Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel, The Coin, is a worthy addition to the rich canon of novels about women losing their minds in New York City. The Coin tells the story of a wealthy Palestinian woman living in Brooklyn who slowly unravels while (questionably) teaching middle school boys, obsessing over her own hygiene, and getting caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags. I talked with Zaher, who is based in Paris, about moralization, journalism, and Hermès. Anu Khosla: The unnamed protagonist in your novel seems very convinced of her own goodness. What was it that you wanted the reader to tak ..read more

I was riding the train home to Maine when I finished Kristen R. Ghodsee’s latest book, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. I found myself teary-eyed and tingly with hope, an increasingly rare emotion in our age of pandemics, climate catastrophe, political paralysis, and widespread loneliness. I immediately reached out to Ghodsee, who just happened to be coming through Maine to visit friends. We met for coffee in Portland as a summer thunderstorm swept through the city. The following is a conversation about her fascinating, optimistic explorat ..read more

Summer has arrived, and with it, a glut of great books. Here you’ll find more than 80 books that we’re excited about this season. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to devour based on their authors, subjects, or blurbs. We hope you find your next summer read among them. —Sophia Stewart, editor July Art Monster by Marin Kosut [NF] Kosut’s latest holds a mirror to New York City’s oft-romanticized, rapidly gentrifying art scene and ponders the eternal struggles between creativity and capitalism, love and labor, and authenticity and commodification. Part cultural ana ..read more

Americans are good talkers these days. Prodigious at least. Our screens and links and tabs are filled with it. Talk, talk, talk. Streams of mouthy TikTokers and YouTubers. News channels transformed into neverending panel discussions. Novels dictated by insistent first-person narrators. Besides the economics of an easily replicable product—talk is cheap, we’re always told, usually in prelude to a fight—what accounts for all the blather? Is it because everyone has something to say? Or is it because regardless of the question—gaping income inequality, an increasingly irritable biosphere, or the a ..read more

“One thing all truths have in common: they are only visible from certain distances.” Angela, the protagonist of Jennifer duBois’s novel The Last Language, arrives at this conclusion from prison. It’s one of the many instances in the book that forces readers to ask themselves if she can be trusted—or if her relationship with Sam, her 28-year-old nonverbal patient, is predicated not on what she claims to be “love” but abuse. The Last Language takes the form of an unrepentant confession that Angela is writing after being convicted of sexual misconduct. As Sam’s family takes legal action against A ..read more

I once admitted a fondness for The Catcher in the Rye, and somebody challenged me: “Read it again.” I was kind of offended. It was true I hadn’t read it in twenty-five years, but I read it twice in high school, at fifteen or sixteen, each time in the span of a day, and I remembered the feeling it gave me. This person was so confident I wouldn’t like the book anymore, as an adult. I was confident I would—yet, I was reluctant to do it. I often reread dog-eared and underlined passages from books, and I reread whole poems, because I never seem to remember poems, even my favorite poems, when I’m no ..read more

I once admitted a fondness for The Catcher in the Rye, and somebody challenged me: “Read it again.” I was kind of offended. It was true I hadn’t read it in twenty-five years, but I read it twice in high school, at fifteen or sixteen, each time in the span of a day, and I remembered the feeling it gave me. This person was so confident I wouldn’t like the book anymore, as an adult. I was confident I would—yet, I was reluctant to do it. I often reread dog-eared and underlined passages from books, and I reread whole poems, because I never seem to remember poems, even my favorite poems, when I’m no ..read more

In Glynnis MacNicol’s second memoir, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, pleasure is political. The narrative follows the weeks MacNicol spent in Paris in late summer 2021 giving herself over to the enjoyment and excesses of sex, food, art, and friendship. In her first memoir, No One Tells You This, MacNicol grapples with turning 40 as an unmarried and childfree woman. This time, she emphatically embraces that identity while subverting the well-worn self-discovery narratives that pervade memoirs authored by women. What instead follows is an exploration of the sublime told through an inventive str ..read more

We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with a writer who writes about literary monsters: Claire Dederer. Here, Dederer explores the kitchen sink domestic analysis of Laurie Colwin. What drew you to Laurie Colwin’s work? I have been a reader of Laurie Colwin since I was in high school in the 80s. That she could be so strongly voiced and so funny made me feel incredibly full of possibility in terms of my own secret and burning ambitions to be a writer ..read more

In 1972, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system officials commissioned Oakland artist Michael Rios to create a mural at 24th and Mission Streets. Rumor has it that Rios was torn between his passion for art and his loyalty to his community. When BART announced its plans for the station to be built, the Mission’s residents protested fiercely, blaming BART for increasing rents, which would inevitably price out residents. The protests outside the construction site where Rios was painting clearly influenced the piece he created: Rios’s mural depicts a row of giant humanlike figures, r ..read more