Welcome!

“A word after a word after a word is powerful.”—Margaret Atwood

And, as Bono says on “COEXIST” from the brand new U2 EP Easter Lily, “Whoever made language must’ve been drinking. Twenty-six characters own all the ink and printing.”

It is a miraculous thing, this combining of letters and words to form something powerful and potentially world-changing. That’s all. I just wanted to take a few words to remind us of the miracle of words.

Happy reading.

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

LIT NOTES

Moonstruck

If you’re feeling a bit weightless in the wake of the exciting return to the moon with Artemis II and the film success of the novel Project Hail Mary, written by Andy Weir, who also gave us The Martian, you might want to consider The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. It’s about a group of unlikely people confined to a small space and though some are aliens and AI and they’re in a spaceship ploughing through a wormhole, the emotional dynamic could just as easily be taking place during a family vacation on Earth. Chambers continues the family trauma with three following books in her Wayfarer series. That will prepare you for this fall when Chambers starts a new series, As You Wake, Break the Shell. If you want to keep things closer to our moon, instead of Tau Ceti’s 12 million light years, you can land on Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, a time traveling novel that, David Mitchell-like, uses the moon as one of its vortices. Mandel is most famous for Station Eleven, about a post-apocalyptic Earth. She, too, will have a new book in the fall, Exit Party, also earthbound. But if you’re moonstruck about the Weir-a-verse and in orbit about the Artemis II mission, you can satisfy your moonstruck desires with his 2017 novel, Artemis, about a young woman forced to become a smuggler on a lunar colony where things go terribly wrong until science fixes it. By the way, Weir is working on a new novel about, what else, AI.

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“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”—Carl Sagan

It seems appropriate to quote Carl Sagan just as the USA has launched a new manned rocket to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. With all the absolute chaos that Donald Trump is unleashing, Sagan’s sad prediction that mankind will destroy itself before escaping the solar system seems ever more likely. “It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and other nearby stars,” Sagan said. “It will be a species very like us but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses.”

But it is comforting that scientist Sagan loved books more than just about anything. I could read this from Sagan again and again:

What an astonishing thing a book is. one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person maybe somebody dead for thousands of years across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions binding together people who never knew each other citizens of distant epochs books break the shackles of time. A book is a proof that humans are capable of working magic.

If information were passed on merely by word of mouth, how little we should know of our own past, how slow would be our progress. Everything would depend on what we had been told on how accurate the account. Ancient learning might be revered, but in successive retellings it would become muddled and then lost. Books permit us to voyage through time to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

A library connects us with the insights and knowledge of the greatest minds and the best teachers drawn from the whole planet and from all our history to instruct us without tiring and to inspire us to make our own contributions to the collective knowledge of the human species.For the price of a modest meal, you get the history of Rome.

Books are like seeds.They can lie dormant for centuries, but they may also produce flowers in the most unpromising soil. These books are the repositories of the knowledge of our species and of our long evolutionary journey from genes to brains to books.

Libraries in ancient Egypt bore these words on their walls, nourishment for the soul, and that’s still a pretty fair assessment of what libraries provide.

Happy reading!

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

LIT NOTES

Poet Anne Waldman turns 81 today. She was a key part of the experimental Outrider poet community and has about 60 books and pamphlets of poetry and prose. In a sense, she was an antecedent to Patti Smith and brought a much-needed feminism to the Beat literary movement. Allen Ginsberg called Waldman his “spiritual wife.” Her poetry readings and talks are electric and many can be found on YouTube, such as this one.

Anne Waldman website

Easter Revealed

Nothing gets us more in the mood for Easter, besides chocolate eggs, than a good novel set during the holiest holiday in Christianity. Rather than go the route of The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas; better for fashion week, or Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace; we get him confused with Moses, we prefer The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny. It’s the third Inspecter Armand Gamache brouhaha in the less than tranquil village of Three Pines. By the way, the 20^th Gamache book was published last year and in The Black Wolf, there’s still plenty of angst and murder. However, for those of us who value the spiritual renewal of this holiday, Sister Liz Dodd has just published Easter in Disguise: The 2026 Bloomsbury Lent Book. It is a brief and powerful reminder of what we can all learn from Jesus and how his “spiritualities” can teach us about unity, hospitality, peace and protest.

BEST OF LITERARY SUBSTACK: Your weekly guide

Jeanette Winterson has a powerful new post on Substack called Palm Sunday 2026. In it she muses on reading, Pete Hegseth, tech-bros and spirituality. Here’s an excerpt: “I wrote last week about the value of reading a book, or a

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“That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.”—Tim O’Brien

We live in a post-truth world. At least a dozen prominent men denied relationships with Jeffrey Epstein only to be proven liars when emails were released. Trump lies so regularly it is overwhelming. Members of Congress lie about Trump, legislation and their opponents. Partisan media outlets shamelessly lie daily. Getting the picture?

And so in these time, yes, oddly, it is literary fiction that often feels as if it is providing important truths about people, politics, history and culture.

I read fiction for pleasure, but also to understand the world we live in.

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

LIT NOTES

April Cruelty

Now with the announcement of the eminent release this month of George R.R. Martin’s penultimate book in the Game of Thrones series, titled The Winds of Winter, we thought it would be great to look back at other long-awaited books that came out of hiding on this date. In the 1956, humorist Jean Shepherd finally announced his debut novel, I, Libertine under the pen name “Frederick R. Ewing.” An immediate best-seller before publication, Ballantine had to hire a ghost writer to write the unwritten book. Side note: That writer was Theodore Sturgeon, already famous for his science fiction classic More Than Human. In the midst of the raunch-lit craze during the 1960s, exemplified by the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann, journalist Mike McGrady, writing under the name of “Penelope Ashe,” published Naked Came the Stranger. Afterwards, McGrady admitted that the book was written by over a dozen fellow journalists with the intention of writing something so lascivious and tasteless that it had to become a best-seller. It was. This date also hosted some important non-fiction books as well. We got to see the personal side of arguably the worst person in the world in The Hitler Diaries. The long passages where the Führer moons over Harry Stiles gave it away as a fake, written by professional forger and smuggler Konrad Kujau in 1983. On a lighter note, April 1 was also the original publication date of The Curious Case of Sidd Finch by George Plimpton. Finch had a Dickensian past in an English orphanage, yet managed to become a yoga master in Tibet, and threw a fastball 168 miles per hour for the New York Mets. He had a locker next to Darryl Strawberry and would have been an all-star but he gave up baseball for the French horn. It was later revealed, to the chagrin of Mets fans, who could have used less chagrin, that Plimpton made the whole thing up. Happy April Fools’ Day! And, sorry folks, the winter winds aren’t coming any time soon.

Unexpected Meetings between Authors and Celebrities

Here for your viewing pleasure are some fun photos of authors meeting celebrities. We leave it to you to google the source of them all!

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Sometimes you read a novel so satisfying you want to press it into the hands of every passerby urging them to read it. For me, Tara Menon’s debut, Under Water, is exactly that.

Eight years after surviving the Indian Ocean tsunami, Marissa drifts through New York, her days unmoored and her nights spent in the beds of strangers as Hurricane Sandy gathers force offshore. From this charged present, the novel unfolds in a striking dual narrative moving seamlessly between the tense hours before the storm and the luminous days of her childhood on a small Thai island, where—after her mother’s death—she and Arielle forged a unbroken friendship, roaming forests and reefs and diving in perfect synchrony like the manta rays they named. All of it moves with quiet inevitability toward that precise moment on Boxing Day when the sea rises and tears them apart

Tara’s prose is vibrant and uncannily precise, every sentence feeling exactly right, every word carefully chosen. Marissa and Arielle are fully realized, their bond rendered with a brightness that lingers, making the coming rupture all the more devastating. It is a beautifully controlled, deeply affecting novel—one that pulls you under before you even know it. I, for one, cannot wait for her second novel.—Mohamed Ikhlef

Tara Menon website

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The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day

Literature abounds with uncanny and strange narrators, yet nothing quite prepared me for The Oldest Bitch Alive, Morgan Day’s polyphonic novel where a chorus of voices unfolds—including, disturbingly, the worms consuming Gelsomina. a French bulldog, from within, changing her inner and outer world.

In a glass house shared with her owners, Wendy and John—an interior designer—and Zampano, a puppy meant to be her companion, Gelsomina becomes infested with two worms after drinking from the murky water of a nearby pond. On the brink of death yet teeming with new life, she comes to perceive the world anew: her bond with the designer-architect couple she lives with, the innocent distractions of their younger French bulldog, Zampanò, her longing for an elusive fox and the emptiness both within and beyond her. As time unfolds the gentle bulldog and the parasites inhabiting her alike are drawn into questions that have troubled philosophers for centuries: Who designed this life? Is there a plan? And am I free to live it as I choose?

The Oldest Bitch Alive is an uncommonly striking debut, one that offers not only an uncanny narrator but also shimmering, poetic prose. Its long, winding sentences feel at once dreamy and bizarre, pulling the reader into a world that is both disorienting and strangely intimate. This is a wild novel that invites us to think—and to see the world—from entirely new perspectives. And if you’re wondering: her next novel will be told by furniture.—Mohamed Ikhlef

Morgan Day website, Instagram

“I am a part of everything I have read.” — Theodore Roosevelt

Hi, members,

Presidents used to read, and Teddy Roosevelt may have been the ultimate presidential reader—maybe the ultimate reader, period. He supposedly read at least two books per day for much of his life! See Lit Notes below for the 26th president’s 10 rules for reading.

In. this issue you will notice that book titles are live links (and in orange). That’s because TMLS has become a Bookshop.org affiliate! We earn a small commission on purchases made through the links, but more importantly, all Bookshop.org purchases support independent local bookstores. So if you want to purchase any of the books we’ve written about, just click the link of that book! Thanks.

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

LIT NOTES

Top 10 Novels to Inspire Spring Cleaning

Now that spring has sprung, it is time to shake off the winter cobwebs and clean the house. Here are ten novels about cleaning, including that most painful of dilemmas, culling through the book collection.

• Let’s start with The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up, a graphic novel by clean queen Marie Kondo, who is also a character, and helps a young woman in Tokyo reclaim “sparks of joy” in her life by the magic of tidying up.

•In those innocent days before the Epstein Files, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was considered risqué. In Leslie Daniels’ novel, Cleaning Nabokov’s House, we find a woman who cleans her life while cleaning up the Russian novelist’s former house.

• The never-ending battle to tidy goes way back, and in 1907 the wonderful Frances Hodgson Burnett, who gave us The Secret Garden, and many other classics, published The Spring Cleaning: As Told by Queen Crosspatch. Faeries are involved.

• For those of us still clinging to mid-century modern fantasies about Paris, there’s the delightful Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico that puts a housemaid seeking a new life in the City of Love where she falls in love with a Dior dress she can’t afford.

• The Swedish author of A Man Called Ove, Frederick Backman, gives us another cozy character study in Britt-Marie Was Here about an obsessive-compulsive woman who leaves her cheating husband and assimilates in Borg where she cleans up a children’s recreation center.

• For those of us into re-imaginings, especially within the Jane Austen Literary Universe (JALU), Jo Baker was rewritten Pride and Prejudice from the downstairs view of the Bennet family cleaning staff in Longbourn. (Not to be confused with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, which is an entirely different gloss).

• In The Maid by Nita Prose, young, neurodivergent Molly loses her grandmother and her bearings on the world, becomes a maid, then a suspect in a murder, then a detective, as happens.

• What happens when we don’t clean up and control our obsessions, especially with books, is we end up like the house-bound, book-entombed brothers in E.L. Doctorow’s based-on-a-true-story novel, Homer & Langley.

• It’s better for us to clean our libraries than meet the fate of the society in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which books start to burn.

• Forget trying to lighten the load or throw out the furniture, the clothing, and the family mementoes instead and cherish those beautiful volumes of imagination and possibilities as do the characters in Matthew Pearl’s The Last Bookaneer.

Teddy Roosevelt’s 10 Rules for Reading

1. “The room for choice is so limitless that to my mind it seems absurd to try to make catalogues which shall be supposed to appeal to all the best thinkers. This is why I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of the One Hundred Best Books, or the Five-Foot Library [a reference to the Harvard Classics]. It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books… But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times.”

2. “A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time.”

3. “Personally, the books by which I have profited infinitely more than by any others have been those in which profit was a by-product of the pleasure; that is, I read them because I enjoyed them, because I liked reading them, and the profit came in as part of the enjoyment.”

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“Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.”—Daphne Du Maurier

Maybe so, but this man is a novel reader who wishes he could appreciate short stories more. For reasons I can’t really identify, reading short stories doesn’t create the same mix of intense feelings I get from reading novels, and it’s distressing, because at times I feel I am missing out. I so want to love a masterful story collection as I do a great novel.

Are any members like me? Or, do any of you love stories even more than novels? Any thoughts on why this happens?

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

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LIT NOTES

March Madness

As we close out the last week of the not so merry month of March, it’s not too late to complete a March reading list. There are more literary novels with March in the title than any other month, making it the most literary time of the year, and maybe why it’s been designated as the National Reading Month (actually, it’s because March 2 is Dr. Seuss’s birthday). This would be a great time to read March by Geraldine Brooks, about the March sisters in Little Women. Staying in the Civil War era, we can follow up with The March by E.L Doctorow, about Sherman’s march and the burning of Atlanta (a very different depiction than in Margaret Mitchells’ Gone with the Wind). If you still feel stuck in the mid-19^th century, you could squeeze in the classic Middlemarch by George Eliot, or if you want to explore the consequences of the America’s racist past, then delve into the March trilogy by crusading congressperson John Lewis, a graphic novel about the Civil Rights movement. Set at about the same time, The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow is a bildungsroman about a young man, “Chicago-born,” who goes about things as he has taught himself, to paraphrase the famous first line. If you like history, there’s The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman, which documents the futility of wars from Troy to Vietnam. Speaking of war, no casus belli would be complete without a focus on Julius Caesar, and Thorton Wilder has given us an epistolary novel about the flesh and blood Caesar during his last days in The Ides of March. It’s a busy month. Luckily, the next bookiest month is not until October, when we’ll be dusting off copies of October Light by John Gardner, The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy, The October Horse by Colleen McCullough, and The October Country by Ray Bradbury. Maybe it’s an equinox thing. We could list more, but we’re not April fools.

NEW RELEASES

• Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich: In the twelve stories of Python’s Kiss, written over two decades, Erdrich returns with her singular blend of magical realism and the everyday lives of her characters, inviting readers into a world shaped by emotion and quiet grace. The collection is accompanied by illustrations from her daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe.

• Light and Thread by Han Kang, various translators: In her first published book since winning the Nobel Prize, Han Kang delivers an intimate and personal work: precise, luminous and composed of essays, journal entries, poems and photographs. She reflects on her relationship with her mother, the questions that run through her novels, and offers glimpses into her writing process, as well as her north-facing home and garden.

• Celestial Lights by Cecile Pin: Pin’s second novel tells the life story of Oliver, born at the moment the Challenger mission explodes in the sky. Oliver grows up dreaming of the stars and becomes a celebrated astronaut, chosen to lead a daring ten-year mission to Europa. As he ventures farther into space, memories of his past begin to surface, raising an unsettling question: what kind of life will be waiting for him on Earth?

• Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry by David Streitfeld: This biography by McMurtry’s longtime friend, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Streitfeld, draws on primary documents unearthed from scattered archives, as well as interviews with the author and those around him—to tell the complicated life of a man who reshaped our vision of the West.

• Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories by Amal El-Mohtar: Written over a decade, and winner of more than a dozen fantasy and SFF awards—including the Nebula and the Hugo—these stories by Amal El-Mohtar are sheer beauty: Crafted in her fine, reflective prose, she delivers inventive fairy tales in the form of letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales and lyrical fragments.

EVENTS AND APPEARANCES

• Tayari Jones will discuss her new novel, Kin. She will be in conversation with Kiley Reid, bestselling author of Such a Fun Age.

Tuesday, 24 March, 7:00 - 8:30 pm PDT

Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St. Portland, OR 97209

• Author Louise Erdrich will discuss her new story collection, Python’s Kiss, in conversation with bestselling author Angeline Boulley, with a guest appearance by Aza Erdrich Abe, illustrator of the stories. This is a virtual ticketed event.

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“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”—Orhan Pamuk

Hi, members,

I had to take my ex-wife to the emergency room this morning after she took a fall (she’s okay). As she went in for examination and x-rays, I knew I had a long wait ahead and I was … thrilled! Away from my work desk, it was a perfect excuse to just read, and by ignoring the hospital’s free wifi, I was blissfully out of service while getting lost in my downloaded library book.

The Libby and Kindle apps on my phone and tablet mean I’m never without a book, and I feel blessed by this technology. Although I kind of miss stuffing a cheap paperback into my jeans pocket …

Happy reading,

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

LIT NOTES

In Praise of Michael Dibdin

If you want to solve a mystery about one of the best mystery writers who seems to be unknown to most fans of the genre, then check out the Aurelio Zen novels by Michael Dibdin. In the month of March, the English writer was born on the 21^st in 1947 and died sixty years later on the 30^th. He debuted his law-bending detective with Ratking in 1988 and ended with End Game in 2007, the year Dibdin died, eleven novels in all. The Venetian-born Zen solved murders and other gruesome crimes, which in Italy is saying a lot, with as much punch and panache as his more famous contemporaries, the Sicilian Inspector Salvo Montalbano in the brilliant series of books by Andrea Camillieri and Donna Leon’s Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti. The true joy of the Zen novels, however, is not the crimes but the times they offer readers to linger all over Italy, eating, drinking, sightseeing, living, loving, and occasionally killing with Italians. It sometimes takes an ex-pat Englishman to truly appreciate la dolce vita. Over his career, Dibdin wrote a variety of other crime novels as well, including The Last Sherlock Holmes Story and Dark Spectre. But for me, I feel about Aurelio the way Dibdin does, as he told January magazine, “He’s a friend I like, but I don’t feel I know terribly well. Which is an advantage, you know. He’s capable of surprising me.”

Names Are Fiction, too!

The practice of using pseudonyms has been around for as long as writing itself. In literature, you can trace it back to Arabic poets as early as the 5th century, and it’s still very much alive today. In the Western tradition, it shows up clearly in the 17th century, when Madeleine de Scudéry borrowed the name Sappho to publish her work. By the 18th and 19th centuries, it had become almost a necessity, especially for women writers navigating a deeply misogynistic literary world: Mary Ann Evans became George Eliot, and Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin wrote as George Sand.

That’s the part most of us know but the story gets more interesting the closer you look. Yukio Mishima, for example was actually Kimitake Hiraoka, choosing a name that simply felt right, even inspired by the rhythm of a train journey. Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; her pen name comes from Anthony. the name she took at twelve after converting to Catholicism, and Morrison, her first husband’s surname. And then there are the writers who didn’t stop at one name. In the 19th century some treated pseudonyms almost like outfits: Stendhal reportedly used more than a hundred while Daniel Defoe went even further with nearly two hundred.

But perhaps the most surprising story is that of Hans Fallada, the German writer who rose to fame in the 1920s. When he began his literary career, he adopted the pseudonym “Hans Fallada” combining names from German folk tales “Hans im Glück” and The Horse Falada and kept it for the rest of his life.

And sometimes the mask never comes off. The real identity of the German writer B. Traven remains a mystery despite decades of digging. As for Elena Ferrante, in a world of eight billion people, only three know who she really is: her Italian publisher and editor and Ferrante herself.

BEST OF LITERARY SUBSTACK: Your weekly guide

Emma Reads Too Much

For people who love lists, Emma Reads Too Much on Substack offers fun itemizations of novels that she’s read over the years. In her latest post, she lists over 40 writers who’ve written at least multiple books she’s loved. The list has some well-known names such as Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys,

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During my childhood, I discovered the unparalleled pleasures of reading through my father’s collection of engrossing and beautifully written books. I spent days and weeks immersed in them—works I later came to know as the Classics. It was therefore to my utter surprise—and delight—to stumble upon Watching Over Her, this magnificent novel by the French author and director Jean-Baptiste Andrea, subtly rendered in English by Frank Wynne.

Watching Over Her immerses the reader in the adventurous and turbulent life of Mimo Vitaliani, an aspiring sculptor determined to make his place in a cruel and unforgiving world. Into his orbit walks Viola Orsini, the brilliant and rebellious daughter of a financially struggling aristocratic family. Much hope is placed on Viola by her relatives, who expect to restore the family’s fortunes, yet Viola dreams of a life far beyond those expectations.

The two outsiders form a deep and complicated bond that will define their lives. Throughout the decades, Viola becomes Mimo’s muse, his fiercest ally and the emotional axis around which his art revolves. Their story unfolds across the turbulent landscape of twentieth-century Italy, from the rise of fascism to the upheavals of war and political change.

Watching Over Her is framed by Mimo’s final days in a secluded monastery, where he guards his mysterious masterpiece, a work that has stirred fascination and unease. The story unfolds through his voice, as well as that of the person in charge of the monastery, gradually revealing the secrets of his life and art.

Written with elegance and quiet intensity, the novel combines sweeping historical storytelling with intimate psychological depth. Andrea’s language is both luminous and restrained, carrying the reader through a century of turmoil with remarkable grace and emotional power.—Mohamed Ikhlef

Frank Wynne website

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Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated by Natasha Lehrer

Usually, reviews do not begin with a warning, but I feel compelled to offer one: this is a raw, unflinching, and deeply painful book. I recommend it nonetheless because everyone should read Sad Tiger, the hybrid autobiographical novel by the French author Neige Sinno, skillfully translated by Natasha Lehrer.

Neige Sinno was abused in childhood by her stepfather and here she offers a painful testimony of a trauma whose shock waves still persist. Through a stark and unflinching narrative, she raises profound questions about violence, power and memory, borrowing the title “Sad Tiger” from a poem by William Blake that reflects on the nature of evil.

Sinno grew up in a modest environment, and her silence as a child was an attempt to protect her family from collapse, even as the details of the abuse remained etched in her memory despite the blurred chronology of events. Although she confronted her abuser legally at the age of seventeen and he was sentenced to prison, this did not bring her a full sense of justice.

In the book, she intertwines her personal experience with literary and intellectual reflections, drawing on a wide range of writers such as Annie Ernaux, Toni Morrison and Vladimir Nabokov to show that trauma never fully disappears; one simply learns to live with its shadow. The result is a powerful work that blends personal confession with deep reflection, tracing the journey of a writer who carries within her both the wounded child and the woman who continued her life and became a mother.—Mohamed Ikhlef

Natasha Lehrer website, Instagram

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“The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”—Kurt Vonnegut

Hi, members,

No government, let alone the current American one, would use tax dollars to start a library today. Using public money for free books? It would be laughed out of any legislature. So, it’s essential to keep the ones we have open and thriving. Even if you buy all your books, please get a library card. It’s easy and meaningful. Those membership numbers could determine if your library stays funded or not. And if its funding is reduced or the library is closed, it will not come back.

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

LIT NOTES

Fetch this Book

It’s long been known in the evolutionary taxonomy of Life on Earth, that human beings as a species don’t even crack the top ten. I’d put certain insects over homo sapiens in terms of their value to the planet and the sheer floridity of their variations. As the biologist J.B.S. Haldane said, “If there is a God, he has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” But at the top of that list, our tails wag the most for dogs. As Mark Twain said, “The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.” Many of our best writers know this. Can you even imagine John Steinbeck without his poodle, Charlie? Or Stephen King without the adorable Cujo—though his non-fiction best friend these days is a corgi referred to as The Thing of Evil. Digging into this fecal ground, Alice Hoffman, author of Practical Magic and other literary treats, has edited a new book, The Best Dog in the World. In it, fourteen authors chew on their relationships with their canine muses. From Isabel Allende to Jodi Picoult to Elizabeth Strout to Amy Tan to Adriana Trigiani, the essays reveal that, as Hoffman writes in the introduction, “we are not worthy of dogs.” Among the most dogophile writers, Isabel Allende’s obsession with dogs goes back to a ghost Great Dane in The House of the Spirits, and she’s written several children’s books about memorable pooches. “Often, I find myself asking [my dogs] something about the writing,” she writes in her essay. “Dogs taught me from early on to see the world through the heart, emotions, relationships, intuition, instinct. I am a much better person when there is a dog around.” For the literary couple Paul Yoon, author of the novel Run Me to Earth, and Laura van den Berg, who penned the story collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, their lab mix, Oscar, is more than a pet. He’s a collaborator. Yoon’s new novel, Etna, coming out in August, is told through the eyes of an ex-military dog who finds his way home. “That was a huge leap for me,” he said, “to enter the mind of a dog.”

Literary Fiction of 1976

Fifty years ago, historical fiction was all the rage. Gore Vidal’s 1876, Leon Uris’s Trinity, and Alex Haley’s Roots (1976-1977) dominated the bestseller lists. The last Agatha Christie novel, and then a posthumous one, also topped the list. That said, 1976 was a wonderful year for literary fiction. Look at the embarrassment of riches that came out:

The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez

The Easter Parade, Richard Yates

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by Mohamed Ikhlef

I have a weakness for debut novels written by short story authors. When a writer trained in the short form turns to the novel, the result is often something beautifully controlled; the prose is economical yet astonishingly rich, and the book rarely overstays its welcome. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo comes immediately to mind.

Kenan Orhan’s debut novel, The Renovation, belongs to that tradition.

At the heart of the story is Dilara, a Turkish school psychologist who flees Turkey for Italy after political turmoil, accompanied by her husband and her aging father. Hoping to create a more comfortable environment for her father, who suffers from dementia, Dilara decides to renovate the second bathroom in their home.

She is meticulous with the builders: They discuss materials, choose fixtures, and carefully calculate the cost. So Dilara is stunned to discover that instead of a new bathroom, the builders have somehow constructed a portal to a Turkish prison cell.

At first she is outraged. Yet gradually the cell becomes something else—a strange sanctuary that reconnects her to the homeland she left behind. It also becomes a refuge from the mounting pressures around her: the slow unraveling of her marriage, the exhausting care of her father, and the fragile effort to build a meaningful life in Italy, the country she now calls “home.”

The Renovation feels like wandering through a house whose walls quietly hold the weight of everything that has happened inside them. Orhan transforms the domestic space into something symbolic, where each room carries a different emotional charge—memory, guilt, longing and the restless pull of a homeland that distance cannot quiet. The novel echoes a tradition that recalls the unsettling architectures of Kafka, where ordinary spaces suddenly reveal hidden psychological depths. Here, too, a familiar room becomes something else entirely, a threshold between past and present. The result is a quietly fable about exile, memory and the strange ways our inner lives reshape the spaces we inhabit.

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by Mohamed Ikhlef

Rahmat and Maryam Sharaf flee the horrors of war in Afghanistan and arrive in America with nothing in their pockets but hope. America, after all, is the land of dreams. Within a decade the Sharaf family has built a new life in northern Virginia: a beautiful house, expensive cars and big ambitions for their children—perhaps even an Ivy League future. Their daughter Zorah, brilliant and beautiful, seems destined for great things.

And then tragedy strikes.

Good People, the debut novel by Patmeena Sabit, unfolds through a mosaic of interviews and police statements, some only a few lines long, others stretching across several pages. Friends, neighbors, teachers and members of the Afghan community all speak, each voice rendered with empathy and nuance. Piece by piece, their testimonies reveal different sides of the Sharaf family while raising unsettling questions. What really happened to them? Are cultural expectations and traditions partly to blame? And what judgments do so-called “good people” make about a family they barely know?

Good People is a haunting exploration of what happens when speculation, rumor and suspicion fill the space where facts should be. A community slowly turns into judge and jury, weaving narratives out of fragments and assumptions—often shaped more by fear than truth. In the end, the final word is left to you, the reader: Who are the Sharaf family, really?

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” — Italo Calvino

Hi, members,

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) has certainly not finished saying what it has to say. It was written during the McCarthy era and remains relevant and potent today, 73 years later.

Bradbury wrote 11 novels and 600+ short stories. Beyond being a godfather of modern science fiction who was critical in bringing the genre into the mainstream and into classrooms, he was simply a great American writer.

TMLS co-editor Stuart Matranga interviewed Bradbury in the mid-1980s for a now defunct magazine not online. We’re excited to bring this interview to the public for the first time.

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

LIT NOTES

Schlesser’s Eyes

It’s always extra satisfying when a novel gives its readers a “value added” to the story. A few years back, Jostein Gaarder offered a primer on Western philosophy in his novel, Sophie’s World. Similarly, in the recently published Mona’s Eyes, the debut novel by French art historian Thomas Schlesser, we get to see dozens of art masterpieces in Paris museums through the eyes of a teenage girl who is slowly going blind. Not only is the novel a journey from Botticelli to Basquiat, it’s also a reflection of the art of living. “When I began [writing Mona’s Eyes] twelve years ago,” Schlesser told World Literature Today, “I already knew the story would revolve around the theme of blindness. . . .I wanted to remind readers that while art can elevate, inspire, and liberate, it can also, at times, lend its strength to domination. We must therefore look at images not only with admiration, but also with awareness.” Though art is its heart, the novel, as translation into English by Hildegarde Serle, is an emotional coming-of-age story. As Schlesser told Book Q&As, “Mona’s Eyes embodies Robert Filliou’s beautiful idea that ‘art is what makes life more interesting than art.’” Comparisons to Gaarder in European literary circles led to a meeting between the two authors. Schlesser reports that Gaarder was delighted to think of Mona as Sophie’s little sister.

Top 10 Novels that include Great Recipes

Novels that make you want to eat those words:

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

The youngest daughter of a traditional Mexican family cannot marry, but she can cook. Recipes include champandongo, chorizo con huevos, and Aztec chili truffles.

Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes

A young couple rebuild an old house and their lives in Tuscany (not a novel, but close). Recipes include fried zucchini flowers, potato ravioli, and lemon hazelnut gelato.

Read more

“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” — Jean Rhys

Hi, members,

We started daylight savings time so I lost an hour of reading. Who sleeps anymore? Is the upside of insomnia more reading time? Not if it takes years off my life! ‘Tis a conundrum.

Actually, I find that my best reading time is very early in the morning, when my head is clear and my surroundings are quiet and dark, and the coffee is strong and hot. When is your best reading time? Tell us in a comment.

Enjoy this great issue of first-to-know info, fun Lit Notes, author in focus Keri Hulme, and our first NONFICTION ROUNDUP, another recurring section.

Happy reading!

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

LIT NOTES

Women’s History Month

We wondered if Women’s History is celebrated in March because of the March family of strong, independent women in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. It seems not, but it would be nice to add to a month-long reading list featuring books with strong female characters. Scouring the internet, we found many such lists, including 31 recommended books on the We Are Bookish site. Their lists ranges from historical fiction such as The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave about Norwegian witch trials in the 17^th century and Hallie Rubenhold’s nonfiction investigation into Jack the Ripper’s victims in The Five to more modern settings such as one in Nigeria and a fourteen-year-old girls battle for human rights in The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré and a women’s empowerment story about sisters who seek revenge for their missing co-worker in Andrea Bartz’ The Herd. BookTrib also presents a suggested reading list of several books. Very timely now, and for a long time in the past, The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali tells a sweeping story of women’s endurance in the Iran of the 1950s. The endurance of women in America also forms the foundation for a story that starts in the ’50s and follows the parallel struggles of a mother and daughter in the Jim Crow South and then during the Rodney King riots in Nancy Johnson’s People of Means. These are all in addition to the required reading list about strong women, that isn’t confined to one month, and would have to include The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, Circe by Madeline Miller and reaching back a bit, a very effective if somewhat sentimental window into early 20^th century life, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. These are good to start but, of course, there are hundreds of great books about and by women and they’re good to read any time of the year.

Top Ten Novels with Dead Narrators

Death can’t stop a good story being told as these books prove:

1. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

A chorus of dead people evoke a comic-tragic after-life for Abe Lincoln.

2. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis

No more blood, but plenty of biting from this aristocrat beyond the grave.

3. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Death itself is the best expert to tell a story of the Holocaust.

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by Brenda Navarro, translated by Megan McDowell

It was a YouTube comment under a Vampire Weekend video clip (yes, I have that habit of reading them) that led me to discover the Mexican author Brenda Navarro and her newly translated novel Eating Ashes (2022), rendered into English by Megan McDowell. Her first novel, the award-winning Empty Houses, came out in 2018.

In this second novel, we follow the odyssey of an unnamed woman haunted by the loss of her brother, Diego. The nonlinear narrative moves between Mexico City, where their childhood was marked by violence, grief and a fractured family (an absent mother struggling to survive in Spain and a deceased father), and Madrid, where the family is finally reunited in a place they all resent. Confronted with racism, scarce opportunities and her mother’s indifference, the narrator moves to Barcelona seeking a future, leaving Diego in a city he hates. When he dies, the guilt of not having protected him consumes her.

Returning to Mexico with his ashes only to find a country unrecognizable, fractured by violence and stripped of memory’s comforts, she wrestles with Diego’s fixation on death and with the larger question of what makes a life worth living, and whose lives are deemed worthy at all. She resists his bleak conclusions, searching for an alternative meaning, yet the novel closes where it began: with Diego’s death.

Eating Ashes is a novel rooted in one family’s intimate story, but it reaches toward universal themes of inequality, immigration, trauma, and grief. —Mohamed Ikhlef

Brenda Navarro website, Instagram, X
Megan McDowell website, Instagram, X

The Book Censor’s Library

by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Sawad Hussain

I love books that amaze me, those that transcend meaning and leave behind clues, questions and open doors. At first glance, The Book Censor’s Library by the Kuwaiti novelist Bothaina Al-Essa and translated by Sawad Hussain seems light and aimed at young adults, but from the very first pages, you realize that it is deeper and more subtle than it appears.

It is a novel that can be interpreted in many ways, appealing to both young and old, from the attractive cover to the small details in the narrative. The rabbit is not just a passing element, but a thread that leads you to doubt and surprise, between tracking and beautiful loss. The world in the novel is not far from our own; a world where imagination is suppressed, questions are confiscated and life is reduced to obedience and compliance.

As you move through the chapters of the novel, childhood stories and their initial wonder are evoked, and you feel your own memories are resurfacing. If this novel existed in a world that fought against imagination, it would be one of the first books to be burned, because it reminds us why we read and why we cannot stop.—Mohamed Ikhlef

Bothaina Al-Essa, Instagram, TikTok, X
Sawad Hussain Website, X

“I love the smell of book ink in the morning.” — Umberto Eco

Hi, members,

We’re getting used to this newsletter thing! This issue—number 6!—is chock-full of fun stuff from the Beatles to Helen Garner to The Modern Reader column about novels that spawn other novels. We’re doing our job of keeping you informed about great literary Substacks (and if YOU have a great one, subscribe and leave a comment in the newsletter and we’ll take a look). You’ll see the Best of Literary Substack every Thursday in our twice-weekly newsletter.

We know your inbox is cluttered, but if you enjoy modern literature and actually want to reduce clutter, our newsletter tells you all you need to know about the books and authors you care about.

I love an email from a new subscriber in the evening.

Happy reading,

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

LIT NOTES

Obsessed by Vladimir

For those ready to leap into the lusty season of spring a bit early, Netflix is premiering Vladimir on Thursday, March 5. Based on the popular debut novel by Julia May Jonas and starring the always alluring Rachel Weisz, the series, like the book, pretends to be a steamy romance, but in reality, is a scathing and darkly funny deep dive into sexual politics. Weisz, who also helped bring great novels to the screen such as About a Boy by Nick Hornby, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, and The Constant Gardener by John le Carré, plays a college literature professor who becomes infatuated with a young colleague after her husband, John Flattery of Mad Men fame, another professor, is accused of sexual misconduct at a university. What goes on in these colleges!? “It was a damn good piece of writing,” says Weisz of the novel and her unreliable narrator who frequently breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly. Though the eight 30-minute episodes veer from thriller to comedy, Weisz played it seriously. “I wouldn't know how to be funny,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “It's not in my wheelhouse. I was aware that there was a lot that was ridiculous, but life is often so ridiculous, isn't it? Things are going very wrong in her life with her husband, and it gets harder and harder for her to toe that line as she tries to pretend it’s not going wrong.” Everything is going right for Jonas, however. Her second novel, Diana will be released this spring. It, too, is a study in obsession, but this time, we graduate from a university to the hallowed halls of Hollywood.

Beatle Books

With the new documentary about Paul McCartney, Man on the Run, on Amazon Prime, plus The Beatles Anthology and The Beatles: Get Back, Peter Jackson’s correcting of the Let It Be period on Disney, and the upcoming tetralogy of films by Sam Mendes, each of the Fab Four getting their own movie, The Beatles have been on our minds—not that they ever left them. In the book world, there have been over 2,000 attempts to capture the genius of the music in pages, and dozens of those have been novels. Some of those

Read more

“When I have a little money I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” —Erasmus

There was a time when I was like Erasmus. I couldn’t read—or own—enough books. Used, new, hardcover, soft, mass market, trade, I bought ‘em all.

Fast forward to 2015 when the big old house was being sold, and I found that all I wanted was less stuff. I had also discovered I liked reading on a tablet. My book collection dropped from 5,000 to about 1,000, (though in retrospect I made some really weird choices). I also gave away my large album and CD collections. I sometimes have a pang of regret about an individual title I suddenly wish I had, but overall I feel great having fewer things.

For me, the greatest miracle of the smartphone is my digital library card. It’s been a life-changer for me. Now, unlike Erasmus, I can afford food and clothes! If only I had an appetite or a fashion sense in these times.

Anyway, onto this issue, which is filled with exciting info, including details on new novels just announced by Bonnie Garmus and Chad Harbach (first in 15 years). Read on!

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

LIT NOTES

A Study in Sherlock

Break out whatever you use as a seven percent solution because March 4 marks the 145^th anniversary of the first case that Dr. John Hamish Watson documented about his friend Sherlock Holmes. First printed in 1887 in the magazine Beeton’s Christmas Annual, the novel was published the following year as A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. Originally, though, the title was A Tangled Skein, and the infamous pair who made much mischief among the Victorian criminal element in London were Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker. We are so thankful for the art of the rewrite! Doyle, of course, went on to write 60 original Holmes and Watson stories including His Last Bow, written in 1917, and pitting an aging Holmes against the Germans during World War I. The final collection came out in 1927, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, 24 years after Conan Doyle tried unsuccessfully to kill his most famous character in The Final Problem. The reading public wouldn’t stand for it, and Conan Doyle had to bring Holmes back to life in The Adventure of the Empty House. After Conan Doyle, Holmes lived on in various pastiches from Ellery Queen’s “The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes” in 1947 to the six novels written by filmmaker Nicholas Meyer, including The Seven-Per-Cent Solution in 1974, to Michael Dibdin’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story in 1979. It wasn’t the last one, though, because Holmes simply won’t die. Stephen Fry took a turn in “The Adventure of the Laughing Jarvey” and Stephen King put on the deerstalker’s cap in “The Doctor’s Case,” as did Neil Gaiman in “A Study in Emerald.” Michael Chabon wrote The Final Solution in 2004, but it wasn’t final enough because Caleb Carr wrote The Italian Secretary in 2005, followed by Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. This is not the place to get into his film, TV, comic book and video game incarnations. To paraphrase Conan Doyle about readers, “Sherlock Holmes lives a thousand lives before he dies.”

Oscar Madness

March means one thing. (Well, it’s March Madness for basketball fans, so two things!) It’s Oscar season. Ordinarily, book people draw the blinds on their devices and hunker down with their TBRs and wait for the hoopla to be over (on the Ides of March, the 15th). But this year there are several exciting films based on great novels. One of the most talked about is One Battle After Another, very loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. Screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson has worked on a Pynchon novel before when he churned Inherent Vice into a movie in 2009. Leonardo DiCaprio is, as usual, wonderful, and the film leaves you wanting to read the book. Anderson also adapted Upton Sinclair’s novel, Oil! into There Will Be Blood in 2007. Another highly touted novel adaptation is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell working with director Chloé Zhao. It’s a beautifully crafted meditation on life

and loss. Though it may not be so accurate to the lives of Anne and William Shakespeare, it holds a mirror up to our deepest emotions. Train Dreams, too, based on the novella by Denis Johnson, who also gave us Jesus’ Son and Tree of Smoke, is an enchanting and elegiac study of loneliness and the frailty of the heart. Perhaps the most enduring, and yes, endearing, character ever to step out of the pages of a novel is Frankenstein. This movie version of Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 novel, scripted by Guillermo del Toro, who as a filmmaker gave us Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water and Pinocchio (based on Carlo Collodi’s novel), owes its style more to the 1931 James Whale version starring Boris Karloff. Though the film is more del Toro-fantástico! than Shelley could have imagined, it is very touching and closer to the spirit of the original novel in capturing the tragedy of the monster and his creator. One movie that wasn’t nominated, but should have been is The Life of Chuck, based on a Stephen King novella, by Mike Flannagan, who is the modern day master of horror movies with several series, including The Haunting of Hill House based on Shirley Jackson’s novel and The Haunting of Bly Manor based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and an adaptation of The Fall of The House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe and two previous films based on the King novels Dr. Sleep and Gerald’s Game. But there is nary a fright in The Life of Chuck. Instead, the movie, like the book, is a life-affirming paean to hope. And with great dancing! We hope that these films will get more people to read the books that they’re based on, but we’re not holding our breath.

NEW RELEASES

The 2026 winter-spring release season continues to offer an embarrassment of riches. This week we highlight four fabulous diverse new works.

• Stories: The Collected Short Fiction by Helen Garner: Helen Garner is one of Australia’s most beloved writers, renowned for her fearless, precise portrayals of Australian life. Stories gathers her short fiction, exploring love, loss and human contradictions with her characteristic sharp honesty and subtle humor.

• Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer: Spanning centuries of the Mexico–US borderlands, Now I Surrender follows a woman fleeing an Apache raid, soldiers pursuing Geronimo and modern travelers seeking the truth of the past. Enrigue blends myth and history into a sweeping reimagining of how the West was truly shaped.

• A Far-flung Life by M.L. Stedman: Set in the vast Australian outback, A Far-flung Life follows the MacBride family after an accident shatters their world and unleashes decades of secrets, sacrifice and moral reckoning. Stedman delivers an epic story of love, loss and the fragile choices that shape a lifetime.

• Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund: As winter closes in, a novelist revisits the seismic year of her sixteenth birthday—first love, rebellion and a quiet family rupture that would echo for decades. In Repetition, Hjorth explores memory, silence and the lingering mysteries of childhood with piercing emotional clarity.

EVENTS AND APPEARANCES

In the mood for thoughtful conversations and bookish evenings worth stepping out (or logging on) for? Here’s our curated calendar, highlighting the best literary events of the week:

• Álvaro Enrigue, author of You Dreamed of Empires, will launch his highly anticipated new novel Now I Surrender. He will be in discussion with Oswaldo Zaval

  Tuesday, March 3 2026, 7:30 pm- 9:00 pm ET
  Green Light Bookstore , 686 Fulton St, Brooklyn, NY 11217

• Allegra Goodman will discuss her latest book, This Is Not About Us, a portrait of a modern American Jewish family across generations. The online event is moderated by award-winning journalist Sandee Brawar Tuesday ,March 3, 2026, 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm ET
  Register Here.

• Lauren Groff will discuss her latest story collection, Brawler, with R. O. Kwon.

  Thursday, March 5 2026, 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm PST
  Irish Cultural Center, 2700 45th Ave, San Francisco, CA 94116

• Tayari Jones will discuss her new novel, Kin. She will be joined in conversation by Kellie Carter Jackson—Michael and Denise Kellen. The event will be followed by signing session.

  Thursday, March 5 2026, 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm ET

  Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St.,Cambridge, MA 02138

• Anna Quindlen will discuss and sign her latest novel, More Than Enough. The event will be hosted by Doug Stanton and is a part of the National Writers Series. The event is in person and virtual.

  Saturday, March 7 2026, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm ET

  1150 Milliken Dr, Traverse City, MI 49686

Tube Treasures: Past events and appearances you can still see

Joseph Heller Revisited

For some reason, we’ve been thinking about war, and looking through our bookshelves for some perspective. Among the canon (!) of anti-war novels is the great satire, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Though set in World War II, the book takes aim at our bureaucratic state of mind that leads to ruptures in logic and insane actions such as war. There is a fascinating half-hour interview with Heller at the Air Force Academy in 1986, the 25^th anniversary of the novel’s publication. Heller is brilliant and funny, and he charms the uniformed officers with his humanity. Check it out HERE. Plus, style tip, it is possible to pull off a lavender turtleneck!

Ethan Hawke, Author

In light of his absolutely brilliant and Oscar-nominated performance as tortured poet/lyricist Lorenz Hart in the film Blue Moon, let’s take a moment to talk about Ethan Hawke. At first glance, he might seem like another Hollywood actor with more serious artistic pretentions. But, in fact, Hawke’s choices as an actor from Dead Poet’s Society to Training Day to the nine films he did with director Richard Linklater and his starring in The Good Lord Bird, based on the fantastic James McBride novel, have been stellar. Most recently, he worked on the Amazon Prime adaptation of another great novel, The Lowdown by Erik Carter. This is one actor who truly loves books. And, here’s where we come in; he is a very creditable author with novels The Hottest State, Ash Wednesday and A Bright Ray of Darkness, and, though not a novel and more of an imaginative mediation on virtue, Rules for a Knight. (By the way, his daughter, Maya, stars in Stranger Things.) There is a terrific interview with him at Politics and Prose, the capitol of bookstores in the capitol of this country, where at the 31:25-minute mark, he talks about inspiration, how McBride’s book spurned him on to embrace writing more than ever and how writing helped him create artistic opportunities. Click HERE for the whole interview and check out his novels.

BOOK NEWS

• Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry, is returning this October with her second novel, Peck & Peck. It is described as a tender story about a young man whose life turns upside down when he is hired by the most prestigious, secretive and dysfunctional poetry journal in the world: the renowned Peck & Peck of New York City, while confronting the everyday dualities that make up life: right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies, rejection vs. acceptance.

• New Zealand director Taika Waititi will direct the movie adaptation of James, the beloved hit novel by Percival Everett. Percival says that Waititi has a talent for balancing difficult material with humor and “is just the right person to direct the movie and that they will figure out a way to strike the right tone.”

  

• Dan Simmons, award-winning author of 31 novels and short story collections, passed away on February 21 in Longmont, Colorado, at age 77. Simmons was a prolific author who wrote across many genres including speculative fiction, historical fiction, horror and hard-boiled crime. He is perhaps best known for his Hyperion series of novels.

• Fifteen years after his brilliant (and smash hit) debut, The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach will finally return this October with a sequel, The Brightness, where he follows Pella and her best friend Irma as love, ambition and reckless choices pull them from college into an uncertain adult world. Vivid and deeply human, the novel captures the fragile intensity of one’s twenties, when every decision reshapes the future.

  

• Cees Nooteboom, whose novels and travel writing made him one of the Netherlands’ most prominent authors, has died at 92. Born in the Hague, he became known for novels like Rituals and his celebrated travel books. A recipient of major literary prizes and long considered a Nobel contender, his work bridged fiction, philosophy and the art of wandering.

  

• Legendary editor and Penguin Press founder Ann Godoff died last week at age 76. Godoff had a distinguished and singular career, publishing many award-winning and bestselling works of fiction and nonfiction including books by Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Ron Chernow, Salman Rushdie, Carlos Ruiz Zafon and Caleb Carr. Her contributions helped shaping the modern American book scene.

  

AWARDS UPDATE

• Works by National Book Award winners in 2024 and 2025 have been longlisted for this year International Booker prize. The long list include titles by literary giants such as Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Daniel Kehlmann and Marie NDiaye and several authors nominated for the first time. The short list will be announced on March 31 with the winner announced on May 19.

  

• Bryan Washington, Stephen Graham Jones and S.A. Cosby are among the finalists for this year L.A. Times Book Prize. The nominated books evoke the anxieties of our time, from government-sanctioned historical revisionism to the ongoing proliferation of AI. The prize will also honor Amy Tan with the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. Winners will be revealed at the 46th L.A. Times Book Prizes on April 17 at USC’s Bovard Auditorium.

• The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, one of Australia’s most prestigious literary prizes, announced their winners last week. The Rot, a poetry collection by poet and educator Evelyn Araluen, was the standout, winning both the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Prize for Indigenous Writing.

• Twenty novels including three titles by American authors have been longlisted for the 2026 Dublin Literary Award. The prize is in its 31st year and is worth €100,000 to the winner. Previous winners includes Anna Burns, Edward P. Jones, Orhan Pamuk and Valeria Luiselli. The short list will be announced on April 7 and the winner on May 21.

• Sarah Hall, Benjamin Wood and Lucy Steeds are among the authors longlisted for this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The 12 selected novels span eras and continents, blending epic scope with intimate human stories. The short list will be announced in April, with the winner announced on June 14.

  

• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan and Blob by Maggie Su are the finalists for the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel. Winners will be announced in early April.

AUTHOR IN FOCUS: John Irving

John Irving has had a bit of an odd career. After three early uneven but lively novels, he hit his stride with The World According to Garp (1978), which set the world on fire as literary fiction so rarely does these days. Everyone was reading it, everyone was talking about it. Irving stayed gold with three subsequent novels—The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany—some saying Meany was his peak. It seemed he could write no wrong. Yet he stumbled with his next novel, A Son of the Circus, and while some called the subsequent A Widow for One Year a return to form, to many fans, he never again achieved the magic of that incredible four-book run. The novels kept coming, some quite long, but the reviews became mostly negative, as did reader complaints. The Last Chairlift (2022) came in at 912 pages and TMLS members reported a struggle finishing, some even putting it aside as a DNF! His latest book is a sequel to Cider House that was largely ignored. By the same token, Irving has a hoard off fans who faithfully read every book because of the place he has in their literary hearts. As Irving celebrates his 84th birthday on March 2, with 16 novels, he is now an elder statesman of American letters. His stylish yet clear prose is sterling modern American English. Yet Irving, who holds dual American and Canadian citizenship, moved to Toronto in 2015. Here, in a letter from 2019, he explains why:

Dear Readers,

There have been a lot of questions about my decision to become a Canadian citizen — questions I’ve tried clear up in interviews with the Toronto Star, with the Washington Post, and, in the interview excerpted here, with the CBC’s Rosemary Barton.

I think I see the U.S. more clearly from abroad than I did when I was living there. The perspective of home can be a little exclusionary, when you’re at home. It has always been a necessary perspective for me: to see my country through the eyes of others. Not unlike writing a novel — when the objective is to put yourself (and the reader) in someone else’s shoes, or to see the world from someone else’s point of view. And I care deeply about what happens in the U.S. — three generations of my family are still there. There’s never been a more vital time to vote, as an American, and I intend to keep voting.

Yet I fell in love with and married a Canadian woman. After more than 30 years, it was time for her to return home. Just as it is important to participate in the democratic process as an American, it’s important as a long-time resident of Canada to have some influence in decisions that affect not only my life but affect the lives of more vulnerable people in my community. The route to civic responsibility involves citizenship. Dual citizenship, while not formally recognized by the U.S., is permitted and accepted, and it’s important to me.

—John

What’s your take on Irving? Leave a comment and tell us!

John Irving website, Facebook

Leave a comment

BOOKS IN TRANSLATION: Eating Ashes by Brenda Navarro

It was a YouTube comment under a Vampire Weekend video clip (yes, I have that habit of reading them) that led me to discover the Mexican author Brenda Navarro and her newly translated novel Eating Ashes (2022), rendered into English by Megan McDowell. Her first novel, the award-winning Empty Houses, came out in 2018.

In this second novel, we follow the odyssey of an unnamed woman haunted by the loss of her brother, Diego. The nonlinear narrative moves between Mexico City, where their childhood was marked by violence, grief and a fractured family (an absent mother struggling to survive in Spain and a deceased father), and Madrid, where the family is finally reunited in a place they all resent. Confronted with racism, scarce opportunities and her mother’s indifference, the narrator moves to Barcelona seeking a future, leaving Diego in a city he hates. When he dies, the guilt of not having protected him consumes her.

Returning to Mexico with his ashes only to find a country unrecognizable, fractured by violence and stripped of memory’s comforts, she wrestles with Diego’s fixation on death and with the larger question of what makes a life worth living, and whose lives are deemed worthy at all. She resists his bleak conclusions, searching for an alternative meaning, yet the novel closes where it began: with Diego’s death.

Eating Ashes is a novel rooted in one family’s intimate story, but it reaches toward universal themes of inequality, immigration, trauma, and grief. —Mohamed Ikhlef

Brenda Navarro website, Instagram, X

Megan McDowell website, Instagram, X

THE MODERN READER: Bad Books by Great Writers

by Stuart Matranga

Though great writers are capable of writing bad, or less than well-received, books, I usually find that the fault is in the reader more than the writer.

It’s said that Toni Morrison’s worst book is Tar Baby because she reduces her characters to cardboard personifications of good and evil. But Tar Baby refers to an African folktale about foolish people who react too swiftly and suffer the consequences. The tradition encourages audiences to project their personalities into the tales. Though different from Beloved and her other great novels, the folksy simplicity of Tar Baby gives it an enduring power.

Though The Breast by Philip Roth is often cited as his worst book, in the context of Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose, the novel is a literary cartoon. It’s sarcastic, libidinous, brutal, nasty, and short. Not as ambitious as most of Roth’s work, The Breast is a joke. As with any great comedy, if you’re not all in on the premise, you won’t buy the punchline.

Is The Tommyknockers Stephen King’s worst novel? He calls it “awful” because it was written during a bender, and it has forgettable characters, a ridiculous plot, an overwrought style, and when you finally put the book out of its misery (pun intended), you have no idea what it was about. It’s not The Stand or The Shining, and maybe it’s in the bottom of the barrel of the King’s books. But when the barrel is that deep, is there really even a bottom?

Now don’t mess with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Fans cringe about Slapstick, and Vonnegut doesn’t disagree. About it, he wrote, “Everybody else writes lousy books, so why shouldn’t I?” But if not for Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions, this satire would be a funny, dark novel about how bad people would be if they weren’t so weird.

I’ve learned to let time pass before passing judgment. What books by your favorite writers did you consider poor at first, but changed your mind?

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One from My Heart

Remember when you first fell in love with reading? When you realized that the world is more alive because of the books you read? I learned to read very late, and when I did, it was more with my heart than with my eyes.

My uncle, a jazz bassist, and I were driving from Brooklyn to the Village Vanguard in Manhattan. It was after midnight. I was eleven.

“What are you reading, kid?” he asked.

I was not into school at the time. Probably hanging out in jazz clubs until the wee hours put schoolwork on the back burner.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You want to be an idiot all your life?”

The truth was, except for comic books where I could figure out the story from the pictures, I didn’t know how to read.

He reached under the double bass propped up in the back seat of his rusted red Karmann Ghia convertible for a paper bag. “Open it.”

My interest dwindled as I felt that inside the bag was a friggin’ book. I opened it anyway.

“It’s called The Little Prince,” he said. “It changed my life. It will change yours.”

I doubted that. But at least the book had a lot of pictures. I looked at one of an elephant. “Is it about elephants?” I asked, hopefully.

“You don’t see a hat?”

“It’s obviously an elephant getting swallowed by a snake,” I said.

“Then this is the book for you.”

I spent the night struggling to read the book at the bar. The band guys came over at their break. With their boozy breath, they helped me sound out words like territory, reverie, asteroid, departure, baobab, essential.

I worked at it for days until I loved it. I loved it so much, I learned French to read it in the original language of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and so I could better understand, “On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” I haven’t stopped reading since. What’s your gateway book, the first book you read with your heart?

Wining Writers

When you open the door to a new book, it’s like going to a friend’s house, and it’s only right to bring a bottle of wine. But it’s essential to pair the right wine to the right friend.

When “hanging” with Sebastian Barry, whose charming books include Days Without End, A Long Long Way and Old God’s Time, the best cork to pop should be redolent with the bittersweet tones of his Irish terroir and a hint of romance in the throes of trauma. My choice is Rare Apple Ice Wine. Like Barry’s writing, it has a self-deprecating grace that accepts the inevitable with good humor. And if we drink too much, well, as he writes in The Secret Scripture, “at the close of day, the ship we sail in is our soul, not our body.” Sláinte!

Next, a bottle of Frontenac for Elizabeth Strout. Its crisp mouthfeel defines New England granularity. Like Strout’s novels, Olive Kitteridge, My Name is Lucy Barton and Oh William, each sip sharpens the soul on the tragic turns of life. A spicy tartness is suspenseful on the tongue, while the nose scintillates with a blend of stone fruit and aged leather, brought to an edge of aggressiveness. Words and wine bracingly insist that this life may not get any better, but if you’re lucky, it won’t get appreciably worse. A Votre Santé!

No discourse on wine and writers could not raise a Neapolitan glass to the mysterious Elena Ferrante. Though her identity has been hidden despite the success of My Brilliant Friend and its sequels, we may find her secret revealed in a glass of Piedirosso, or “Red Feet,” a throwback to when women stomped grapes in oaken barrels. Like the two friends in the books, the wine combines contradictory flavors. A brutal burst of fruitiness, like Lila’s dark brilliance, surprises while a quiet undertone, like ’Lenu’s apparent steadiness, provides an endorphin rush of well-being. It balances life’s chilly arbitrariness with the warmth of its natural antidote, friendship. Salute!

What are you drinking (and reading) tonight?

The Use of Used Books

I have a friend who never buys used clothes. “You take on the personality of the last person who wore them,” he said. “You take your chances.” Yes, that does sound like the plot of a horror film. However, when it comes to used books, there’s something to that.

Besides the rarefied environment of used bookstores, and stepping over the inevitable cat, I love the random thrill of stumbling upon unexpected treasures. In a used bookstore in Amsterdam, I found Venus on the Half Shell by Kilgore Trout. I don’t have to tell you that the fictional Kilgore Trout recurs in several books by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I always thought Venus was by Vonnegut, too, until Vonnegut himself told me it was written by Philip José Farmer. Similarly, in London, I found Ariosto by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, a kind of “side-quel” to Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto. Yes, I could have gotten them on Amazon but pulling them out of a dollar rack between a diet book and a car catalogue is pure joy.

By the way, I also love the Little Libraries that pop up haphazardly. Whoever thought of them deserves a Nobel Prize.

There is one more reason I love used books. They are haunted.

I don’t know about clothes, but books can be possessed by their readers. I found William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying with marginalia in different inks and hands that indicate an infestation of multiple spirits, often disagreeing with each other. My Bob Dylan’s Chronicles is so overwritten with comments and personal references that I can barely make out the original text. It’s like being in the middle of a lively book club unbound by time and space.

In turn, I also mark up the books I read and that will inevitably end up in a used bookstore, thereby allowing me to haunt the future.

What treasures have you unearthed in used bookstores and, better yet, what has been your experience with the fine art of marginalia?

Read ‘n Rock

Great literature can come in the form of music. In 2016, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and artists such as Leonard Cohen (Beautiful Losers), Nick Cave (The Death of Bunny Munro), Morrissey (List of the Lost), Jim Carroll (The Petting Zoo) and Jimmy Buffet (Where is Joe Merchant?) have all written credible novels.

And many rock stars have created novelistic albums. David Bowie turned George Orwell’s 1984 into Diamond Dogs. Pink Floyd’s Animals comes from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and The Wall is as full of post-war British angst as anything by Kingsley Amis, as are two rock operas by Pete Townsend, the Who’s Quadrophenia and Tommy.

As for American angst, The Ghost of Tom Joad is Bruce Springsteen’s gritty callback to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. If Larry McMurtry and Richard Yates had a literary child, it’s Willie Nelson’s Tougher Than Leather, an epic of love, loss and redemption set in the Old West. What a fantastic Richard Brautigan-esque novel Bernie Taupin (sorry Elton) has in Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirty Cowboy about a poor English lad stiff-upper-lipping his way through an alienated life by daydreaming.

Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs and Hubert Selby can hold Tom Waits’s beer for Frank’s Wild Years, a bracing depiction of the boozy afterglow of unrequited romance. Neil Young’s Greendale is very much in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesville, Ohio.

As for social novels echoing Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, what is more impactful than Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On?, a bleakly picaresque sweep through the 1960s, Vietnam, drugs and racism.Unless it’s the story of the struggles of a 1990s single mother in The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

Some artists capture the spirt of a novel in a song, such as Kate Bush’s take on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or the Rolling Stones evocation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita in a little ditty called “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Not all great literary works are stuck between book covers. What are some other novels that you can dance to?

We hope you enjoyed perusing the first four Modern Reader columns. Our twice-weekly newsletter, filled with great stuff, always ends with the Modern Reader column. Subscribe to never miss an issue!

Seventeen years after his acclaimed short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, was published to widespread praise and a place among the Pulitzer Prize finalists, Daniyal Mueenuddin has finally delivered his debut novel, This Is Where the Serpent Lives—an ambitious, multigenerational work spanning continents and decades.

Much like his earlier book, it unfolds less as a conventional novel and more as a constellation of interlinked narratives, portraying the layered world of feudal Pakistan through the lives of ten central characters drawn from sharply different social strata. Among the most memorable are Yazid, an orphan who becomes a tea stall proprietor, and Saqib, a poor gardener; both gradually rise within the household of Colonel Akhtar, only to confront the invisible ceilings imposed by class, loyalty and power.

Mueenuddin’s prose is elegant—never sentimental, yet deeply compassionate. His characters are so carefully and vividly constructed that attachment becomes inevitable; their private struggles linger long after the page is turned. Across decades, the novel reveals the quiet machinery of authority, corruption, and social hierarchy, exposing how lives are shaped—and often constrained—by forces both intimate and systemic.

This Is Where the Serpent Lives already carries the aura of a modern classic, recalling the psychological precision and humane clarity of masters like Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev. It is a book to seek out without delay.—Mohamed Ikhlef

Are you grow tired of waiting for the next Franzen (although a movie adaptation of Crossroads is coming)? Or do you feel that Franzen is not absurdist or hilarious enough? Well, let me persuade you to read Lost Lambs, the debut novel of Madeline Cash.

Lost Lambs opens with the kind of joke that instantly signals the ride ahead: on the very first page, Madeline Cash describes a “gnat situation” at the Flynn family’s church and mischievously litters the prose with stray g’s until the gnats are finally “elimignated.” This literary trick sets a tone for the novel.

What makes this debut so winning, though, isn’t just the humor or the cleverness; it’s how Cash tucks something universally recognizable inside the chaos: the comforting truth that most families are gloriously dysfunctional. The Flynns, in particular, are unraveling with impressive flair. Catherine and Bud’s open marriage is collapsing while their daughters spiral in wildly different directions — Abigail dates a man nicknamed War Crime Wes, Louise secretly corresponds with an online terrorist and Harper, the brilliant and slightly alarming youngest, is the only one who dares to question the suspicious billionaire shipping magnate Paul Alabaster and his shadowy dealings, dragging the entire family into a conspiracy that might actually pull them closer together.

The plot keeps swerving in unexpected directions, each turn funnier and stranger than the last, making it impossible to predict anyone’s fate — and leaving you wishing for hundreds more pages of their chaotic misadventures. With quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness, Cash delivers a modern family saga for the internet era.

It is a novel that can be interpreted in many ways, appealing to both young and old , from the attractive cover to the small details in the narrative. The rabbit is not just a passing element, but a thread that leads you to doubt and surprise, between tracking and beautiful loss. The world in the novel is not far from our own; a world where imagination is suppressed, questions are confiscated and life is reduced to obedience and compliance.

As you move through the chapters of the novel, childhood stories and their initial wonder are evoked, and you feel your own memories are resurfacing. If this novel existed in a world that fought against imagination, it would be one of the first books to be burned, because it reminds us why we read and why we cannot stop.—Mohamed Ikhlef

Madeline Cash on Instagram: madelinecash

By Stuart Matranga

Kurt Vonnegut sits on the steps of his brownstone in Turtle Bay on the east side of Manhattan waiting for me. It’s a nice day, and when I tell him that I recently visited with his neighbor, Katherine Hepburn, he asks me if I brought her flowers. “Calla lilies,” I say. He laughs. “You did your research. She won’t even talk to you if you don’t bring her flowers, and those are her favorites.” Inside, as we walk through a tunnel of bookshelves towards his kitchen, he tells me that his other neighbor, Stephen Sondheim, usually makes a racket playing the piano, but he doesn’t mind. We sit at a big wooden table with a wall-sized window behind us letting in the sun through his garden, where birds chirp in place of Sondheim’s piano. “They’re pests, but I love pests,” he says. Kurt, he insists I call him Kurt, peels oranges for us as we talk. Like him, I spit the seeds out in my hand and later he collects them in a paper napkin.

I have an entire notebook of questions for the author of Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and a body of work that, if you put a banana to my head, I’d say are my favorites, outside of our mutual hero, Mark Twain. He waves off my fawning.

“I’d rather have written an episode of Cheers than any book I’ve written,” he says, spitting orange seeds into his hand, “including Slaughterhouse Five.”

Read more

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

Let’s begin with the wisdom of Groucho Marx as we head into the weekend. I especially love a weekend when I know I will have time to read a big chunk of a book, some magazines, my Substacks—but no newspaper front pages.

In this issue, our bookstore correspondent takes you on the first of his visits to Our Favorite Bookstores of the world. This time we step to Blackwell’s of Oxford.

Scroll down to our Notable Debuts section to read about a new novel you simply must add to the top of your TBR. And if you like your rock ‘n roll as much as your literature, don’t miss this issue’s The Modern Reader column. As always on Thursday, we end with a poem, this week by John Burnside.

Jay

Founder of the Modern Literature Society

LIT NOTES

The Other Irvings

Now that the Winter Olympics have all but melted away, we were proud to see modern literature represented by the Irving siblings—the grandchildren of John Irving, author of The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meaney, The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules and many other novels, including 2022’s The Last Chairlift, which features skiing. Though Svea Irving placed eleventh in the halfpipe finals in Italy, the 23-year-old made a valiant effort at this bracingly difficult and dangerous competition. Her brother, Birk, 26, finished a respectable fifth in the men’s halfpipe, but scored a personal best on his final run. “I remain astonished by them,” said Irving grand-pere to the New York Times. “I know how hard and long they’ve worked for this. I grew up in a family of skiers—in which I was always the weakest. You don’t get to be Olympians overnight ... They were willing to block out all the distractions and do it again and again and again. Repetition. I’ve always thought that, if nothing else, writing and rewriting is a dedication to a repetitive process. Any craft, any sport — the more you repeat it, the better you get at it. But you have to do it.” Birk added that his novelist grandfather always encouraged him and his sister in long emails with perfect grammar. “His text messages are better than my high school and college papers,” he said.

Fiction and Figures

Reading through reactions to a recent post here about The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, we see that it’s actually the third biggest selling modern literature book with over a 100 million copies sold, behind The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling (the highest selling book of all time is Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes with 500 million—not counting the Bible’s miraculous five billion copies). And that got us wondering about the other end of the scale. What is the average number of sales for a novel? Publishing companies are notoriously secretive about sales, but our deep cover agents have revealed that a successful novel sells more than 10,000 copies over its lifetime. A breakout success, such as Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, can sell two million copies (at least three times as many people will have seen the movie version in theaters.) The average lifetime sales for a novel are about 3,000 and less than 300 in its first year. Less than one percent of the 300,000 novels published per year make it to any best-selling list. These statistics are for all novels, including the first and second most popular genres, romance and thrillers. As for literary fiction, novels that are considered more thoughtful or deep, they rank a surprising third in best-selling categories, over science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Though breaking into the reading public’s imagination is difficult—a debut author who sells 500 copies in the first year is respectable—there are occasional bursts of light. Virginia Evans’ debut novel, The Correspondent has sold over a half million copies! Not The Little Prince level yet, but a sign of life for serious literature.

BEST OF LITERARY SUBSTACK: Your weekly guide

In this brutal age, it’s refreshing to see a writer make a bold stance for better manners in the world. In her new Substack, Mind Over Matter, author Jeanette Winterson declares that “Civility is a form of Love.” This seems on

brand for the English novelist, whose books such as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, The Passion and Written on the Body explore shifting sexuality and the encroaching of technology into what we once naively thought of as humanity. In this essay, she writes, “The way we behave in public may look like small stuff - but it’s not. Bad behaviour, careless behaviour, rude behaviour, is a threat to how we made ourselves civilised.” She cringes at how social media (this site exempted) has led the world into our worst version of ourselves. But she claims that a little politeness, stopping short of automatic deference, might save what’s left of, erm, humanity.

Jeanette Winterson Website

Catherine Lacey’s Substack feed is great. The author of Biography of X posts almost daily, with a diversity of approach and style. From “HUMBLE YOURSELF OR PERISH” to “I sneezed in my kitchen with the door to the patio open and the child in the neighboring house (I hear him playing all the time, but have never seen the child) shouted back SALUD! and I’ve never felt more at home” you never know what you’ll get. Her four novels have been adventurous and her latest work, The Möbius Book, a hybrid novella-memoir, garnered strong reviews. Her Substack gives us a glimpse of Lacey unfiltered, slyly humorous, angry, as well as offering much writing advice. She hates Botox and book blurbs. One favorite post: “The punishment for taking a ZOOM MEETING in a CAFÉ should be A PUBLIC STONING.”

Catherine Lacey Website, Instagram

R.F. Kuang has only two Substack posts, but they are worth a read. One is a letter to readers from November 2025 announcing a European book tour, but she also provides an update on her life. The other one, from August 2025, on the day her latest novel, Katabasis, came out, is called “to rebehold the stars” and provides a moving summary of her state of mind while writing the book. We hope she posts more!

R.F. Kuang Website, Instagram

BEST OF THE LITERARY WEB: The Marginalian by Maria Popova

How often does a book lead you to a website? Rarely, if ever. But that is exactly what happened to me with Figuring. It had a radiant yellow cover—minimalist yet unmistakable among the others—and a title that exerted an immediate pull. Only a few pages in, I found myself searching for the author’s name, Maria Popova, which led me to a cherished corner of the internet: The Marginalian.

The Marginalian is a one-woman labor of love, sustained by Popova’s devotion to literature, art, and science. In essays that defy genre, she illuminates the human search for meaning. She writes in a lush, attentive prose about what she has read, contemplated, and wrestled with across disciplines—literature, science, philosophy, poetry and what she has called “the various tentacles of human thought and feeling.”

Yet what moves me most is not only the beauty or insight of the writing, nor the way it casts a warm, clarifying light on unexpected corners of life, but the illustrations that accompany each piece—gorgeous, authentic, and singular images, chosen with quiet precision. They do not decorate the essays so much as converse with them, extending their emotional and intellectual resonance.

Today, the site stands as an ever-growing archive of one woman’s lifelong attempt to understand the elusive, ethereal experience we call living.—Mohamed Ikhlef

AUTHOR IN FOCUS: Lauren Groff

With each new publication, Lauren Groff’s reputation rises. Since her award-winning story collection, Florida, came out in 2018, she had published two widely acclaimed feminist historical novels, Matrix and The Vaster Wilds. Member Tom Ioppolo had this to say about her 2023 novel, The Vaster Wilds: “Ms. Groff does not present this book in the flat journalistic style of modern American prose. She has the ability to create a literary style that is—well, it’s hard to describe—lyrical, poetic, maybe slightly archaic to capture the time and place, elevated, and, above all else, beautiful. Here’s one sample sentence I’ll quote to give you a taste: ‘Once, she opened her eyes to a moonlit clearing, the trees hunched at the edges into an ardent watching forest; the spring-stirred soil smelled tender in the silvery night, and thickening the sky with its barest of light was the near-dissolved rim of moon.’” Now she is back with her first story collection since Florida, the just-released Brawler. The nine stories in Brawler “hum in exhilarating resonance. Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region — from New England to Florida to California — these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels.”

Lauren Groff website, Instagram

Lauren Groff Indie bookstore: The Lynx

NOTABLE DEBUTS: This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Seventeen years after his acclaimed short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, was published to widespread praise and a place among the Pulitzer Prize finalists, Daniyal Mueenuddin has finally delivered his debut novel, This Is Where the Serpent Lives—an ambitious, multigenerational work spanning continents and decades.

Much like his earlier book, it unfolds less as a conventional novel and more as a constellation of interlinked narratives, portraying the layered world of feudal Pakistan through the lives of ten central characters drawn from sharply different social strata. Among the most memorable are Yazid, an orphan who becomes a tea stall proprietor, and Saqib, a poor gardener; both gradually rise within the household of Colonel Akhtar, only to confront the invisible ceilings imposed by class, loyalty and power.

Mueenuddin’s prose is elegant—never sentimental, yet deeply compassionate. His characters are so carefully and vividly constructed that attachment becomes inevitable; their private struggles linger long after the page is turned. Across decades, the novel reveals the quiet machinery of authority, corruption, and social hierarchy, exposing how lives are shaped—and often constrained—by forces both intimate and systemic.

This Is Where the Serpent Lives already carries the aura of a modern classic, recalling the psychological precision and humane clarity of masters like Anton Chekhov and Ivan Turgenev. It is a book to seek out without delay.—Mohamed Ikhlef

OUR FAVORITE BOOKSTORES: Blackwell’s of Oxford

Your bookstore correspondent recently visited the magical literary town of Oxford, England, for a few days of sightseeing and book shopping. We stopped in Blackwell’s massive bookshop on Broad Street, first opened in 1879. Though no longer a family-owned business (it was purchased by Waterstone’s in 2022), the main shop still maintains the feel of a reader-focused space with booksellers excited about literature.

The shop is home to the Norrington Room, recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest single room selling books in the world, with over 3 miles of shelves. The room is reached by walking down a flight of stairs from the fiction department on the ground floor of the shop, and it’s a bit staggering to take in the size and scale of the space. As you might expect of a bookstore in Oxford, the room is dedicated for the most part to academic study areas including literature, history, science and business.

The staff is amicable and were eager to talk about what they and their customers have been looking forward to reading. Departure(s), the latest (and last) book by Julian Barnes, takes place partially in Oxford and has been a popular title. Another highly anticipated title is the next volume of On the Calculation of Volume, a seven-part novel by the Danish author Sovej Balle. The story puts a literary fiction spin on a classic science fiction situation of the protagonist being stuck in a time loop. Six volumes have already been published in Danish, and the first three volumes have been released in English. The fourth English volume publishes in April.

We’re looking to explore other bookstores around the world, to understand what literary fiction their readers are most excited about. Leave a comment with suggestions on amazing independent bookstores we should visit.—Rob Weisstuch

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THE MODERN READER: Read 'n rock

by Stuart Matranga

Great literature can come in the form of music. In 2016, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and artists such as Leonard Cohen (Beautiful Losers), Nick Cave (The Death of Bunny Munro), Morrissey (List of the Lost), Jim Carroll (The Petting Zoo) and Jimmy Buffet (Where is Joe Merchant?) have all written credible novels.

And many rock stars have created novelistic albums. David Bowie turned George Orwell’s 1984 into Diamond Dogs. Pink Floyd’s Animals comes from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and The Wall is as full of post-war British angst as anything by Kingsley Amis, as are two rock operas by Pete Townsend, the Who’s Quadrophenia and Tommy.

As for American angst, The Ghost of Tom Joad is Bruce Springsteen’s gritty callback to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. If Larry McMurtry and Richard Yates had a literary child, it’s Willie Nelson’s Tougher Than Leather, an epic of love, loss and redemption set in the Old West. What a fantastic Richard Brautigan-esque novel Bernie Taupin (sorry Elton) has in Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirty Cowboy about a poor English lad stiff-upper-lipping his way through an alienated life by daydreaming.

Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs and Hubert Selby can hold Tom Waits’s beer for Frank’s Wild Years, a bracing depiction of the boozy afterglow of unrequited romance. Neil Young’s Greendale is very much in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesville, Ohio.

As for social novels echoing Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, what is more impactful than Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On?, a bleakly picaresque sweep through the 1960s, Vietnam, drugs and racism.Unless it’s the story of the struggles of a 1990s single mother in The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.

Some artists capture the spirt of a novel in a song, such as Kate Bush’s take on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or the Rolling Stones evocation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita in a little ditty called “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Not all great literary works are stuck between book covers. What are some other novels that you can dance to?

Leave a comment

Poem for Saturday (or anytime you want to read it)

Interview by Mohamed Ikhlef of the Modern Literature Society

Could you tell us about your journey into translation? What first drew you to it, and when did it become more than a side interest?

I first started translating from Catalan and Spanish while living in Barcelona. I had always loved languages, and a chance meeting with the owner of a translation agency led to doing a sample for them, and subsequently work. They effectively trained me by editing my work and giving it back to me to revise. I later started translating pieces for a literary agent, which led to me working for them as a foreign-rights agent. During this time I became fascinated with Japanese, and ultimately decided to leave my job and go to study a four-year degree in Japanese at SOAS (London University). After graduating, I worked for four years as an editor at Kodansha International in Tokyo, before going freelance to focus on literary translation. As a freelancer, I also did an MA in Advanced Japanese Studies, a distance-learning degree with Sheffield University that included an option for literary translation.

What does your translation routine look like? Do you follow a fixed process, and how do you balance creativity with accuracy?

I start by translating the entire piece quite roughly, not worrying too much about style, just getting the words down on the page. I do research during this phase, but if I can’t resolve something fairly quickly I mark it and move on. By the time I start my second pass, I have a pretty good idea what the narrative voice should sound like, I’ve come to know the various characters and how they talk, and so I focus much more on the style and how it reads in English. I spend more time on coming up with solutions for things like wordplay or other translation challenges, any outstanding queries. On my third (or sometimes fourth) pass I check against the original to make sure I haven’t strayed too far from the original, and depending on the text I may do more passes until I am satisfied I have come as far as I can. My husband will then often check my translation for any mistakes, and he will also point out places where the nuance is slightly off, which is incredibly helpful. At this stage, if I have access to the author, I will ask them any remaining queries. I submit the resulting first draft to my editor, often making them aware of any particularly tricky translation issues I grappled with, and will normally go through another few rounds of line editing, copy editing, and proofreading before the piece is ready for publication.

You’ve translated across several genres—how does your approach differ between them? Is there one book that stayed with you, and another that was especially challenging?

Of course each genre has its own conventions and you need to know these, but on the other hand I always take the lead from the original text. Genre might not work quite in the same way in Japanese as in English, and I prefer to keep the flavour of the original without making it too Anglicized. Every book or short story has its own challenges, and I become deeply involved with each of them while I am translating. It’s hard to pick out individual books, as I feel so emotionally invested in all of them, but I’d say that the stories by Akiyuki Nosaka based on his wartime experiences as a child are so hauntingly beautiful and terrifying in equal measure that they will remain with me forever. As for the hardest work I’ve ever translated, that would have to be a story by the Meiji era author Izumi Kyoka, called Sea Daemons - the best way I can describe this author is to say he resembles an impressionist painter. He builds up images while breaking down grammatical structure, with the effect of producing something very beautiful but hard to actually understand with a logical mind - which presents a particular challenge for translators who have to glean meaning from a text in order to translate it! I would spend literally a whole day meditating on one paragraph just trying to understand what was going on in it. But I learned so much about translation in the process, and the experience actually gave me a lot more confidence in not trying to adhere too closely to the original.

Many readers discovered your work through Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. How did that project come to you, and did you expect its international success?

I translated a story by Sayaka Murata for a bilingual charity edition put together by the publisher Waseda Bungaku following the 2011 earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster in Japan - “Lovers On the Breeze” - which was eventually also included in her Life Ceremony collection. I really loved that story, which was on the surface a sweet story of teenage love, but had a dark undercurrent to it. A few years later I was asked to translate her story “A Clean Marriage” for Granta’s Japan issue. This brilliant, hilarious story garnered a lot of attention, so when Convenience Store Woman won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, she was already on the radar of several English-language publishers. I was fortunately asked to provide a synopsis and sample translation, and after Grove Atlantic bought the rights they commissioned me to do the full translation. I thought that it would probably do well, but nothing could have prepared me (or anyone else) for it becoming the runaway success that it did.

In your view, is the anglophone publishing world becoming more open to women writers in translation?

Absolutely, but you have to understand that this is largely thanks to activism by translators. I would say the initiation of Women in Translation Month in August 2014 by the blogger Meytal Radzinski brought the focus onto the fact that the majority of works translated into English from all languages were by male authors. Women’s voices were not being heard. This galvanized the translation community to shine the spotlight onto women authors from around the world. In the context of Japanese literature, my colleagues Allison Markin Powell, Lucy North, and myself formed the collective Strong Women Soft Power in 2016 with the intention of promoting Japanese women authors.

You live in Japan—how does cultural immersion shape your translations? Do you often collaborate directly with authors?

I live in a rural community of farmers, at the foot of a small mountain frequented by hikers, and often enjoy chatting with locals and hikers alike. It is worlds away from the literary scene in Tokyo, which is also within easy reach for me. I am friends with a number of brilliant authors, especially women, and there is also a thriving literary translation scene, with a number of J-E translation colleagues, so I can enjoy the best of both worlds. Whenever I have the chance, I will collaborate with authors - I do collaborate closely with Sayaka Murata and Kyoko Nakajima, for example. But Japanese publishers can be very protective of authors, and I don’t always get the chance. I do think, though, that collaboration is to the advantage of both author and translator - not only to ensure you have understood things correctly, but also it can be hugely beneficial to explain certain translation challenges to an author and get their understanding and input on how best to solve it in English.

You recently won a translation prize. What role do awards play in the visibility of translated literature?

My translation of Mayumi Inaba’s Mornings with My Cat Mii was awarded the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Prize, as part of the awards managed by the Society of Authors in the UK. I was especially pleased since all of the judges were very capable of assessing not just how well my translation read in English, but how well it reflected the Japanese original. But most of all, I am really happy this little gem of a work has been put in the spotlight. Japanese literature featuring cats is insanely popular at the moment, but unlike most of the bestselling titles, the cat in this book is not a comforting blanket cat, prescribed to help heal humans, or even a magical cat that will take you on an adventure - she was an ordinary cat, rescued by the author as a kitten, to whom she ended up being a close companion to for the twenty year duration of her life, through old age, sickness, and ultimately death. As someone who lives with cats and who is involved in cat rescue, this was such a meaningful book to translate, and I am delighted that more people will get to know about it as a result of this prize.

Who is an author you love who deserves an English translation?

One author I have admired for some time is Mariko Asabuki. I was recently given the opportunity to translate a short story by her for the Okayama Art festival in Japan - she had a limited time to write it, and I had to translate it on an insanely short schedule, but I have to say it was a brilliant story, with really difficult translation challenges, and I am even more in awe of her now. I would love to translate more by her.

What advice would you give to emerging translators?

The first thing I always say to emerging translators is that very few of us will be able to make a living out of literary translation, so ideally you will get a job that will support your translation habit. My suggestion is always to get a job in publishing - I worked variously as a foreign rights agent in Barcelona, assistant to a well-known UK agent, reader for a literary scout, and then as an editor for Kodansha International, the English-language publishing outlet of one of the biggest Japanese publishers, before eventually being able to go freelance and focus on what I really wanted to do all along, which was to translate literature. The second thing I say is: never cut corners. Literary translation doesn’t pay well for the amount of time you put into your translation - you need to do your research, and do multiple revisions of your translation until you are satisfied it is the best it can be. If you don’t do this work, it will show—it does show, some works are better translated than others.