Esther Kinsky’s Lyrical Elegy for the Movies
In Esther Kinsky’s fiction, landscapes write and speak. Across her novels we find “waters sighing,” “shadows of leaves scribbling notes,” the Oder drawing “countless watery question...
Madeleine Watts Doesn’t Want Closure
Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts’s sophomore novel, follows a young married couple from New York City on a two-week road trip across the American Southwest in November...
John and Yves Berger’s Letters on the Nature of Art—and the Art of Nature
Halfway through Over to You, the painter Yves Berger recounts a meeting with university students interested in his creative process. The meeting, he feels, was a...
Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2025 Preview
It’s cold, it’s grey, its bleak—but winter, at the very least, brings with it a glut of anticipation-inducing books. Here you’ll find nearly 100 titles that...
Rubies Shored Against the Ruin
By the time the English poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney was felled by a bullet among the low, frigid marshes of Zutphen in October of...
A Year in Reading: Edwin Frank
The book that held my attention through most of the year, that I went back to again and again—perforce, it is a very long book—was Volume...
A Year in Reading: Sophia Stewart
A mortifying admission in light of my 2023 Year in Reading essay: this year, I fell in love with a man. I also fell back in...
A Year in Reading: Jeremy Gordon
I have long made lists of my favorite cultural artifacts of the year—as a college blogger blathering about movies to a single-digit readership, as a Pitchfork...
A Year in Reading: John Lee Clark
When I moved to Montreal last August to begin doctoral studies, I gave myself a personal assignment to sift through Canadian literature. Elizabeth Hay’s 2006 novel...
A Year in Reading: Ellen Wayland-Smith
I published a book of essays two months ago, which I realized only in retrospect is a collection of meditations on pain, and since then I...
