This Month In Books: What Did We Miss?
Dear Reader, The end of the year is a time for regrets. What are all the things I didn’t do? What are all the books I didn’t feature? For the past two years I’ve compiled a gift catalog for our readers...
View ArticleThis Month in Books: The Decameron Is Online
“The pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick, the way a fire close to dry and oily things will set them aflame. And the evil of the plague went even...
View ArticleThis Week in Books: This Moment Doesn’t Remind Me of Anything
Dear Reader, I’ve been trying to think of what books this corona moment reminds me of. I don’t know why — uh, I guess I instinctively try to relate most things that happen in my real life to my reading...
View ArticleThis Week In Books: A ‘Melancholia’ or ‘Take Shelter’ Situation
Dear Reader, A thing about me is that I’ve been depressed for awhile. Staying inside a lot. And now, Melancholia-like, real life has begun to mirror my mental state: my outer and inner worlds are on a...
View ArticleThis Week In Books: Too Small For the Occasion
Dear Reader, I’m sitting here trying to write up my little “This Week in Books” list, and it’s a real problem, because the literary corona-articles I saved last week already seem… slight. As in, too...
View ArticleThis Week in Books: An Everlasting Meal
Dear Reader, The book that’s been the most help to me during lockdown is a book I’ve never read; I didn’t need to read it for it to save my life. I just needed, just one time, from a review or maybe...
View ArticleThis Week in Books: A B-Movie Storytelling Moment
Dear Reader, We’ve been watching a lot of movies lately — uh, just like everybody else on the entire planet — and there’s this particular kind of moment that I get really excited about (like, I start...
View ArticleThis 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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