, the madeleine event had begun. And the Villa Albertine had a surprise for us: there would be not one but three madeleine reinterpretations to be tasted tonight! We clapped and cheered. We were hungry. The interpretations sat on a small table at the front of the ballroom, arrayed in order of height. Behind them sat three French pastry chefs.

Not long after Argentina lost in a stunning upset to Saudi Arabia and hardly anyone outside the losing country was crying, I read a new book, Dark Goals: How History’s Worst Tyrants Have Used and Abused the Game of Soccer, by the sports journalist Luciano Wernicke. Evita, I learned, once tried to fix a game between two Buenos Aires teams, Banfield and Racing, first by force of will and, when that failed, by offering a bribe to Racing’s goalkeeper: he could become mayor of his hometown. Of course, that kind of behavior is behind us (FIFA? Bribes? Are you kidding?), although government pressure and reward still hover on soccer’s periphery: Emmanuel Macron famously called Kylian Mbappé the best player in the current tournament, and urged him not to move from Paris Saint-Germain to Real Madrid, because, he said, “France needs you.” After the Saudi victory, a national holiday was declared in the oil-rich kingdom, all amusement parks were free, and citizens could enjoy their favorite rides for as long as they wished. In Qatar, outside interference of another kind was exposed when it came to light that those bouncing, joyful, muscle-bound, tattooed Qatar supporters in identical maroon T-shirts were actually faux fans imported from Lebanon and elsewhere, all-expenses-paid. They had been trained in patriotic Qatari chants. Meanwhile, the Ghana Football Association appealed to a higher power and urged two days of fasting and prayer nationwide to give its team the necessary boost. This sounds quite reasonable; there’s been an awful lot of skyward finger-pointing and prostrations of thanks by players after they score a goal. Someone’s deity is clearly playing a part. No one, to be clear, ever thanks God for a loss.

I’m going to abandon religion but stay on politics a little bit longer before we get to Richarlison’s stupendous scissor kick against Serbia, his matchless wonder goal against South Korea, and the rest of o jogo bonito. Early in the tournament seven European teams decided their captains would wear rainbow armbands in support of diversity and inclusion. This planned gesture of goodwill upset FIFA so much that it threatened to give out one yellow card per armband, which would certainly tip the balance unfavorably against teams whose players insisted on visibly supporting kindness, tolerance, and equality. The captains abandoned ship, but the Germans puckishly posed for a team picture with their hands over their mouths.

Speaking of which, a debate over nomenclature has emerged in the English-speaking part of the World Cup. During the U.S.A. v. England game, U.S. fans taunted their English counterparts by cheering, “It’s called SOCCER”—a witless banality that nevertheless has inspired and morphed into a popular Doritos ad in which Peyton Manning schools David Beckham. Or did the ad come first? The young, athletic U.S. team played really well; Christian Pulisic took his first steps toward sainthood; and the team drew but thoroughly deserved to win against a drab, pedestrian, unimaginative England. I was reminded of the time I saw the U.S.A. beat England 2–1 in a friendly at Foxboro Stadium a year before the 1994 World Cup. Toward the end of the game the small contingent of England fans began to chant, “We’re such shit it’s unbelievable.”

The commentary has been as sensational as you might imagine: In the first ten minutes of the showcase opening game between Qatar and Ecuador, Fox Sports lead play-by-play announcer, John Strong, noting that “this was a fistfight to start,” excitedly advised, “The ref must keep some sort of lid on this thing” when nothing remotely untoward had happened at all. The message was clear: Don’t worry, America, this sport is as down and dirty as a UFC cage fight! Fox Sports has also, unsurprisingly, sugarcoated the tournament and tried its best to ignore the politics, with little to no mention of the human rights issues and has elided, for example, the celebratory upheaval in the immigrant-heavy banlieues of Brussels after Morocco beat Belgium. In other parts of the world, the politics often come before the football. Even the British tabloid the Sun has sometimes foregrounded ugly issues, like the NO SURRENDER flag draped in the Serbian dressing room as an insult to Kosovo.

The poet Agha Shahid Ali died of brain cancer in Amherst, Massachusetts, a world away from the beloved Kashmir of his childhood, twenty-one years ago today. The title of the book he published that year, Rooms Are Never Finished, testifies to the unfinished work of a writer whose life ended too soon, at the age of fifty-two.

In his first poem published in The Paris Review, “Snow on the Desert,” Ali wrote about another singer interrupted mid-performance:

                          in New Delhi one night as
Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out. It

was perhaps during the Bangladesh War,
perhaps there were sirens,

This text was delivered as the T.S. Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on October 23, 2022.

In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described it in her diary as “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are.” In comparison, Eliot’s praise is triumphal. “A book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” And yet this proposed relationship between Ulysses and its readers may not seem altogether inviting either. Do we really want to read a novel in order to experience the sensation of inescapable debt? In the century since its publication, Ulysses has of course become a monument not only of modernist literature but of the novel itself. But it’s also a notoriously “difficult” book. Among all English-language novels, there may be no greater gulf between how much a work is celebrated and discussed, and how seldom it is actually read.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that very soon after the publication of Ulysses, critics started to speculate that the novel as a form might be dying. In 1925, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of the “decline of the novel,” comparing the genre to a “vast but finite quarry.” “When the quarry is worked out,” he warned, “talent, however great, can achieve nothing.” A few years later, in 1930, Walter Benjamin wrote of the “crisis of the novel.” These two very different works, Ortega’s book and Benjamin’s short essay, both make reference, albeit in passing, to James Joyce. In fact, in T. S. Eliot’s piece in praise of Ulysses, he remarks, “If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve,” and later adds that “the novel ended with Flaubert and with James.” In the present day, the “death of the novel” is declared so regularly and with so little provocation that this might not seem to be of any great significance: but I don’t know that the novel was ever declared dead even once before Ulysses was published.

Joyce was, as we know, writing at a time of enormous artistic and cultural upheaval. The seemingly stable conventions of classical music were being shattered by composers like Arnold Schönberg; the refined traditions of Western realist painting were revolutionized by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. And writers like Marcel Proust were already beginning to destabilize the familiarities of the nineteenth-century novel form. It’s easy to understand in this context how a book as innovative and iconoclastic as Ulysses could be seen as striking the final blow against an already ailing literary tradition. In fact, it might be less easy to understand why, one hundred years later, the novel is still lumbering on, not yet superseded by any more popular or critically significant form of textual storytelling. Classical music, after all, effectively gave way to popular music in the twentieth century; figurative painting never again reasserted itself as a dominant cultural form. But novels as we know them are still being written and widely read. And as one of the people writing and reading them, I can’t help but be interested in the question. What exactly did Ulysses do to the novel? And if we can’t escape it, how can we go on?

***

Friends sometimes ask me why I still bother going to the theater. It’s a fair question. Most of the time, I’ll mention a play only to complain about it at length—the pretentious set design, the hammy performances, the man in the audience who laughed very loudly to show that he’d understood the joke. Does any other art form have such a low hit rate? Yet I persist, because of the few plays that manage, in some way, to alter me—and on those rare occasions when they do, the years of disappointment only heighten my elation.

Our new Winter issue is not actually devoted to the theater, but several of the pieces we chose do capture the same miraculous thrill I experience when plays go right. There is, for instance, Isabella Hammad’s “Gertrude,” in which a London actor finds herself part of a troupe putting on Hamlet in the West Bank. You’ll also find an excerpt from Old Actress, a new play by Lucas Hnath. It’s set in the living room of a woman who is struggling to memorize her lines for a production of a play called Death Tax (also by Hnath) and who has enlisted a younger and far less successful actor to help her learn them. On the page, the script’s dialogue looks worryingly avant-garde—the punctuation and spacing are a copyeditor’s nightmare. But read aloud—my deputy, Lidija, and I tried it, surreptitiously, in my office—it is almost eerily naturalistic, such that you wonder why some playwrights pretend people speak in perfect paragraphs.

As Colm Tóibín tells Belinda McKeon in a new Art of Fiction interview—in which he also discusses the uses of trauma and his hatred of the pluperfect—writing a first draft can feel as alarming and adrenalized as any live performance. In preparing to write the part of Nora Webster  in which Nora thinks she’s seen her dead husband, Tóibín spent several days alone at his County Wexford home, reading other works in which ghosts appear. Then, one morning, he got up early and put Beethoven’s Archduke Trio on repeat. “I knew it could only be written in one go,” he says. “I had to get every moment of it down as though it were happening in real time.”

Reading certain short stories can feel like watching a dangerous solo sport; I’m drawn to the ones that stay on course even as they remind me how easy it would be to crash that Alpine A522. So it is with Sophie Madeline Dess’s troubling “Zalmanovs”; Addie E. Citchens’s brilliant, unruly “A Good Samaritan”; and Avigayl Sharp’s “Uncontrollable, Irrelevant,” a bravura portrait of frenetic self-absorption.

Also in this issue: an Art of Poetry interview with N. Scott Momaday, our 2021 Hadada Award winner; portfolios by Lily van der Stokker and Mary Manning; and poems—selected by our new poetry editor, Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy—by C. S. Giscombe, Timmy Straw, Cynthia Cruz, and Victoria Chang. What’s nice about reading is that you don’t need a ticket, you can do it in bed, and there are no shoddy performances. As Jung once said, in the theater of dreams, the dreamer plays every role.

I’m living in East London, in Cadogan Terrace, at the far end of Victoria Park. I work as a copytaker at the Daily Telegraph, typing in stories dictated over the phone. (This was a very long time ago.) Sometimes it is crown green bowls, sometimes it is a yachting regatta in Pwllheli. Sometimes it is a massacre in Bosnia. On a whiteboard are names we might find hard to spell: Izetbegović. Banja Luka. Srebrenica.

I bicycle to Canary Wharf down Grove Road. The last of a row of terrace houses is in scaffolding, then gradually uncovered to reveal a concrete shell. For a long time I thought this was just the way houses looked beneath the skin, but this is, in fact, Rachel Whiteread’s House, which will go on to win the Turner before being demolished by the council.

Whiteread makes casts of the space enclosed by ordinary objects, using the object as mold. (This generally destroys the object. Space repays the violence inflicted by the objects which imprison it.) Whiteread will go on to create Water Tower, a resin cast of a water tower, and Nameless Library, a Holocaust memorial in Vienna, of which more later.

I have bought a small blond upright piano for £900 despite my low pay.

Forbidden evokes, to my English-speaking ear, the biblical fruit whose consumption leads to shame and expulsion from Paradise. Eve’s story is not irrelevant to a novel like Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook, in which a woman succumbs to a temptation: to record her thoughts and observations. Valeria Cossati’s impulse to keep a diary leads not so much to the knowledge of good and evil as it does to the self-knowledge advocated by Socrates and serving as a cornerstone of philosophical inquiry ever since. In Valeria’s case, it also leads to solitude, alienation, guilt, and painful lucidity.

The Italian title of Forbidden Notebook is Quaderno proibito—literally translated, “prohibited notebook.” Forbidden and prohibited may be interchangeable in English, but the latter lacks the romance that might soften the former (as in “forbidden love”), and connotes instead legal restrictions, interdictions, and punishment. The word prohibited comes from the Latin verb prohibere (its roots mean, essentially, “to hold away”), which was fundamental to legal terminology in Ancient Rome. It is the word de Céspedes chooses to describe Valeria’s notebook, and to interrogate, more broadly, a woman’s right, in postwar Italy, to express herself in writing, to have a voice, and to hold opinions and secrets that distinguish herself from her family.

The act of purchasing the eponymous notebook, along with the ongoing dilemma of how to conceal it, drives the tension as the novel opens. Having purchased it illegally and smuggled it home, Valeria hides it in various locations—in a sack of rags, an old trunk, an empty biscuit tin. But she always runs the risk of it being discovered by her husband and grown children, all of whom laugh at the mere idea that she might want to keep a diary.

As soon as she buys the notebook, Valeria is anxious and afraid, but she is also armed—for although acquiring a diary throws her into crisis, the quaderno is both an object and a place, both a literary practice and a room of one’s own. In lieu of walls and a door, pen and paper suffice to allow Valeria, albeit furtively, to speak her mind. Thematically, I would call this book a direct descendant of Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking treatise and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It’s just that Valeria does not consider herself an author but rather a traditional homemaker. Her writing is surreptitious, and she must lie to tell the truth.

The novel Basti by Intizar Husain begins with children in the fictional village of Rupnagar— which means beautiful place in Urdu—shopping for staple foods like salt and brown sugar. Trees here breathe “through the centuries,” time “speaks” in the voices of birds, the world is new, and the sky is fresh. From a distance, elephants look like mountains moving. For the children, including the novel’s protagonist, Zakir, one source of information about the world is the town shopkeeper, Bhagat-ji, a Hindu; Zakir’s father, Abba Jan, a Muslim, is another.  Bhagat-ji tells them that elephants could once fly and are hatched from eggs. Abba Jan, who is referred to as Maulana, a respectful term for a man of religious learning, tells them the earth is shaped from the expanding ocean and the ocean’s water came from a single pearl. Together their voices weave a tapestry of life that will be torn asunder in 1947 by the partition of India.

“Partition set in motion a train of events unforeseen by every single person who had advocated and argued for the division,” writes the historian Yasmin Khan. The intention of local leadership and the British Raj was that the two new states of India and Pakistan would allow for Hindu and Muslim self-rule in Hindu- and Muslim-majority areas. But loosely organized violence against minority populations on both sides led to the mass migration of ten to twenty million people to the countries run by their co-religionists, with an estimated 500,000 to three million killed. These killings occurred with what Khan calls “indiscriminate callousness” that included widespread disfigurement, mutilation, and rape. Conflict between India and Pakistan is ongoing to this day. Most scholarship, Khan argues in her book The Great Partition, has largely viewed these events as historically and culturally isolated, but she makes a compelling argument for locating it within “wider world history.”

The main narrative in Basti, which I read in a translation from the Urdu by Frances W. Pritchett, starts two decades after Partition, with Zakir abruptly recalled to his childhood memories by “the sound of slogans being shouted from outside” in Lahore. Zakir is an adult; his family has left the paradise of Rupnagar for the promise of Pakistan. It’s the early seventies, a time of political turmoil between the western and eastern halves of the country that led to further sundering and to a war with India. (East Pakistan became Bangladesh during this period.) Zakir has become a professor, but the buildup of violence closes the university, casting him adrift into a world of memory, history, and myth. “The rain poured down all night inside him,” Husain writes. “The dense clouds of memory seemed to come from every direction.”

In September 1852, when he was twenty-three, Tolstoy published his first piece of writing, in a Saint Petersburg monthly. Although it garnered praise, he was upset that the magazine had changed the title to “The History of My Childhood.” “The alteration is especially disagreeable,” he complained to the editor, “because as I wrote to you, I meant ‘Childhood’ to form the first part of a novel.”

Like Tolstoy, Elif Batuman always intended to write fiction. One of the essays in her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a collection based on her experiences as a grad student in the Stanford comparative literature Ph.D. program, had originally been pitched to a magazine—and accepted, Batuman thought—as a short story. “I had changed things to protect people’s identities,” she told me earlier this year over Zoom, “but then had to unchange them so they could fact-check it; the alternative was not to be published.” The piece appeared in print as “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy: A Forensic Investigation.”

Batuman approaches much of her life and work as a reader on the lookout for clues. Her autobiographical debut novel, The Idiot, follows a young Turkish American woman named Selin through her freshman year at Harvard as she studies elementary Russian and linguistics, falls in love with an inscrutable math-major senior, and stress-tests the capacity of the former to explain the behavior of the latter. Selin compulsively overreads everything and everyone she encounters, as if gathering evidence for a case that may reveal itself only in hindsight. Batuman’s second novel, Either/Or, published this year, picks up where The Idiot left off, covering Selin’s second year at Harvard, and serves as a reckoning with all the previously gathered clues. As the title suggests, it aims to explode the supposed distinction between an ethical and an aesthetic conception of the good life. It’s a paradoxical and seriously funny contraption, a bildungsroman that relentlessly deconstructs its author, the social world around her, and the very concept and value of fiction itself.

Speaking with Batuman about Either/Or feels a bit like watching someone ride a motorbike along a tightrope. At one point during our conversation, she took out a pen and paper to trace her argument through Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and de Beauvoir. She expects from any book, her own included, nothing less than a real-time experiment in how we should think and live.