Early in First Love: Essays on Friendship, Lilly Dancyger writes about her fire escape, a precarious perch off an old East Village apartment where she and her friends would gather: “Literally stepping out of our lives, to drink and smoke and commiserate.” It becomes a perfect metaphor for the refuge found in friendship, for the ways we hold and make space for one another, and this book is an extension of that: a hand to squeeze, a shoulder to lean on. Throughout First Love, Dancyger reminds us that our most meaningful love stories can be those we share with our friends. I talked with Dancyger ..read more

Paul Auster died on April 30 after being the voice in my ear for a month. I had only recently finished his massive novel 4321, using an approach I learned from my wife to preserve momentum on very long books. (It is almost 1,100 pages.) By taking up an audiobook alongside a physical volume and alternating between the two as circumstances require, the reader can keep a story going without getting stuck. The only downside is the tricky business of finding one’s place while jumping back and forth between media. Auster narrated his own audiobook version of 4321, so I had been listening to him talk ..read more

The region, we’re told, extends from the deserts of Sonora to the straits of Tierra del Fuego, encompassing 7.7 million square miles that are home to 660 million people who share two Latinate languages: Spanish and Portuguese. What complicates the picture is that many in that vast expanse also speak Nahuatl, Quechua, and hundreds of other tongues. But it’s not just the language: the people of this region, we hear, are Catholic. Even if we set aside the fact that many of them are Pentecostal or Jewish, however, the Catholic traditions of Oaxaca would be unrecognizable to churchgoers from Rio de ..read more

Welcome to the first installment of a new column where Millions readers can sound off on the books they’re currently reading. Tell us about what you’re reading—hot takes always welcome—and you might just end up in next month’s column. * Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth (1966) I wanted to celebrate Barth’s life by exploring more of his work, and am now kicking myself at not reading Giles Goat-Boy sooner. It’s a maximal novel that celebrates its style, proudly defiant and aware that it’s an oddity. In the form of parody, Barth mixes genres and traditions like the odyssey, the messianic, and the cam ..read more

A hiker who sets out from the half-timbered German village of Schrierke intending to scale Brocken Mountain—the snow line still visible at the last dusk of April when the clover blooms crimson, the vetch is already blue, and green leaves are again on the elms and sycamores—might experience the “specter” associated with that peak, wherein backscatter sunlight against the fog can cause a person’s shadow to be magnified and projected upon the clouds, conjuring a ghostly, dark doppelgänger. Occasionally, this gargantuan silhouette is accompanied by what the Germans call a Heiligenschein, a halo-li ..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, Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, author of such books as Lost Children Archive and The Story of My Teeth, explores the new translation of Juan Rulfo’s landmark text Pedro Páramo. What do you think of the new translation of Pedro Páramo? I have been forever frustrated with the existing translations because I think it’s the greatest novel ever written, and I knew very few people in the English-speaking world who ..read more

We’re thrilled to reveal the cover for Sam Sax‘s forthcoming debut novel Yr Dead, slated for August 6.  Here’s a bit about the book, courtesy of McSweeney’s: In between the space of time when Ezra lights themself on fire and when Ezra dies the world of this book flashes before their eyes. Everyone Ezras ever loved, every place they ve felt queer and at home, or queer and out of place, reveals itself in an instant. Unfolding in fragments of memory, Ezra dissolves into the family, religion, desire, losses, pains and joys that made them into the person that’s decided on this final act of pr ..read more

In her new memoir Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, Suzanne Scanlon recounts the years she spent in New York State Psychiatric Institute and Hospital. In chapters oscillating between memoir and criticism, Scanlon narrates her own experience while disassembling notions of madness, recovery, patienthood, diagnosis, and the asylum. She situates her story within—and also pushes against—the canon of “crazy chicks,” whose memoirs were published while she was hospitalized in the early nineties. And yet Scanlon’s depiction of her artistic development suggests an appealingly thorny relationship betwe ..read more

About a year ago, I spent a lot of time with a 14-month-old who was learning how to speak. She could repeat certain sounds and occasionally mimic my words, but wasn’t quite able to ascribe meanings to the sounds and words she produced. I told my friends, in earnest, that she taught me more about language than I’d gotten from our graduate seminars on literary theory. I thought of my time with this curious, burgeoning infant often as I read Kate Briggs’s novel The Long Form. The Long Form traces the course of one day in a young mother’s life. Helen gets up after an almost sleepless night with he ..read more

When Jules Gold, the protagonist of Alexandra Tanner’s debut novel Worry, comes home to find her younger sister Poppy lying naked on the couch, covered in ice packs and crying, she knows exactly what’s going on. The reader might be baffled, but Jules understands immediately that Poppy is suffering an outbreak of full-body hives, a chronic condition that has plagued her since childhood. She doesn’t need Poppy to explain her medication dosages or the drastic side effects of the new steroids her doctor has prescribed, and she doesn’t need to be told what to do: call in sick from work, make white ..read more