This Week In Books: The New Lord and Lady of the Apartment
Dear Reader, This week I figured out that the best way to hang-dry our sheets is over the closet doors. From across the room they look like a pair of dangerously large jellyfish landing on a dead coral...
View ArticleThis Week In Books: I Bought Some Books
Dear Reader, My concentration is pretty much shot. So I have to confess I haven’t gotten very far into A Distant Mirror. I’ve mostly been playing Unciv on my phone and watching Devs and making curry...
View ArticleThis Week in Books: Several Nihilistic Frenchmen
Dear Reader, I feel like most of my reading this past week was preoccupied by power: who has it, who can get it, and what it looks like. The overall arc of the revelation seems to be that no matter how...
View ArticleThis Week in Books: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
[If you’d like to browse all the books mentioned in the newsletter this week, you can do it on our Bookshop page, because I enjoy lists, especially lists about other lists, so I spent a few hours...
View ArticleThis Week in Books: Anarchist Ice Cream and Other Dairies
Dear Reader, When compiling the reading list this week, I was struck harder than I have been so far by the sensation that time has compressed, or flattened, or leveled out, or I’m not entirely sure...
View ArticleThis Week in Books: Pale Horse on the One Hand, Pale Rider on the Other
Dear Reader, The pandemic is a boundless set of small sad stories crescendoing into an incomprehensibly large and terrible story. Here’s one of the small sad ones: my nana’s coronavirus test came back...
View ArticleThis Week in Books: Bullets and Gas
Dear Reader, The books newsletter seems a little irrelevant at the moment; it’s Monday night, and I’m pretty sure the president just pulled a reichstag. Ah, but ok, books, yes, that’s my job. So, first...
View ArticleThis Week in Books: Pain and Power
Dear Reader, In an essay about W.E.B. Du Bois’s apocalyptic short story “The Comet,” Saidiya Hartman pries at the edges of the plot; Du Bois, she writes, depicts black life in America as entailing a...
View ArticleThis Week in Books: We’ve All Been Briefed
Dear Reader, “Every Chicagoan is financing torture, every day,” writes Laurence Ralph in an excerpt from his book The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence. The excerpt is written in the form...
View ArticleThis Week in Books: Farewell Longreads! I’m Taking This Rodeo to Substack.
Dear Reader, It’s been a wonderful five years! But sadly after today I will be leaving Longreads. Let me tell you about how you can read my “This Week in Books” newsletter going forward, since I know...
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