Every year, the peony show down the street from my house never disappoints, and I was excited—on Wednesday—to see that it had begun ..read more

The first time I read Shashi Bhat was her Journey Prize-winning story “Mute” in 2018, and I remember just feeling captivated by the narrative voice, being struck by the singularity of her character’s experience, and yet noting how much I could identify due to the specificity of her perspective and the choice of such essential details. A scenario that really gets under the skin, that’s really “cringe,” as the kids say. A little “Cat Person,” a little Sally Rooney, altogether timely in the age of #MeToo, but also I just read it and wanted more of literature that can affect me like that, and tha ..read more

As I noted in the introduction to my Bookspo conversation with Adrienne Gruber, I’m not as preoccupied with notions of motherhood these days, or with essays about of motherhood, certainly not as much as I was back in the day when I was publishing my own anthology of essays about motherhood, when I was positively obsessed, and felt like I was working out pressing and essential existential questions with this obsession. The most surprising and disappointing revelation of that experience (along with many others that weren’t disappointing at all) being that motherhood is niche, never mind that ev ..read more

On the tail of the news of Alice Munro’s death at age 92, I’m even more pleased and glad to be able to share the latest Bookspo. Deepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM, a book that’s so great it’s got me accosting strangers in the street, and she came to our conversation with a very cool twist on the Bookspo format. Her Bookspo pick is Munro’s short story “Corrie” (which was included in her 2012 DEAR LIFE), which she used as inspiration for her own same-but-different story “Rahel,” published in her collection. Listen at Substack or at Apple Podcast ..read more

Raise your hand if you too are unable to resist the compulsion to stop any stranger in public you see reading or even just carrying a book you love in order to let them know—in case they didn’t already—JUST how good that book actually is. But never before has the experience been quite as rich and rewarding as when I accosted @livingbyn_designs on Saturday night as she walked down Queen West bearing her newly purchased copy of PEACOCKS OF INSTAGRAM, a book that is not only THE best titled title of 2024, but also everything you’d hope a book with such a great title would be, as I found out in F ..read more

I loved Marion Douglas’s novel The Game of Giants, though I’m not sure where to start in telling you about it. The back of the book describes the story as beginning with narrator Rose and her partner Lucy in the early 1980s discovering that their son Roger has developmental delays, his abilities marked the third percentile, which sends Rose back into her own history to explore when things went awry, which was early, because Rose as a character is pretty off-beat herself, and so is the narrative. But I’m not actually sure that this is what the story is “about” at all, and instead have a sense ..read more

I do believe in love and humility and that we all deserve a transcendent life. I believe that we are all trying our best and that we are all artichokes, with our myriad glorious fucking wings. Which oceans did the textiles traverse, and how did they get to me? It’s distance from that phase of motherhood that allows me such a full and free and visceral connection to it. She didn’t find a book she wanted, but typically I found four. Perhaps I will be more restrained in 20 years time, like Margaret? We said goodbye and that we hoped we’d run into each other again, at Saver’s or at Vinnies or so ..read more

“But what’s sad in this whole thing is Wild One ain’t the criminal here. No, no, no. He jus a dude who did suttin. The criminals is us people around him, the people watching someone shake someone else awake from a dream and not doin nothin to stop it.” —”The Young Entrepreneurs of Miss Bristol’s Front Porch.” Reading Sidik Fofana’s debut Stories from the Tenants Downstairs was especially meaningful for me because my friend B. recommended it to me when I was staying at her house last week, and she reads my book recommendations all the time but it’s not so often that I get to return to the favo ..read more

This episode of BOOKSPO is guaranteed to put a song in your head, as Michelle Hébert tells me all about how revisiting Emma Donoghue’s 1997 story collection KISSING THE WITCH helped her discover solutions to problems she was facing in developing the characters in EVERYTHING LITTLE THING SHE DOES IS MAGIC, her debut novel, which is out this week and pretty magic in its own right. I’m really excited to share it with you, and hope it makes you curious enough to pick up both books (and you definitely should!). Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts ..read more

I have a file in my head I’ve started calling the “Really Important to Understand Even if (ESPECIALLY IF?) You Don’t Agree” file, and the latest addition to it is Zadie Smith’s New Yorker essay “Shibboleth.” It joins Naomi Klein’s “We Need an Exodus from Zionism,” a speech she made in New York City last month at a Seder during Passover, and the essay “Resigned,” by Dashka Slater, which I think was the piece that started it all. Someone I admire a lot posted that essay, and the weird thing about that was the people who reacted to it with comments like, “This!” and “So good,” which didn’t seem ..read more