For decades, the Mexican-born journalist Alma Guillermoprieto has been respected, if not revered, as the preeminent English-language chronicler of the trials and triumphs of contemporary life in Latin America. When she speaks, people in the know tend to listen.

The Years of Blood: Stories from a Reporting Life in Latin America, published last year, is Guillermoprieto’s latest and final collection of reportage from the region. There is plenty of bloodshed in the 21 compiled stories — and while there is plenty of life too, these are largely not the kinds of tales she originally set out to record.

“People sometimes ask me why I like writing stories that can be terribly violent and cruel, and the answer is that of course I don’t,” Guillermoprieto writes in her introduction to the collection. “This is not what I expected to do with my life.”

Indeed, Guillermoprieto’s path into journalism suggested a very different kind of journey. Guillermoprieto dedicated the first part of her adulthood to dance, studying with the renowned American choreographer Merce Cunningham in New York and briefly teaching at the National Art Schools in Havana. She began her career in journalism in 1978 in Nicaragua, at a moment when the Sandinista-led uprising against the dictator Anastasio Somoza was gaining momentum. Somoza fled Managua the next July as the Sandinistas poured into the capital, led by the soon-to-be president Daniel Ortega. For many in Latin America, it was the beginning of a heady decade: oppressed people were struggling for their rights, dictatorships were steadily falling, commodity prices were rising, and it appeared the region could be on the precipice of a proud, new democratic dawn. That is, understandably, what Guillermoprieto thought she might spend her career covering. But it did not work out that way.

There is, as a result, a soul-searching, melancholic quality to the questions Guillermoprieto poses in the collection’s introduction. She wonders how she could have been so naive as to think the Sandinistas could have managed to govern in line with their highest guerilla ideals, or to think the peace accord between the government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) could bring lasting peace to war-ravaged, traumatized El Salvador. “We look back on the dreams of change we failed so resoundingly to achieve and wonder,” Guillermoprieto writes, “What were we thinking?”

Indeed, there are so many varieties of failure chronicled in the pages of The Years of Blood it is exhausting to catalogue them all. Many of the failures are driven by forces beyond the region’s control: Guillermoprieto traces the eruption of gang violence in El Salvador to U.S. immigration policy, and the eruption of drug violence in Mexico and Colombia to U.S. appetites and foreign policy doctrine. Then there are the more anodyne failures of men and women who claimed to represent high ideals but ultimately were devoted to the pursuit and consolidation of personal power; Evo Morales in Bolivia, for example, suffered what Guillermoprieto calls an “enduring presidential vice: he could not bring himself to get off that chair.” The reign of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua has been even more monstrous and ruinous.

There are, in Guillermoprieto’s eyes, two primary consequences of this multidimensional mess: the first is that violence has triumphed as a form of political expression in Latin America. The second is that, after a blossoming of electoral democracy in the last decades of the 20th century, democracy is no longer even an aspiration in the 21st.

Nowhere is this clearer than in El Salvador, where Guillermoprieto traveled in 2011 for a New York Review of Books story and immediately encountered a cab driver with no memory of the infamous slaying of four American nuns just 31 years prior. The trip did not improve from there; Guillermoprieto found a country teetering on the brink of unraveling with a bankrupt government, a 38 percent poverty rate, a stagnant economy, and a profusion of gang violence propelled, in part, by the arrivals of mareros who had been deported to the country from cities like Los Angeles.

When Guillermoprieto was reporting in San Salvador, Nayib Bukele, the 30-year-old president of a branch of the Yamaha Motor Company, was on the verge of entering electoral politics for the first time as the FMLN’s mayoral candidate in the small suburb of Nuevo Cuscatlán. Just eight years later, having been elected mayor of San Salvador and then thrown out of the FMLN, Bukele won the presidency.

Bukele’s approach to the presidency led to an unraveling of sorts. In 2021, Bukele fired the attorney general investigating his government for corruption and replaced all five magistrates on the Constitutional Court with his own appointees, who quickly ruled that he could run for another term in 2024 — despite a constitutional ban on immediate reelection. The following year, the legislative assembly, controlled by Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party, authorized a state of exception that suspended due process and gave the government sweeping authority to combat gang violence. The state of exception is still in place three years later, with roughly 2 percent of the country’s population in prison and a growing number of the government’s critics in exile. In September, Human Rights Watch warned that the country’s democracy was “dying.”

Nevertheless, Bukele’s approval rating remains sky-high, exceeding 80 percent in a poll conducted over the summer. Perhaps more chillingly, just 1.4 percent of respondents said the concentration of power in a single person was a problem. In slashing the murder rate by as much as 97 percent and drastically reducing the power of the gangs that once dominated large swaths of the country, Bukele has given Salvadorans — at least those whose loved ones have been ensnared by the prison state — a benefit democracy seemingly could not deliver.

But democracy was failing in El Salvador long before Bukele began packing the courts and altering the constitution. The corruption of the two main parties — and their inability to curb crime and address inequality — prefigured the emergence of a leader who could make the country’s challenges seem less intractable. As Guillermoprieto notes, “Elections are but the end product of a democratic life.” Bukele is popular now, in fact, much more popular than democracy itself across the region: Guillermoprieto cites a Latinobarómetro poll that found 54 percent of respondents open to a non-democratic form of government so long as it was effective. But Bukele will not be popular forever, and when people eventually tire of his reign, his assault on democracy will make it that much harder to remove him.

El Salvador is a dramatic example of democratic backsliding in the region, but it is not the only place where democracy is imperiled. Nor is a traditional dictator a necessary component of democratic decay: Will Freeman has argued that Peru is a paradigmatic example of a nation where the democratic state apparatus has been left intact but is nevertheless “unable or unwilling to constrain predatory private powers — narco-traffickers, illegal gold miners, human smugglers, corruption rackets — and the officials and politicians who go into business with them.”

Freeman names Mexico as another example of a country where democracy is fading without the presence of a traditional strongman, and the second half of The Years of Blood shows us exactly how this process happens. In “The Morning Quickie,” we see a political associate of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, then serving as the mayor of Mexico City, captured on film accepting a briefcase full of cash from a rich businessman. In “Risking Life for Truth,” Guillermoprieto tackles the enormous dangers facing local newspaper reporters who report on the drug trade. In “A Voice Against the Darkness,” she pens a searing, moving tribute to slain journalist Javier Valdez. The final two stories in the collection, pieces of investigative reportage on the femicide crisis in Ciudad Juárez and the kidnapping of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, are riveting examples of Guillermoprieto’s mastery of the genre.

All of these stories take place in a democratic Mexico, after the country managed to topple the PRI’s perfect dictatorship at the turn of the century, and they together demonstrate how democratic life can be kneecapped by forces other than tyranny.

Elements of this might sound familiar to readers in the U.S.. Here, as in Latin America, we too are experiencing the corrosive effects of inequality and corruption on democratic life. Donald Trump is only referenced glancingly in The Years of Blood, where Guillermoprieto identifies him as a stylistic successor of Hugo Chávez, but the volume offers a lens through which to understand both his ascent and why Democrats’ appeals to the sanctity of democracy fell short at the ballot box last year.

Trump and his cabinet, for their part, are certainly interested in Latin America. At the beginning of January, the U.S. intensified its neo-imperial engagement with the region by kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela (a man Guillermoprieto variously calls “clumsy,” “goofy-looking,” and a “fool”), with Trump declaring that the U.S. is now “in charge” of the country. The Trump administration has also threatened Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, bombed boats in the Pacific, and appears to have regime change in Cuba next on its agenda. This aggressive posture towards the region comes as Trump and his lieutenants simultaneously attempt to excise Latin America from within the U.S., prosecuting a project of terror against migrants that the Department of Homeland Security claims has already resulted in two million removals and “self-deportations.” After creating and enforcing a hemispheric order that has left much of Latin America beset by inequality and violence, the U.S. finds itself grappling with some of the same issues.

Those opposed to Trump, then, must look to Latin America too. As Greg Grandin has argued, activists and center-left leaders in the region have an intimate understanding that if democracy is to work, it must deliver for people — must be true social democracy. The alternative is chilling.

If you’re concerned that The Years of Blood is a slog, rest assured: what has always made Guillermoprieto such an engaging chronicler of Latin America is her wit, curiosity, gift for portraiture, and sensitivity to the hopes and joys of the regular people who animate her stories. Guillermoprieto has professed not to closely follow politics or even vote, and her main enthusiasms — for food, art, and performance — shine in stories on the cholita wrestlers of El Alto, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 film Roma, and a profile of the late English food writer Diana Kennedy, who devoted her life to Mexican cooking. Guillermoprieto writes that when Kennedy moved to Mexico in 1957 with her foreign correspondent husband, she fell in love in the neighborhood markets of Mexico City with “a universe of flavors, colors, textures, shapes, and aromas several light-years removed from her own.”

The profile of Kennedy is notable not just for its delicious descriptions of cactus fruits, hibiscus flowers, and moles oaxaqueños, but because it conveys why an outsider like Kennedy — or many of Guillermoprieto’s English-language readers — might fall in love with Mexico or Latin America. The inclusion of these stories, in turn, animates the significance of the political events Guillermoprieto spends the bulk of her time tracking. The cost of inequality and violence in Latin America becomes clearer the more time you spend with Guillermoprieto, often at street level, immersed in the textures of everyday life in the places she visits.

It is fitting that Guillermoprieto begins the introduction by recounting an interview she conducted decades ago with a 26-year-old Colombian man who was being held in a jail on the outskirts of Medellín. The man, whom Guillermoprieto calls Néstor, was accused of participating in a gruesome massacre in the small town of Segovia. During their conversation, he haltingly filled Guillermoprieto in on the details of his life, attempting to scratch out a living as a freelance gold miner and seeing one or more brothers — Guillermoprieto can’t be sure — gruesomely murdered. At the conclusion of their hour-long conversation, Guillermoprieto tells us she was “so full of Néstor’s mumbling despair” that she couldn’t think and couldn’t write, either. She was supposed to produce a story for the New Yorker about the Segovia massacre, but couldn’t. Guillermoprieto credits Néstor with helping her understand that the story she needed to write about Segovia — the story of bloodshed in Colombia — was not, as she first thought, a story about “evil murderers pitted against innocent civilians,” but rather one of the U.S.’s “reckless exercise of its immense power in Latin America.”

Guillermoprieto has told that story for more than 40 years, all while making space to relate in vivid color “the great, bubbling-over, defiant life” of the region. She ends her introduction by passing the baton, articulating her hope that “in the not-too-distant future a much younger writer will be able to report and write the stories of how peace was consolidated throughout these lands.” We should be so lucky to read those stories. It is only a shame Guillermoprieto herself hasn’t had occasion to write them.

Abe Asher is a writer whose reporting has been published in The Nation, Jacobin, VICE News, and a variety of other outlets.

To live with plants, even if one lives alone, is to not truly live alone. Plants are living beings, with both a genesis and a death; for a while, like us, they are infused with life and then that life recedes. I have wondered whether plants go to heaven when they die. Or whether their life essence, once it leaves their material substance, joins the greater consciousness, and whether we can feel their spirit surrounding us the way we do when a person dies.

“Everything alive is sentient,” Michael Pollan says in his new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. Describing a walk home through a grove of trees, he tells us he is humbled by the sudden feeling that “the kinship of all these sentient others” could finally be “an antidote to our loneliness.” He echoes Wordsworth, who in describing nature spoke of something “deeply interfused.” Nature is infused with consciousness. One imagines, when reading this passage, the trees sensing Pollan’s realization and swaying in gratitude as he walks by.

A World Appears is Pollan’s 10th nonfiction book, and it is billed simply as “a journey into consciousness.” He has also written bestselling books on food, botany, gardening, and psychedelics. An impression of him, even before reading this book, glimmered in my mind as a kind of mysticism-whisperer to the respectable masses — someone capable of introducing potentially inflammatory ideas, such as the connection between mental health and psychoactive plants, to people who listen to NPR and wear slippers from L.L. Bean.

The visionary Book of Revelation in the New Testament speaks of a tree of life, growing on either side of a sparkling river “that produces fruit twelve times a year, once each month; the leaves of the trees serve as medicine.” Plants as sources of healing is a very old idea. Contemplation of a person’s interiority, and what it means to be aware, awake, and alive, is not a new practice either. Pollan is a science writer who looks into these spaces through a biological lens, but A World Appears is steeped from first word to last in spiritual longing.

It is not going too far to suggest that this book reaches toward religion in every way. It is a “re-enchantment” book, even if it does not fit into the contemporary canon of re-enchantment discourse (titles like Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder come to mind). Throughout Pollan’s questioning of what consciousness is, what sentience, feeling, and emotion are, and who or what has consciousness, he speaks with various scientists and brain specialists. Yet his sojourn ends with a stay in a remote cave on a Buddhist retreat property. He expresses resistance to the mind-body dualism that originated with Descartes, and examines the “bifurcation of nature we inherited from Galileo” which places quantifiable abstractions over “immediate experience.” Pollan also considers the meaning of terms like intelligence and cognition, and how we share these qualities with non-human beings like computers.

What, then, is consciousness? There is no scientific consensus. Is it merely sentience? Is it something like awareness of being alive? Is it the ability to think? To perceive? The philosopher Thomas Nagel believes that an organism is conscious if it is “like something” to be that organism (in other words, if it has subjectivity). For years, scientists have tried to crack what is known as the “hard problem” of consciousness. Why does it feel like something to be alive? Why don’t we simply carry out activities with a lack of sensation? Do animals feel what we do? Do plants?

Early in the book, Pollan describes himself as a humanist and a romantic of sorts. He is skeptical of reductive, chemicals-only explanations for existence. He finds in literature a better encapsulation of emotional experience, yet at the same time he is wary of his own attraction to what he calls “magic.” One gets the sense that the author is laying the groundwork so as not to alienate his typical reader — likely a secular, liberal, well-educated, and well-to-do dweller in a largely irreligious community. But there is something very deep in Pollan that yearns for mystic awareness. He is a seeker despite himself. He is masterful in his ability to seduce even the most rational reader into a consideration of what might be beyond — and that there could be a beyond at all. His writing is effective because he does not come across as a frizzy-haired hippie or proselytizing religious fanatic, but as a sensible everyman. He is not mushroom-hunting in purple Crocs, nor is he Bible-thumping. Yet, surreptitiously, he draws the most “trust the science” reader into cosmic territory. He is a contemplative with a willingness to enter into silence, and more than a little mischievous. I found myself glancing at his author picture repeatedly, seeing in his eyes on the back flap of the book a gaze that twinkled with stealthy delight.

The most interesting scientists Pollan talks to are humanists like Antonio Damasio, author of the famed book Descartes’ Error as well as The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. The descriptions of brainiacs in A World Appears are often amusing and provide extra insight into eccentric characters. Pollan tells us Damasio is “a vibrant and charming eightysomething, a compact figure with silvery hair swept back from his broad forehead. He was dressed head to loafer in designer leisurewear, all in black, and wore stylish round glasses with tortoiseshell frames.” He speaks of the neurologist’s “old-world air” and “passion for art, music, and literature.” Damasio is an example of a scientist who grounds his conception of consciousness in the body. Because human beings want to maintain homeostasis, we are aware of delicate changes in physical sensation and interpret them for the purpose of survival. This is a fascinating theory of emotion: we don’t generate tears because we are upset. First, the body generates tears, and our consciousness interprets that we are sad. Our bodies don’t shake because we are afraid; first, the body shakes, and we interpret that we have something to be nervous about. These ideas were first explored in the 19^th century by psychologist William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Consciousness being rooted in the incarnated body makes sense to me, a believing Catholic. I think consciousness would be served by being more deeply identified with the body, not less. Pollan makes a fine point when he notices that “curiously, we speak of ‘our bodies’ as something we own, which is why ‘I am my body,’ strikes the ear as off-key.” But I am my body. I experience a thousand physical sensations every day, some of which I misinterpret. My body is often right when I am wrong. I notice statements from artists throughout time which help me liberate my physical awareness from our analytical culture with its Puritan roots. Martha Graham said “the body never lies.” Lord Byron claimed that “the great object of life is Sensation.” Ariana Grande, in a pop song about sexual desire, references both Elvis and Mariah Carey in pleading for “a little less conversation and a little more touch my body.”

In fact, many of the impressions and objections Pollan shares, whether he’s conscious of it or not (and I don’t suspect he is), could be seen as leading to a Catholic worldview. The only Christian he mentions in his book is the unorthodox gnostic Blake Lemoine, who was formerly an engineer at Google, and the only spiritual figure we see him consulting is a Buddhist abbot. But his indignation at the view of consciousness often espoused by the AI community — “bloodless, bodiless, and utterly oblivious to biology” — could be soothed by immersion in the ritual of the Mass, in which we hear the words body and blood before our sacrament. He mentions that Damasio, the elegant neurologist, stands by “the premise that human feelings owe their existence to our vulnerability,” which echoes the Catholic idea that meaning is found in suffering.

A strong feeling for the sacredness of life can be evoked by varying quotations Pollan provides. He speaks with a psychologist named Arthur Reber who says that a single cell can sense its environment. “When some event is sensed, it is felt. It is experienced. It is encoded as a subjective phenomenal state — even when the organism doing the sensing is unicellular,” Reber explains. A philosopher named Evan Thompson tells Pollan that “my hunch is that sentience is woven into life from the beginning.”

By far the topic I’d most love to discuss with Pollan, if I got the chance, would be animism. Animism — the idea that everything in the universe is alive and has a spirit (anima in Latin means soul) — is close to the traditional Catholic belief in the sacramentality of nature, or the view that nature is infused with God. Both ideas are related to something Pollan calls panpsychism — “the ancient idea that everything . . . is conscious to some infinitesimal degree.” Pollan laments that Western science has given us the idea that other than human beings, “the rest of the world is more or less dead,” and that “the dead-world idea has helped the West prevail over traditional cultures that believe the world is alive with consciousness.” He sees psychedelic medicine as one way to overcome this learned anti-animism. But an animistic view is to be found within our Western tradition too.

In a 2019 episode of the podcast Strange Familiars called “A Monastic View of The Other,” host Timothy Renner speaks with a Franciscan friar named Brother Richard Hendrick who lives in Ireland. Brother Richard, a monastic who works closely in his community with neighbors needing prayer and healing, talks about the idea of the anima mundi, or world soul, and how in early Christian thought there was an “infinitude of steps on the ladder of consciousness.” Believers thought of the world as a “vast ecosystem of spirits,” and that originally, “all of this consciousness was able to communicate in various ways.” Although “our ability to communicate with creation” has been “broken,” he says, it is possible to reach this state of dialogue again through contemplative practices.

Saint Augustine introduced the idea of the world as a book offering messages to those willing to read or listen. If the Bible was the book of Scripture, the world and nature made up the “book” of creation. It is perfectly apt, Brother Richard explains, to combine strong Catholic faith with an older “understanding of the land as something alive, and living, and active.” As human beings, we are ourselves a “mix of consciousness and physicality.” He talks about other theologians like Aquinas and Bonaventure, suggesting that “every species, every individual plant or animal has its guardian spirit,” and brings up the idea of panentheism, or the notion that “the divine is present in everything that exists, in every aspect of nature . . . everything is a communicative word of the divine, so reality itself is sacramental.” This is different from pantheism, which sees nature as God. In panentheism, nature is a point of contact with God, while God transcends and is beyond nature.

In one of the most fascinating moments of the conversation, Brother Richard speaks about messages from God taking shape in animals or other beings when a person would otherwise be frightened and shocked by a more direct divine encounter. Is this what happened to Pollan when he decided to eat “a handful of magic mushrooms,” an experience he has described in detail? The author sits in his garden and, under the influence of psilocybin, is suddenly “certain of the sentience of the flowering plants.” They “returned my gaze,” he remembers writing in his journal, and beyond this, even “wished [him] well.” Is it possible that God gave Michael Pollan this taste of the sacramentality of nature, this inherent aliveness of all things, because he was open to another being — in this case the mushrooms? It does say in the Book of Revelation that healing will be provided through plant medicine. Some people are not open to the idea of God. In fact, the word “God” itself brings up massive blocks in many. But my sense is that God uses any opening possible in order to draw people toward belief. Since Michael Pollan was open to mushrooms, they were used as a portal to communicate, however briefly, this divine knowledge.

In a chapter called “Feeling,” Pollan writes about his meeting with a young scientist named Kingson Man, once a student of Damasio’s. Kingson tells him about his own experience inhaling a psychedelic derived from a toad that lives in the deserts of the Southwest. It was “the most profound experience of my life,” he shares with Pollan. “I disappeared, fell out of time, and then came back with the realization that everything in the world is love. . . . As a scientist, there’s no reasoning about it. But I understood for the first time that everything is connected by the same substance, and that substance is love. Afterward, I was overflowing with love. For every person on the street! . . . I came out of it convinced there’s a spark of the divine in us.”

This testimony, given to Kingson through an animal messenger, sounds remarkably similar to the American monk Thomas Merton’s account of a mystical experience on the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, about an hour from his monastery in 1958:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs. . . . There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Merton, of course, was open to this experience because of his monastic practice. But God reaches people in various ways. The host of Strange Familiars, Timothy, at one point tells Brother Richard that he has always thought of himself as a “Marian animist”: a person for whom the Blessed Mother of Christ, Mary, has been deeply important, and who also believes in the living nature of all created things. Would it be too daring or expansive to suggest that Michael Pollan is, or has the capacity to be, a Marian animist as well? In the most boundless vision of the Blessed Mother lies the notion of Blessed Mother Earth — something Pollan obviously has feeling for, given his many books about gardening, food, plant medicine, and building himself a writing hut far in the Connecticut woods. His intuition that “everything alive is sentient” is not too far removed from William Blake’s “everything that lives is holy.”

It can be frustrating to watch Pollan search for answers to the question of consciousness in everything but the religious wisdom of our own Western tradition — like watching someone try to put a nail in the wall using a hairdryer instead of a hammer. Seeking deeper knowledge about the Christian understanding of consciousness, I contacted Luke Dysinger, a Benedictine monk and expert on Catholic bioethics living in California. He forwarded me a paper called “The Spirituality of Human Consciousness” by a theologian at Providence College named Terence McGoldrick. Of course, from a religious perspective, the idea of consciousness is inseparable from the idea of the soul. McGoldrick illustrates how the Catholic understanding of the soul grew out of Judaism and Greek philosophy, as well as the New Testament. While scientific inquiry is useful and worthy of respect, he insinuates, it can never fully account for nor penetrate the profound mystery of human consciousness. “Vital signs are measured daily in hospitals around the world, but life is more than the functions that always accompany it,” he explains. “The believer is not satisfied with the materialist’s reduction of intelligent and conscious life to biochemistry, because it does not account for this spiritual human experience of life.”

In many ways, McGoldrick sounds like a romantic himself:

Reducing human consciousness to an aggregation of cellular “desire to live” and a concert of neurons does not explain the wonder of human freedom, genius, love, virtue and intelligence. . . . Theories in biology of emergence and dynamic systems are compatible with belief in the human soul as the principle of conscious life only insofar as they recognize that consciousness is not reducible to the metabolic parts. The wonder of two people falling in love cannot be explained by gravity and the Big Bang theory and, similarly, human conscious freedom, from which the act of love in its noblest form arises, cannot be reduced to neurons. Without the self-conscious human soul, humans lose their individuality and become nothing more than accidental and temporary collections of atoms.

Perhaps a New Science is needed, one capable of taking into account the spiritual dimension of human life without reducing it to a solely materialist view. McGoldrick intriguingly calls this interdisciplinary approach neurotheology. What else could it be called? Mystic biology? Enchanted somatology? Pollan speaks excitedly of such an idea, suggesting that we will “have to broaden our conception of science.” He mentions that Evan Thompson, the philosopher who studies sentience, has collaborated with Buddhist thinkers. “A new science of consciousness will likely be a hybrid enterprise,” he contends.

In April of this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order meant to accelerate access to psychedelic drugs and develop “innovative research models” for the benefit of people with “serious mental illness.” The president explained that these drugs are a hopeful solution for the many veterans struggling with suicidal ideation, but another fact is worthy of note: psychedelics have been known to cause religious conversions. In his 2024 book Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, Rod Dreher confesses to having tried LSD during a period of despair in his college years. Although he is embarrassed to admit to this experience, it directly led to him becoming interested in Christianity. “Though I regret it, I must admit that it pulled me out of depression and opened my eyes to the fact that God was real,” he writes. Dreher maintains, and I agree, that it is possible and far more preferable to reach a similar state through “prescribed prayer and religious practice.” But perhaps some of us moderns require a substantial intervention to be able to accept a truth Dreher describes in The Benedict Option as obvious to the medieval Christian mind: “the world is charged with spiritual force.”

Pollan is an effective nonfiction writer because of his own sentience. Like a plant, he is able to sense his way toward the light, and to climb along the edge of what is life-giving to the collective unconscious. Like many great writers, he has a premonitory quality. His books How to Change Your Mind (2018) and This Is Your Mind on Plants (2021) preceded Trump’s executive order by eight and five years, respectively. If these titles presaged a collective turn toward psychoactive plants as healers, A World Appears may signal a coming shift toward a spiritual understanding of consciousness.

It may also add to people’s acknowledgment and acceptance of the sentience of plants and animals as far more similar to our own than we have assumed. This is something that many people intuitively know, but a great writer can crystallize in words what lies beneath the surface of shared awareness, ready to emerge. I remember a time in my own life when plants healed me. I was a younger woman then, suffering from panic disorder and awakened several nights a week by severe nausea that enveloped my whole physical being. I had tried therapy and many kinds of medication, but the attacks did not subside until I went to live on the farm of a man I loved. There, on long walks through his fields, my nervous system came down to earth, and I lay for hours in a grove of trees just beyond a stream at the edge of his property. Would it be too much to say that the plants were ministering to me in that moment? Hour by hour, my consciousness blended with theirs, until I saw everything as it is — infused with transcendental power. The anxiety subsided.

Some of the most beautiful sentences in A World Appears come in the last section, when Pollan describes his stay in a remote Buddhist retreat in the mountains of the Southwest. His lodging is a kind of monastic cell carved into a hillside that faces a meadow and has a sliding glass door. He has come here because, on some deep level, he senses the need to think of consciousness “less as a scientific or philosophical puzzle to be solved and more as a practice.” One night, after several days spent meditating and doing simple chores around the lodging, he looks up at the sky and sees it differently.

Instead of dotting the same black scrim, like pinholes in a two-dimensional theater backdrop, the stars were scattered through space at dramatically varying distances, a vast swarm of them filling every last corner of an even vaster, more numinous, and emphatically three-dimensional darkness. Even stranger, the negative space between the stars had flipped to positive, forming a soft, almost palpable blackness that embraced the stars and reached all the way to earth, enveloping it and me in the same intergalactic blanket. For the first time I could see — no, could feel — that the stars and I shared the same infinite space.

Pollan spends the majority of the book speaking to scientists before finally turning toward what he was looking for all along: the spiritual. The word “religion” means, at its root, to “re-tie”: ligare means to bind. The purpose of spiritual practice is to re-tie us to our source. It is possible to question consciousness, or even practice it; our deepest aim may be to enjoy it.

Emma Collins, a contributing writer to The Metropolitan Review, is the author of A New Heaven on Substack. She has written for the Washington Examiner, RealClear Books & Culture, and The Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression. Originally from upstate New York, she now lives in Washington, D.C.

We live in an unprecedented moment for booksmaxxing. I don’t know how I could otherwise make my way through authors like Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard — the latter of whom surely wrote not to be understood. With ChatGPT to help me sentence by sentence at times, Wikipedia, and the ungodly profusion of podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, and other internet rabbit holes, I feel that I could read almost anything.

Given everything we have at our fingertips, naturally we should be producing the most sophisticated readers in human history. Makes sense, then, that in this golden age, we’d be living through a massive wave of book bans, self-canceling authors pressured by mobs who haven’t even read their books, and outrage over fictional characters whose ignorance is the whole point.

Wait, what?

In an interesting turn of events, it appears that the first generations with unprecedented access to human knowledge don’t understand the most basic things about thought or art, like that a depiction of something is not the thing itself, nor is it an endorsement of it. A lot could be said about their ignorance; at the very least, we could say they don’t know how to approach a book with nuance.

Against this backdrop, Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books? or Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You), a call to arms for reading the great works of world literature, feels like a timely and welcome intervention.

Yet Kanakia’s defense of the Great Books isn’t quite what you’d expect. In the introduction, Kanakia lays her cards on the table, outlining exactly how she’s going to make her case. Rather than waxing rhapsodic with the lofty rhetoric of her academic forebears in the Great Books movement, she takes a characteristically methodical and thoughtful approach, where chapter by chapter she addresses the most common questions and objections from those she sees as her audience: left-leaning types.

Some questions are serious foundational questions like “What do you mean by ‘The Great Books’?” and “Where did your list of Great Books come from?” Other questions are distinctly of our cultural moment: “Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?”; “When we say, ‘The Great Books are worth reading,’ do other people hear, ‘White men are inherently superior’?”; and “Can’t reading the Great Books be psychologically damaging for marginalized people?” These latter questions might seem as intellectually uninformed to some people as “Can I catch HIV by hugging someone?” Nevertheless, Kanakia engages with them fully and in earnest.

As a subscriber to Kanakia’s Substack newsletter, Woman of Letters, I was already accustomed to her honest, forthright style and willingness to carefully consider other points of view. But I’m not going to lie: the idea of approaching these questions systematically one by one seemed kind of boring and made me think I already knew where the book was headed. And designing it around some of the most common questions about and objections to the Great Books (I was already pretty sold on the concept — English major, Classics minor, I read Arendt and Baudrillard “for fun”) seemed tiresome at best.

Indeed, as I began to read Kanakia’s book, it was like traveling back to college when a professor takes up another student’s obvious question in class, and you slouch in your seat, roll your eyes, think to yourself, “Here we go,” and resign yourself to mentally checking out. Except that, as Kanakia’s book proceeds, the professor takes up their question with such thoughtfulness, patience, and respect that you stop fantasizing about the hot junior next to you and start to pay attention. Before long, you realize you’re crying, so moved that you have to excuse yourself to the bathroom, where sniveling and red-faced and puffy, you give yourself a good, hard stare in the mirror. In that moment, you vow to become a better person — one more like your professor — and, inspired not just by their intellectual integrity but their humanistic empathy, you change your life forever.

Yeah, reading Kanakia’s book was a bit like that. With her dialogic structure, Kanakia models the very intellectual generosity that she argues is part of what makes the Great Books great. And while engaging deeply with these questions, she invokes Homer, Socrates, Kant, William James, Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot, James Baldwin, and many others, and brings free will, aesthetics, postmodernism, decolonization, cultural capital, and all your other favorite liberal arts suspects into the conversation.

Sound dry? It’s lively as hell, actually.

While Kanakia apologizes for her lack of academic pedigree (“Even now, I’m almost ashamed to be writing this book — who am I to write about the Great Books — I’m not a professor or a PhD!”), it’s probably one of her greatest strengths.

Unlike the tomes in the Great Books genre, which are written by and for academicians, Kanakia writes as an accomplished reader for the common reader, or the aspiring one. She wasn’t an English major. She grew up reading sci-fi, and despite her rare humanistic education at her Catholic high school, had very little interest in the Great Books until after college, when she took it upon herself to read the great writers so she could become a better writer of science fiction.

As she works through the questions in her book, Kanakia explores competing arguments from multiple angles, freely admitting her own doubts, uncertainties, and confusions. At one point she confesses, mid-thought: “I face a terrible, hopeless muddle, to the point where I am not even sure what I’m talking about anymore.” While most writers might try to conceal these moments, Kanakia follows them through. Such honesty only reinforces the book’s intellectual seriousness.

That’s not to say that Kanakia doesn’t have convictions. She reveals her 17 years of serious reading in her clear, finely weighed judgments and discriminating sense of taste. But she doesn’t just draw from what she’s read but from her own experiences, including her efforts to reconcile, as a trans person, the recent movement among the right in favor of teaching the Great Books. All of this adds up to something rarer and more compelling than a conventional defense of the canon: a consciousness. Kanakia offers not a dissertation, but, as in literature itself, an individual viewpoint.

But while Kanakia’s book avoids the abstraction and well-meaning yet ivory-tower loftiness of other Great Books proponents, it’s not without transcendence. Kanakia grants that the books won’t necessarily change your life and that some people may have better ways to spend their time (she offers up the example of her wife, an HIV research scientist looking for a cure). Yet her most compelling argument, which might also be the least fashionable, lies in defense of aesthetics.

Aesthetics are under attack in late capitalist digital America. Part of the reason is that, thanks to the democratization of aesthetic production and distribution through tools like Canva, as well as the very nature of the simulacral digital world, genuine aesthetic experiences have been replaced by brand signaling and instant interpretation. While we’ve had the democratization of the elements of aesthetics, we have yet to democratize deep thought.

As Kanakia reveals with the help of Great Books authors, it is nuance itself that characterizes aesthetics. While the manipulation of aesthetic elements is part of its practice, so is moral complexity.

Kanakia introduces Marxist critical theorist Terry Eagleton’s “ideology of the aesthetic,” which she defines as “the idea that our aesthetic sense gives us higher truths than human reason can.” It’s a seductive argument for aesthetic ideologues — and it’s been my own. Yet even though Kanakia admits that it’s at the core of her own position, she acknowledges its “fuzziness” and occult qualities. She proceeds, however, to ground the concept in a way that made me realize just how fuzzy my own notion of this has been.

An aesthetic sense isn’t some mystic faculty but the ability to make, as Kanakia writes, “finer distinctions in morality.” It’s through this lens that she explores books like Anna Karenina and Middlemarch. Why are some aesthetic works great while others fail? Why do we return to certain books while others disappear just as soon as we finish them? Kanakia suggests an answer:

[T]he Great Books tend to share one quality. They have a lot of integrity. They tend to be unflinchingly honest about whatever their subject happens to be. And this means that even when they come down on one side of a question, they usually make a fair case for the opposite side.

And here we come to the T-word. While she may not be capitalizing it, she’s most assuredly talking about Truth with a capital T. Not only that, Kanakia invokes yet another T-word — Taste, which it turns out isn’t just the inability to enjoy a Netflix original movie:

The Great Books are, more than anything, marked by their tremendous rigor, their drive to hold their own ideas up to scrutiny. And in that rigor, that paring away of what’s easy and facile, they bring us closer to the world-in-itself — the true, objective world that we can never know through reason alone. And it’s my contention that this rigor and honesty and care is synonymous with taste.

In our household, we don’t censor movies by violence and adult themes but by what I call “quality.” While I never explicitly explained this notion, by the time my kids were seven they seemed to grasp it intuitively as I shared with them what made the cut and what didn’t. Under our dictatorship of taste, my daughter recently got into replaying Terminator 2 and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off while I was reading Kanakia’s book. We knew these were unquestionable inclusions on the “Quality” list, but I finally had the vocabulary to articulate why. Formal considerations aside (there’s also something to be said for the other capital word, Beauty, and Kanakia takes that up as well), they give a fair shake to opposing viewpoints. In Terminator 2, how can all machines be evil when the Good Terminator is able to form a stronger connection with John than any human has? Is it really worth all of Sarah Connor’s sacrifices for humanity’s future savior when she won’t even accept the french fries he saved for her? As for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, while Ferris seems to be saying that life should be enjoyed, in the case of Ferris’ BFF Cameron, it appears that sometimes it’s about confronting painful and scary realities. True freedom doesn’t mean playing hooky from life, but if you focus on making a good little boy or girl out of everyone, like Rooney or Ferris’ sister, Jeanie, you risk missing the very thing that gives Cameron the courage to claim that freedom for himself.

For all her efforts to pin it down, Kanakia understands that a conversation about taste only goes so far; a work of true taste can never be reduced to explanation (sorry, book review reader). As Kanakia writes as she compares reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time:

Proust is indeed the superior author. To find out why, you simply need to read and appreciate him, because what you learn from reading him is something you need to read him to learn! If it could be conveyed without reading the book, there’d be no need to read the book. The answer is distinctly unsatisfying, and yet it is true.

It’s in Kanakia’s own pursuit of moral truth through nuance that her strength as a writer lies. She doesn’t use the showy language or inflammatory élan of other popular internet writers, but then, do we really need more of that anyway? There’s a strong aesthetic sense behind her clean, clear prose.

As for the rest of What’s So Great About the Great Books?, I’ll let the book do the talking for me. As Kanakia suggests when she argues in favor of reading Proust, there are some things you can’t do justice to in summary — even in a long-winded review. A testament to its own greatness, the same is true of her book.

Who knows? Perhaps one day sensitivity readers, self-canceling authors, outrage mobs, and ideas like the belief that you can catch someone’s “evil” by reading their work will seem as quaint as the old fears about hugging someone with HIV. At least for now, Kanakia gives us reason to believe that the tradition of nuance, generosity, and integrity passed down through the Great Books may help get us there.

Jesse Relkin is a fiction writer and critic. She publishes The Dreaded Word, a Substack on literature and culture.

Military life has long served as reliable fodder for American literature, which should come as no surprise: something about stories of men from all corners of the country facing danger as a team is inherently dramatic. From Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage to Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, authors have mined the ups and downs of military life not just to shine a light on what makes those institutions — and the people who work them — tick, but also the American experience as a whole. Sometimes this even takes a comic turn, as seen in Joseph Heller’s satirical masterpiece, Catch-22, or Neil Simon’s autobiographical play Biloxi Blues, which documents his stint in the U.S. Army (with plenty of gags thrown in for good measure).

It is from this very established tradition that Yannick Murphy’s new novel, Things That Are Funny on a Submarine But Not Really emerges. As the title suggests, the story focuses on a group of submariners — aka bubbleheads — in the U.S. Navy, and if you skip the mini-foreword, you just may think the book is a memoir. It certainly reads that way, as Murphy yanks you deep beneath the ocean’s surface and straight into the “big steel tube of dumb” that the sailors call home. You’re then immediately delivered into the head of David Sterling, a radioman in his early 20s as he nears the end of his five-year stint underwater. His racing thoughts make up the book’s story and play out as if he himself had committed them to the page.

This book, however, is very much a novel, and it’s a credit to Murphy’s considerable powers as a writer that she may trick you — at least at first — into thinking you’re reading a true first-person account. As is briefly explained before the story starts, all three of Murphy’s children are submariners in the U.S. Navy: one is retired, while two are active duty. Things That Are Funny on a Submarine But Not Really is said to be “a work of fiction blended with her children’s stories from overseas phone calls and underway emails,” and in lesser hands it could read as an inauthentic pastiche. Murphy, however, is an accomplished, award-winning novelist, and the claustrophobic, often crude, mostly male world she builds never rings false. The writing is also full of enough Navy slang, acronyms, and abbreviations that you may find yourself — like me — consulting Google every three or four pages.

Our protagonist, David Sterling, is obviously bright, but he was a shiftless, poor student in high school. Facing few options after graduation, he joined the Navy because he “liked submarines” (a passion instilled by his father, a full-blown sub geek), but now that his time is almost up, the prospect of college looms. His parents are constantly pushing him to enroll in a university when he gets out, but Sterling wonders “if there is a shit ass college for me out there. Is there one that admits students with high school grades more like their shoe sizes?” His ticket to college is the G.I. Bill, but he fears he’ll self-sabotage before claiming his reward by mouthing off to an officer and ending up with the “Big Chicken Dinner, aka dishonorable discharge.”

Sterling has never had a girlfriend, a secret he confessed to his comrades during sub school. One reason for this is his weight. This doesn’t go unnoticed in the confines of the submarine, where every physical flaw is the target of ruthless ribbing. “The gay guy Manning . . . tells me I’m fat,” Sterling says, “and he’d never do me, and I’m actually relieved for once to be fat.” On several occasions he refers to his “ba-donk-a-donk ass,” and this, plus the “Bigfoot is Real” bucket hat he often sports, paints the picture of an overgrown nerd in a poopy suit — the jumpsuits that serve as the uniform for enlisted men onboard.

Like any good military book, it’s the supporting cast — all referred to by surnames or nicknames — that really breathes life into the story. Baitz is from South Carolina and “thinks that North Carolina is in the North.” Tintin is an Iowa farm boy named after the comic book character on account of his greasy ginger cowlick. Grenadier hails from the mean streets of South Chicago and admits to gangbanging before enlisting. Bortlein is called “Borderline” because of his tendency to violently flip out, while Cordova “has one of those hook noses that makes him look like he just came running down the steps at Chichen Itza in a loincloth.” Their captain sounds like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, and every time he signs off on the sub’s P.A., Sterling and his buddies respond in Texas drawls with “Alright, alright, alright.” Doc — the boat’s medic — is an intense loner from NYC and a known woman-beater, and Sterling — due to failing his role in a fire drill — comes to be known as simply “Dead Man.”

These men represent the regional and racial patchwork that is the modern U.S. military — which Sterling describes this way:

Sometimes I think of our submarine as the Noah’s ark of all different types of humans. If we were to sink to the bottom of the ocean and be found hundreds of years later, there would be no shortage of a diverse gene pool with which to start colonizing the planet.

The submarine is based in the island territory of Guam in the Western Pacific, and while their supposed nemesis in those waters is the Chinese navy, the biggest enemy they face aboard the boat is boredom. Sterling and his buddies in the radio room — known as “the Goon Squad” — do anything they can to pass the time. They argue about whose mother makes better pancakes. They speak in mafia accents. They scuffle, wrestle, and put each other in headlocks at the slightest provocation. They watch old movies ranging from Cool Hand Luke to Pretty in Pink, and Sterling entertains them all with stories from home:

The guys on the boat want to hear the story about the time the heavy snow on the powerline cut the electricity, so my father went out with the shotgun and tried to shoot the snow off. They want to hear about the calls I went on with my father, the veterinarian, to treat horses and cattle. The time we pulled out a newborn calf, but it was dead, and all we pulled out were the legs that had broken off from the body that was still inside the mother.

As the book progresses, it’s clear that Sterling comes from a different social class than his boatmates. After all, his father is a veterinarian — hardly a proletarian occupation — and the family home in New England comes complete with a private pond. This — plus the fact that he has a college education in his future — makes him stand out from the rest of the enlisted guys on the crew. Grenadier is aware of this, and encourages Sterling to grab the opportunity in front of him. “Go to college,” he says. “I’ve never been, but I bet it’s dank. Chicks and shit. You don’t have to stand watch. You don’t have to live in a metal fucking tube. Besides, you’d be good at college. You’re smart and shit.”

Sterling’s buddies clearly grew up rougher and poorer, and their current life choices put them on a vastly different trajectory. Grenadier is married to a stripper back in Chicago. They have two kids, but when it becomes clear she wants to leave him, it sends him into a tailspin. Tintin is in love with another stripper named “Kitten” from one of the clubs they frequent back in Guam, and — despite Sterling’s repeated warnings — is determined to tie the knot with her.

Murphy’s prose shines best when she’s describing the day-to-day passing of time on the sub, with illuminative passages such as this:

I start whistling riffs from Aaron Copland’s Rodeo. Baitz reaches his hand up to his face and starts squeezing a zit on his cheek between two fingers. Wonton cracks his neck, and we all agree that it sounds like fucking popcorn being cooked.

She also keenly describes the unwritten rules that govern sub life, especially when it comes to the crews’ bunks known as “Rackistan”: “Pulling back another guy’s rack curtain when it’s closed is grounds for all-out-war, and even if you think your rack mate is on his deathbed, you do not open the curtain to his inner spanktum.”

While the mundanity of sub life may be enough for a slice-of-life story, Murphy manages to inject enough drama into the proceedings to prevent any narrative navel-gazing. There is a suicide attempt. Doc becomes convinced that one of the crew is spying for the Chinese, and attempts to enlist Sterling as his eyes and ears. A group of Navy SEALs launches a mission from the boat to recover a submersible device captured by the Chinese, who respond by shadowing the sub with one of their own. Finally, during a crew swim session on the surface, known as a “steel beach party,” one of their numbers never makes it back onto the boat.

All of these crisis-laced sub stories certainly elevate the stakes in Things That Are Funny on a Submarine But Not Really, though they do feel shoehorned at times, as if Murphy didn’t trust that a day-to-day examination of submarine life where nothing extraordinary ever happens would be sufficient fodder for a novel. Maybe she’s right, but the book works best when it’s not trying too hard to drum up some Hollywood action.

The actual submarine scenes occupy just the first half of the novel. Due to a conflict with a superior who seemingly has it out for him, Sterling is grounded to the base in Guam while the sub returns to sea without him, pondering his soon-to-be civilian future while taking a resume-writing class, which includes penning college-entrance essays, igniting a new passion. He soon is discharged and makes his way back stateside, where, after a stint with his parents in New England, he finds himself enrolled at a nameless midwestern university. Supported by the G.I. Bill, he immediately feels out of place, surrounded by bright and shiny, much younger students with stridently woke sensibilities and very little life experience. “I’m wearing my boat T-shirt with the name of our sub on it,” he remarks on the day of his arrival at the college. “The T-shirt’s dark shitty brown with black lettering, and the shorts I’m wearing are also brown. I look like a muddy river trout in a sea full of neon tetras and paradise fish.”

This sense of alienation is made worse in his creative writing class, where his first story — an account of visiting a legendary brothel known as “Four Floors of Whores” on shore leave — is savaged by fellow students for running afoul of current sensibilities. “Nobody talks about the story, instead they talk about how I shouldn’t call women whores and that I’m being derogatory toward women,” he laments. “On the first day of class, the teacher said we should write about what we know. That was my mistake.”

Despite the fact that Sterling is thousands of miles away from the sub, sub life can’t seem to quit him. He thinks about the Navy constantly, longing to be back underwater with his old crew of misfits. Some send him occasional emails filling him in on sub gossip and encouraging him to re-enlist, which tempts him as his college life feels empty. The one quasi-friend he’s made (his video-game-playing partner) seems hopelessly naive and unable to understand his previous life, and it’s also the same with Taloe, a girl introduced as a possible love interest.

Most notably, Sterling suffers from hearing voices in his head in the form of his comrade who went missing during the swimming break, who at times berates him for going civilian and turning his back on his bubblehead buddies. Whether this is a specter of his guilt or an actual mental break is never made clear, but once Sterling settles more and more into the rhythms of regular life, the voice fades away.

His final encounter with sub life happens when his old buddy Tintin, in the midst of a drugged-up psychosis, appears at his doorstep on a bug-eyed quest to track down his ex-fiancée, the stripper-turned-student at the university (it all seems a bit too convenient plot-wise, but hey, sometimes writers need to keep things simple). Just when Sterling is finding his groove as a respectable civilian, Tintin acts as a tornado from his past, almost blowing him completely off the tracks. Tintin also acts as a potent reminder that sub life wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be, and that we tend to romanticize our pasts.

This seems to be a big idea in Things That Are Funny on a SubmarineBut Not Really: that our memories define us, at least for a while — especially when formed in our teens and early 20s. This is why the once-great high school quarterback will still tearfully wax poetic about his glorious game-winning touchdown 30 years down the road, and why so many military guys can never really shed the armor they once donned. The bond created between humans who wear the uniform is stronger than lifelong civilians such as myself can ever really fathom, which is why it’s remarkable that Yannick Murphy — never having served herself — captures these feelings so clearly. I suppose it’s because, as a mom, she knows a thing or two about mutual love and obligation, and that greatly aids the telling of this story.

Chris Tharp is the author of The Cuttlefish and two other books. He has been a regular contributor to National Geographic, The Telegraph, Asia Times, and plenty of fancy travel mags. He lives in Busan, South Korea with his wife and a pack of animals, and his Substack is called The World According to Tharp.

One of the most irritating things we learn in Ted Geltner’s new biography of Denis Johnson, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures, is just how easy it all was for Denis. Not that Denis’ life was easy — anyone who’s picked up Jesus’ Son is at least dimly aware that DJ blasted away his 20s careening between dope and booze before he got his act together — but the writing, if we’re to believe Geltner’s reverent account, came to him with blissful, galling ease. It began at the University of Iowa, where a 19-year-old Denis (“It was always Denis, not Denis Johnson,” Joy Williams insists) showed up to his freshman year seminar with a poem that left his classmates dumbfounded. “Nobody was able to manage any suggestions for improvement,” Geltner reports. Dejected, the class slinked off to “go listen to some Bob Dylan records.” Poor, defeated hippies. For the next seven years, as Denis muddled through an MFA, he routinely shocked professors into slack-jawed awe and drove students into paroxysms of envy with his immense and inexplicable talent. By 1974, “Well, it’s another Denis Johnson poem” had become a weary refrain around campus.

“Immediately,” “promptly,” and “quickly” are the adverbs that pepper Geltner’s breezy summary of Denis’ college years: Denis’ poems were “immediately” put on track for publication, and once that happened, Denis — restless and in search of further worlds to conquer — turned his attentions to Iowa’s fiction workshops. The first short story he ever wrote, “The Taking of Our Own Lives,” was “promptly” accepted by the North American Review. The next landed at The Atlantic and provoked Houghton Mifflin to “quickly” make Denis a deal for his not-yet-written debut novel. It’s enough to make the reader, who’s probably a writer, squirm with jealousy as they consider the drafts, rejections, “in-progress” submissions, fragments, jottings, and half-baked ideas clotting up their desk and their desktop.

That the audience for a Denis Johnson biography is likely to consist of writers themselves is obvious. It’s not that Denis can be comfortably labeled a “writer’s writer” (although Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures comes enthusiastically blurbed by Jenny Offill and T. C. Boyle, who claims, erroneously, that it’s a “biography with all the fluidity and thrust of a novel”), but that he, even more so than his mentor Raymond Carver, can be held responsible for the applications of at least several thousand young writers to MFA programs across America. The truth is that Denis wrote marvelously, and, crucially, he produced the kind of effortless prose that seemed imitable, the sort of writing that made one think, “Maybe I could do that.”

His formula was deceptively simple: take the minimalism and subject matter of Carver (“The Savoy Hotel was a bad place”), add a dash of Whitmanian lyricism (“I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth”), and presto, you had yourself a heartsick little gem like “Work” or “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” Of course, try to do this at home and you’ll find that it’s teeth-grindingly difficult work. So one cracks open Gestures determined to find answers. What made Denis tick? What was his routine? Was he a Balzacian, sustained by endless gallons of coffee, or did Denis draw his inspiration from some deeper interior well — heroin, followed by religion? We want to know how, exactly, he wrote those novels, and those stories, and those sentences. Reading about his life, we want a little of his power for ourselves.

It’s pointless to try and answer these questions — we’re almost better off knowing nothing about him — but Geltner sets himself to the task patiently. Denis left no instructions for a potential biographer before he died, so it’s up to Geltner, a professor of journalism at Valdosta State University, to track down the usual grab-bag of friends, lovers, ex-wives, colleagues, former instructors at the U of I, writing retreat buddies, barflies, gadflies, and hangers-on, all of whom seem as mystified by Denis as we are ourselves. The result of all this pavement-pounding is a diligent, respectful account of Denis Johnson’s life, from birth to death, addiction to sobriety, and obscurity to (sadly truncated) literary fame. Relevant interviewees are quoted throughout, appropriate historical context is provided, but ultimately Gestures is long on detail, short on insight, and although a tone of quiet worship is struck throughout, one finishes the book with the strong sense that Denis would not have wanted it written.

If the writing came naturally to Denis, it was the business of living that he was ill-suited for. “I can’t remember very many situations,” he told the LA Times, “where I had even the tiniest idea what the heck was going on. Meanwhile, you humans, you Earthlings — you all seem right at home.” We roll our eyes reading this — a clever writer’s folksy self-mythologization — but one of Gestures’ great revelations is that Denis Johnson, in addition to being one of the more graceful prose stylists of the last half-century, was also a complete buffoon. Newly arrived at the University of Iowa, Denis quickly took up with Nancy Jo Lister, an Iowan who found Denis “an exotic, romantic figure.” By sophomore year, Nancy was pregnant with his child. Denis reacted to this news by getting drunk and chucking a bottle of whiskey out of the cafeteria window. The couple moved into a two-bedroom and prepared for the arrival of their first child. Nancy’s parents bought them a crib and Nancy decorated the nursery. For his part, Denis, the boy-poet, decreed that if the child “was a girl . . . she should be called Tangerine.” If it was a boy, he would be christened “Changer D’avis.” Geltner earnestly explains that translated from the French, this means “change your mind,” but the effect, when spoken, is more Appalachian than French — closer to Breece D’J Pancake than Guy de Maupassant. The child was a boy. Fortunately, his parents had recently seen the 1966 slapstick comedy Morgan! starring Vanessa Redgrave and David Warner. Having enjoyed the film, Denis and Nancy decided to name their firstborn after it. Morgan would be Denis’ only biological child.

More examples of his dumbassery ensue, each less charming than the last. As Geltner put it, Denis was “middle-class gone crazy,” which meant that he was a sloppy alcoholic and a druggie who spent the better part of the ’70s embarrassing himself. Geltner dutifully records each one of Denis’ moronic misadventures. These range from the risible, like when Denis, a new hire at Lake Forest College in Chicago, decided that instead of grading each student’s work by hand, “he would throw the entire pile of essays down the stairs” and assign grades based on where they fell, to the repulsive, like when he encouraged his seven-year-old son to make friends in a new neighborhood by passing out porno mags.

Much of the flavor of these sodden, peripatetic years is contained in Jesus’ Son. The hangovers, the driftlessness, the mornings waking up dead broke and hitchhiking to the next crummy town, countless days weathering “the common humiliations of a human life.” This period makes for grim reading, but one realizes, raising an eyebrow, that Denis had a dim idea that all of it — the pain, the homelessness, his addictions — was necessary research. He was hungry for any kind of experience, the seamier the better. Pills, guns, needles, burglary, drunk driving, unplanned pregnancies, general disreputability: Denis hoovered it all up. “You’re only hanging out with us so you can write about us later, aren’t you?” one of Denis’ pals at the Vine, a favored dive in Iowa City, asks him. Right he was: the Vine — “a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere”— would appear in Jesus’ Son, along with its regulars. It becomes laughable how often Geltner, having just described another sordid scene, magnanimously concludes that it “would lead to some memorable stories down the road,” or at the very least, promises us that “Denis observed and took notes.”

But by the late ’70s, Denis had realized that his powers of observation and “even his ability to write poetry . . . had abandoned him.” Finally scared straight, he retreated to his parent’s house in Arizona, where he sobered up with startling alacrity. In the span of two pages, Denis goes from a “bloated and pale” lush to a hearty and hale all-American. The reader’s head spins. At this point, Geltner might pause to reconcile Denis’ recusant youth with his newly sober and monkish 30s, and to explain the congruence between his life and his art. Instead, he plugs on, and Gestures becomes a dull catalog of novels published, fellowships won, and plaudits received.

It’s a pity, because there is fertile ground here. A shrewder writer might have seized the opportunity to become an English department’s resident Denis Johnson expert — all it would take is a chapter on his relationship to his class of lyrical realists and some plucky assessment of his oeuvre. But Geltner is strangely timid when it comes to evaluating Johnson’s work — the wrong tack for this biography, because after the derangements of his 20s, work was all Denis had left. Sober and clear-headed, powers of observation recovered, Denis started writing and never really stopped. First came Angels, written in two spurts separated by a decade and not quite so convincingly soldered together. Next, emboldened by a grant-winning streak, Denis pumped out Fiskadoro, a puzzling post-apocalyptic daydream, and the Robert Stone homage Stars at Noon. Both novels are only ever fitful displays of Denis’ talent. He seemed aware of this. “Actually [Fiskadoro is] kind of a weird book,” he wrote to a friend. “But who cares?” Denis certainly didn’t.

The ’80s pass by in a productive blur of plays, poems, stories, and essays, but Jesus’ Son, Denis’ 1992 collection of highway-side missives, is the star attraction here — indeed, it’s the book upon which Geltner’s argument for his greatness hangs. In his fabulistic retelling, Denis was looking for a way to pay for his divorce from Lucinda Johnson when he happened upon some short stories he had written 30 years prior stashed in a drawer. All he had to do was staple them together and mail the packet off to Jonathan Galassi at FSG, who promptly pronounced them masterful, had them published, and gave Denis the biggest success of his career. All that’s left for us to say, hopelessly, is “Well, it’s just another Denis Johnson story.”

Geltner, so far, so reticent, devotes a fulsome chapter to Jesus’ Son. According to him, the book “directly tapped into the vibe of an era” — the ’90s — and “fill[ed] a hole in a new generation searching for touchstones.” Vibes and touchstones, like much of Geltner’s writing, sound suspiciously vague. Jesus’ Son was certainly the book that established him as a serious, unusual writer, but by now the reader, becalmed in a sea of drab facts, longs for Geltner to express a bold opinion or make an interesting claim about Denis’ life and work. This is the first biography to be published since Denis passed away nine years ago; one feels that it should go some way to tidying up Denis’ place in the American literary canon. He was not a titan like DeLillo or Cormac McCarthy — although at times his work shared some of DeLillo’s Americana or the flinty spirituality of novels like The Crossing — nor was he (as his detractors would have it) a mediocre prose-poet, someone like Richard Brautigan. The cliché, in this case, is true: his influences were often obvious, but what he did with them, when it came time to sit down and do the work, was anything but. There’s Carver of course, along with Graham Greene, Leonard Gardner, and Conrad, yet at its best Denis’ prose seemed peerless.

Post-Jesus’ Son, Gestures begins to lose steam. Simply put, Denis’ life became sort of boring. He wrote, he taught, he accepted occasional assignments from Esquire or Salon, he bought 200 acres in Idaho and a pad in the Bay Area, where he married Cindy Lee, his third wife. But Geltner is a Denis fan, and as a fan, he has a fan’s quiddities, his bêtes noires and pet topics. We’re treated to a chapter on Denis’ dalliances with literary journalism (“It was Denis’s first published work of journalism. It was also his masterpiece of the form”), even though Denis, who once described journalists as a “pack of lemmings,” clearly saw his trips to Kabul or Liberia as paid opportunities to gather material for his fiction. He suggests that Denis should’ve received a National Book Award for Jesus’ Son — the “creation that the gods of literature had actually chosen to preserve for eternity” — rather than Tree of Smoke. (I disagree: Tree of Smoke, Denis’ 700-page Vietnam War epic, is his masterpiece and the gods of literature, wherever they are, were right to bestow one of their highest honors upon it.)

Elsewhere Gestures can be repetitious, unclear, listless, sterile, and excitable: “Much of the work of transforming his experiences from the trip with Messer into literature would take place at an ideal location for such work.” Or this passage: “It was now part of the wider ‘human experience,’ and Denis believed he had a calling to write stories from that human experience.” And when Geltner does reach for some verve, we’re confronted by sentences like “Denis dined with Somali fighters high on chhaht, the warrior’s drug of blood and ecstasy.” Besides the bizarre spelling of khat (qat or qhat are also acceptable), it would be more apt to characterize the leaf, a mild stimulant chewed as a social pastime in the Horn of Africa, as the loafer’s drug of zippy conversation and slight insomnia.

“Nobody could ever possibly imagine how clumsy, silly and stupid that great man was in his youth,” Baudelaire wrote of Balzac. “And yet he managed to acquire . . . not only grandiose ideas but also a vast amount of wit. But then he never stopped working.” So it goes with Denis: first we get the idiot, thrashing around the heartland; then we get Denis the weathered and weary mystic — as Jonathan Franzen grandly put it, “the God I want to believe in has a voice and sense of humor like Denis Johnson’s”; and finally we get Denis the writer. Yes, he was uncommonly talented and unreasonably lucky, but what Gestures ultimately reveals is what we already half-suspected about him: each effortless sentence required slavish devotion, incessant tinkering, and a steely focus. You’re left admiring Denis — his creative powers, his reserve, his mulishness and determination — but he remains a remote figure, a kind of wonderful savant adrift among the earthlings. Only once while reading Gestures did I feel noticeably close to him. Right before he died, before the liver cancer took over, he asked his wife, Cindy Johnson, “Is it ok if I stop writing now?” Everybody knows that feeling.

Max Callimanopulos is a writer who lives in New York City. He most recently wrote about the singer Αkon in the London Review of Books.

Two short story collections by trans men were released in 2025, CRAWL by Max Delsohn and Realistic Fiction by Anton Solomonik. (A disclosure: Max Delsohn is a friend of mine.) Both collections are humorous, and both collections feature a lot of pink on their covers. I’m fond of these color schemes, as if together these covers wink at their contents’ ironic approach to representing masculinity. One might expect the covers to assert their authors’ identity more firmly, considering how rarely books are released by trans men. To my knowledge, no organization is publishing statistics on trans publications, but I would be surprised if more than a handful of literary fiction books by trans men are published each year; expand that to other genres and you might, optimistically, number more than a dozen. So as a trans man, I was quite excited to have two literary story collections in one year, and I’ve wanted to write about these two collections together. Although they’re different in style and tone, their commonalities signify a refreshing direction for transmasculine literature.

And yet, discussing identity in Realistic Fiction and CRAWL feels like an essentializing act, pigeonholing both works as “trans guy books.” This is the trap of representation discourse: noting the significance of identity risks portraying the work as relevant only to those with a vested interest in said identity, or worse, as an obligation; reading for representation makes reading a political duty, like eating your vegetables or calling your senators. There is also an evaluative element, as the lens of representation inevitably calls up the specter of positive or negative representation. This limits the scope of critique and devalues the work’s artistry.

While I did feel personally “represented” by some of these stories, in that I recognized experiences and feelings from my own life, reading these funny, crude, imaginative, and absurd collections should be no one’s homework. These stories should be read because of their quality, not because of what they do to represent trans lives. Yet writing about these books as if how they depict trans life has no bearing on their quality would be disingenuous.

Aid comes to me through a definitional theory of short stories that predates our modern representation discourse, hailing from the 1960s: Irish writer Frank O’Connor’s language regarding the short story’s “submerged population.” In the 20^th century, O’Connor was regarded as one of the preeminent short story writers of his time. He elaborated on his submerged population theory in a 1961 lecture series at Stanford, lectures that have been collected in The Lonely Voice. To O’Connor, the chief element which distinguishes the short story writer from the novelist is that, while the novel is primarily concerned with how a character relates to society, characters in short stories don’t have the option of relating to society; they are remote, set apart, “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes.” It is this focus on the outlawed figure that gives the short story writer license to articulate “an intense awareness of human loneliness” and gives the short story its particular lean towards characters whose isolation and absurd framing make them ill-fitting to be novel heroes.

The short story draws its outlaws from a submerged population, by which O’Connor does not necessarily mean a group marginalized on some identity axis, but rather any group the writer feels an affinity for and in which there is potential for alienation. In The Lonely Voice, O’Connor writes:

We can see in [the short story] an attitude of mind that is attracted by submerged population groups, whatever these may be at any given time — tramps, artists, lonely idealists, dreamers, and spoiled priests . . . the short story remains by its very nature remote from the community — romantic, individualistic, and intransigent.

Gogol had his officials, Turgenev had his serfs, Chekhov had his doctors and teachers, Joyce had his Dubliners; some of these groups, yes, we’d consider to be marginalized or oppressed using today’s vocabulary, but almost all of the writers O’Connor analyzes through this lens are cis-heterosexual white men, and we don’t think of their bodies of work as representing the underrepresented. Instead, their work is generally acknowledged as universal, but they achieved this universality through dedicated focus on alienated groups.

Opting for the language of “submerged population” over the language of “representation” is not a picayune difference in word choice, but an ideological difference. Representation discourse presents a utilitarian argument, one that fundamentally elevates a story’s political utility over its artistic merits. Recognizing a writer’s attention to their submerged population is an artistic analysis that both recognizes the importance of the submerged group to the writer’s craft, and gives craft primacy over political utility. For O’Connor, when a writer brings a submerged group to life — and, crucially, when the writer gives their submerged characters full autonomy to act out their own values and culture, independent of those dictated by their society — this is the mark of a genuine storyteller. Far from pigeonholing marginalized writers to a niche audience, this framework correctly places them beside Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Joyce, et al.

CRAWL gives attention to its submerged population through studied realism, its characters feeling like they could have walked into fiction from real life. Most of the collection’s trans men have ties to queer and trans community, but these ties generate more angst than succor. In “Same Old,” a character must wrestle with the responsibility that he has (if any) to another younger, suffering trans man. In “Geeks,” Ray is tortured by his unspoken love for another trans guy, one who calls him “brother” and whose emotional unavailability seems tied to his transition. “Don’t Be Boring” examines the friendship and exploitation between a trans man and a cis gay man as vicious as he is gorgeous. And in “The Bubble,” Delsohn’s most direct confrontation with an idealistic vision of community, he exposes the thorny intricacies of trans community over the course of one summery afternoon in a public park. We find the protagonist of “The Bubble,” after he’s spent hours attending to the emotional wounds of his fellow trans dudes, discouraged by the utopian ideal of “community.” Any trans person who has tried to live in community with other trans people will recognize his disillusionment: “[That] ‘trans family’ speech was a pipe dream. Or it was one big family of babies. Just babies smearing shit all over each other and calling it ‘community.’” The story ends with its narrator, despite his cynicism, choosing once more to reach out to a trans person, after witnessing how they’ve been mocked by a cis crowd.

This scene, in which a non-binary transmasculine person is laughed at for being absurdly “tiny,” gets at a recurring theme in both collections, a contradiction at the heart of transmasculine experience: we want to be taken seriously, for our manhood to be taken seriously — yet there’s something inherently ridiculous about masculinity, so there’s much to laugh at in the desire to become a man. CRAWL is a riotously funny collection with jokes on every page, and often humor itself becomes Delsohn’s subject matter. One of his characters, a stand-up comic, reveals that he can’t stop joking about his shortness. “I thought if I kept talking about how short I was, I could somehow exorcise the shortness from me, or at least prove I had some sort of handle on the situation. . . . Onstage, my short jokes rarely failed. On dates, cis girls loved them.” This reveals a classic tendency among trans people, the urge to make ourselves the butt of every joke, pre-empting a cis person doing it for us. (When this character starts dating a trans woman, she has moved past this urge and doesn’t think his height is notable nor funny, telling him, “You hang out with cis people too much.”)

If CRAWL draws humanistic, realistic portraits of trans men to bring its submerged population to life, Realistic Fiction leans into absurdity. Solomonik’s title is tongue-in-cheek: these stories are not “realistic” as we usually understand that term, or perhaps they lean so far into literalism that they come out the other side, into the surreal. There is something deeply weird and almost uncanny about Solomonik’s characters. They’re crushingly self-conscious overthinkers with absurd motivations and goals, and their language is too precise and overly literal, making the reader both laugh and cringe away. Solomonik’s prose is lethally funny, with sentence constructions that defamiliarize both interiority and action. Take how he writes about sex in “How to Run for Local Office While Building a Community Out of Nothing”: “Making sure, swift, rhythmic movements, he began to manually stimulate his, at first, only semi-erect genitals. He made rapid progress.” A different character declares that he’s finally figured out what sex is for: “[I]t’s essentially a form of networking.”

In this same story, Solomonik exposes what’s funny about the idea of “representation” for white trans men. Ashton, a trans man, seeks to become New York’s first trans congressional candidate. “I’d be the perfect figure for these, like — troubled times, or whatever. . . . Kind of like a member of a disadvantaged group, but not. Kind of like a white male, but not.” We laugh at this, but it also articulates the awkward way white trans men fit into the paradigm of marginalization: the least disadvantaged members of a disadvantaged group, a submerged population in the sense of being invisible, whose invisibility makes their marginalization difficult to see. White trans men should, theoretically, have access to the very top of the social hierarchy, but that “theoretically” conceals a wide swathe of experience, and the tension created by this gap also creates humor.

The tone of this collection is satirical, but what exactly is it satirizing? Satire is meant to punch up, at targets that have political power, yet cis people are not Solomonik’s primary focus. Instead, like Delsohn, Solomonik’s humor interrogates positive portrayals of trans acceptance and community. While CRAWL questions trans community and assimilation through realism, Realistic Fiction’s satirical tone presents characters too strange for either assimilation or kumbaya notions of in-group acceptance. In The Lonely Voice, O’Connor posits that this quasi-satirical mode might be unique to the short story form. Regarding Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” he claims it “uses the old rhetorical device of the mock-heroic, but uses it to create a new form that is neither satiric nor heroic, but something in between — something that perhaps finally transcends both.”

There is something affirmative in achieving this transcendence, though it’s not the kind of “affirmation” demanded by our representation discourse, which requires that stories by marginalized writers provide some overtly political uplift for the represented identity. Often, the question of affirmation determines whether representation is judged as positive or negative. In “Enamored of the Abyss: On the place of affirmation in art,” Garth Greenwell argues for a concept of “affirmative art” that allows affirmation to come through form’s beauty, rather than solely through subject matter. “The value of art can’t lie only in the particulars of a story. . . . It has to lie also . . . in that province particular to art; it has to lie in significant form, in style charged with feeling and meaning.” Through attention to form, we can find affirmation in subject matter which may imply negation, such as James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which Greenwell acknowledges as operating on homophobic logic. Yet the novel’s formal qualities, the beauty of its prose, provide an “amplitude of expression” about love between two men, suggesting that even through tragedy Baldwin’s work made the lives of gay men intelligible and lifelike, and gave them meaning.

With this definition of affirmation, the irony within both Solomonik’s and Delsohn’s collections — that both write about trans men’s yearning to be taken seriously, yet their trans men are often laughed at, undermined, even humiliated — takes on a different meaning than the disempowering, abject stance it might seem from a superficial reading. Solomonik’s characters have a rigorous self-awareness, reflectinggranted dysphoria’s lethal compulsion to minutely examine and evaluate every desire. In “The Meaningful Ex,” the protagonist is caught up in an unhealthy, BDSM-like relationship with a cis man, continuously arguing with his ex about whether this relationship is exploitative. He’s painfully aware of this argument’s consequences: “My whole identity as a man depended on my being able to make the distinctions I was now making.” The more legible affirmative approach would be to say that this character’s manhood is innate, valid regardless of any sexual dynamics; but in depicting the internal traps and tests that trans people set for ourselves, Solomonik gets at a deeper truth, which is that to be a man is to recognize that manhood is forever contingent. This is not affirming to trans masculinity because it suggests that our genders are neither fixed nor invulnerable, but in his honest portrayal of trans male sexual hang-ups and embarrassed yearnings, Solomonik gets to affirmation through abjection — and, crucially, through absurdity, through characters so stilted and obsessive they become defamiliarized. It’s like seeing the real social dynamics of trans life captured accurately through a funhouse mirror.

In CRAWL, “Maude” meticulously details the psychological journey of one character’s decision to transition. Our narrator is trapped in rumination for the story’s first seven pages, mired in recursive questions about their own transition, stuck in OCD spirals:

I’ve gone on and off testosterone twice. Nothing feels certain; nothing feels truthful or inevitable or right. So it’s a decision after all, a choice, just like everything else, just like moving to a new city or leaving a relationship or staying right where you are. There are pros and cons, costs and benefits.

This rumination defies the talking points of mainstream trans politics, which prefer, for political reasons, to depict dysphoria as innate and fixed and transition as almost mystically inevitable, definitively not a choice, particularly not one wracked with uncertainty. But “Maude” illustrates a transition that I recognized from my own life, wherein I did not “just know” that I was a man. Instead I adopted male pronouns and started testosterone while I was still indecisive; I lacked “proof” that I was really a man, and instead had to make a leap of faith, not knowing if my mind might change in the future. It’s precisely because “Maude” does not strive to empower its protagonist that I felt affirmed — affirmed by the care Delsohn takes in exploring this kind of transition, one in which uncertainty isn’t quelled.

With the release of these two collections so close together, transmasculine literature may be starting to define its trajectory. This is not to say that from here on out every short story by and about trans men should be funny, or surreal, or horny, just because those attributes apply to many of these stories. But in rejecting the self-serious expectations of identity-focused literature, these collections sidestep the burden of proof of trans validity; rather than taking trans masculinity at face value, they give their characters freedom to act beyond the constraints of purely political affirmation. I hope that this freedom will encourage other trans male authors, and perhaps even men, in general. I’m not saying that these collections can solve the male loneliness epidemic or rescue masculinity from its constant state of crisis, but I’m not not saying that.

O’Connor argues that we can’t understand great short stories by whittling them down to the “point” they may be making:

A work of art . . . is not only something more than the point; it is by its very nature different from the point. . . . [T]he surface of a great short story is like a sponge; it sucks up hundreds of impressions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the [point].

This quote makes me think of Delsohn’s prolonged psychedelic descriptions in “The Geeks” and “Same Old,” in which badly-timed mushroom/acid trips prompt disaster; and of Solomonik’s “Moving to Boron,” which features a roommate named Punk Skunk and a protagonist obsessed with a 1980s anime about Alexander the Great. Both collections are rich with the tangential, O’Connor’s “hundreds of impressions” that animate their submerged groups and convince the reader to embrace the absurd. Rather than serving some political utility for marginalized groups, these short stories achieve universal deep feeling through their outlawed figures, embracing the legacy of the short story’s great masters.

Caio Major is a graduate student in the MFA-Fiction program at Syracuse University. Currently based in Syracuse, he has strong attachments to Salt Lake City and New York City. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Electric Literature, trans rag, and Reading Into Culture, among others. You can read more of his writing at his Substack, Second Adolescence.

Last year, while at a literary magazine party at a big Greek restaurant in New York City’s Financial District, I saw Alex Karpovsky mingling in the crowd near the bar. I walked over and let him know that I’ve watched Girls, start to finish, about eight times. He said something like, “Wow, that must be a world record.” I couldn’t tell if he was flattered or alarmed.

Karpovsky is an actor who played Ray, one of the main supporting characters in Lena Dunham’s HBO show, Girls. But of course you knew that, or else why would you be reading this? Then again, Girls and Dunham have become such American cultural touchstones that people don’t need to have watched the show to have an interest in what a memoir like Famesick is all about.

The book is an incredible read, especially the first half, in which Dunham memorializes her dizzying ascent from making her first scrappy student film to helming and starring in the definitive prestige TV show of her generation. We get an early-twentysomething Dunham running around with various as-yet-unknown people in her filmmaking milieu, and then you realize how much time has passed when those people are now famous. It’s like reading John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse but featuring the Safdie Brothers, Greta Gerwig, and Ti West instead of the luminaries of the Lost Generation, if it’d been written by Gertrude Stein and not an outsider who might’ve made the whole thing up.

For dedicated fans of Girls, there are many intriguing behind-the-scenes bits. Those who cherish the final heartbreaking scene between Hannah and Adam in Kellogg’s Diner (when they realize they will never work as a couple) should skip the part where Dunham reveals her tears were mostly because of her broken elbow. There’s the laugh-out-loud part where you see just how wrong some initial hypothetical choices would’ve been, like a Taylor Kitsch type as Adam. “Hey Horvath. Brooklyn forever.” That would’ve ruined both Girls and Friday Night Lights. I was also surprised to learn that Dunham hadn’t always been meant to play Hannah from day one, and that her casting was more due to necessity than design. Knowing what the show would do to Dunham, it reads like a monkey’s paw moment.

There are beautiful passages that also bring a little heartache, not just because we know that things won’t be happily ever after for Dunham even with the show’s success, but also because they invoke a bygone era where all the artsy kids were still running around with their relatively bulky film cameras, without a care about the algorithm, or worse, AI. There’s a part where Dunham describes walking around with Adam Driver, still a nobody in Hollywood, early in the morning on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade after a long night’s shoot as they share their hopes and dreams:

To this day, I still get a pang every time I watch a documentary about an artist and they talk about this very moment, when they first become part of a creative community but nobody was doing it for the cash yet, when nobody had yet betrayed a trusted collaborator or called someone else a sellout.

Here, Dunham sounds like Bongrand, the successful older painter in Émile Zola’s The Masterpiece, who gives a poignant monologue to a rabble of young artists living in glamorous squalor in Montmartre about how they’ll never be happier than they are now, still anonymous upstarts with nothing but ambitions and dreams — success will only bring misery.

Dunham’s finely tuned, self-deprecating humor shines through, never fishing for reassurances. When her medical treatments cause her hair to thin, she references her “three Homer Simpson hairs.” She describes how she tucks her stomach into her pants “like an undershirt.” There’s a darkly funny moment where she witnesses the hatching of baby sea turtles and is so inspired that she drafts a conciliatory email to Jenni Konner (her producer and surrogate big sister), only to realize via a quick Google search that a mere 1% of those baby turtle hatchlings will make it to adulthood.

Most readers will likely designate Konner as the villain of the story (her saying “I’m really trying to like you again” to Dunham doesn’t help). She comes off as callous at best and as a user at worst, someone with few gifts of her own other than recognizing (and exploiting) Dunham as her cash cow. But while Dunham does air her grievances about Konner, she also acknowledges that Konner must have felt a lot of pressure overseeing and producing Girls while Dunham attended to her health issues. I was also expecting the book to be harsher on Jack Antonoff, since many have claimed that the heinous ex-boyfriend character in Dunham’s 2025 Netflix show Too Much was based on him. But Antonoff comes off more like a well-meaning guy who just couldn’t handle having a sick and depressive girlfriend, especially when his career was skyrocketing and he must’ve had all the dating options in the world. That doesn’t make him a leading man in a romantic comedy, but that doesn’t make him evil either.

The weakest part of the book is when Dunham underreports her actual role in initially defending Girls writer Murray Miller against Aurora Perrineau’s rape allegations, and overreports her explanation as to why she acted the way she did. All she has to say is that she was in a terrible mental and physical state, and that our desire to protect our friends can heavily influence us.

However, I’m not as interested in evaluating the merits of the book. Is anyone surprised that Dunham is an excellent memoirist? I’m much more intrigued by what spawned the hellish hatred she received for most of the 2010s, what’s led to the public turnaround regarding her image, and what that says about us.

Upon Famesick’s release, there’s been a slew of mea culpa pieces by Dunham’s generational peers admitting that their harsh criticism of her was based on little more than envy. This isn’t revelatory news — even back then, it was obvious that there was a deep, rotten layer of personal animosity in the attacks on Dunham. A telltale sign was that the most bitter criticism came from her own ideological and cultural peers.

Dunham writes about how much this friendly fire affected her — more than any proto-MAGA chuds ranting about how she represents everything wrong with modern women. Dunham could’ve worn — and did wear — such attacks from cultural foes as badges of honor and her cultural allies would’ve circled wagons around her (the all-women Ghostbusters was released in 2016, and thus began the era of “Watch the movie that the creeps don’t want you to see!” marketing). But what can you do when an ostensibly feminist publication like Jezebel puts a bounty on un-retouched Vogue photos of you under the flimsy pretense of social progress?

Still, there are moments in Famesick that do make you sympathize with those who must’ve felt that they could’ve been Dunham, had a few life circumstances turned out differently. When Dunham decides to make Tiny Furniture, the breakout movie that fast-tracked her to HBO, her family offers to vacate their Tribeca loft apartment for a whole month so that Dunham can shoot her film there. And to raise money, Dunham’s mother solicits her family friends as if she were helping her daughter move boxes of Thin Mints. How many artists, or those who once dreamed of being one, had to fight their parents every step of the way, warding off discouragement and even outright hopes of failure not just from the cruel, uncaring world but also from their own kin?

There’s a little anecdote that Dunham throws around casually that even I had to pause to sit with for a bit. She recalls a summer she and her family spent in Italy because her father (a reputable artist in his own right, just like Dunham’s mother) wanted to learn glassblowing: “I have mostly tender memories of this time—three of us to a bed in a little palazzo, playing in the fountain and eating thick slices of focaccia.” This sounds like something out of a Wes Anderson movie, back when Anderson was cooler than he is now.

There’s been a long-standing debate about how much Dunham benefitted from nepotism. On the one hand, she had industry connections that are unavailable to 99% of the public. Early in Dunham’s career, her mother offered to reach out to the lone Hollywood connection she had, which turned out to be the founder of United Talent Agency. On the other hand, it’s not as if her parents were superstars with legions of sycophants. How much weight did the names Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons carry in the cutthroat entertainment industry?

What is less discussed is how people were likely envious that Dunham enjoyed the perfect amount of nepotism. She had enough of it to take glassblowing-centered childhood trips to Italy and the phone numbers of Hollywood agents (or at least, a phone number of a Hollywood agent), but not so much that every stage of her life had been ruthlessly public. The Jaden Smiths, Lily-Rose Depps, and Brooklyn Beckhams of our world may grow up with fantastical amounts of privilege, once only available to children whose fathers conquered at least one civilization, but they are also burdened by the fact that they will never quite live up to their parents. Dunham didn’t have to deal with such overshadowing, and one of the most uncomfortable parts of Famesick is when she describes how her own parents, especially her mother, became envious of her rapid success.

While it’s nice that many people have come around to appreciating Dunham and her work, I’m not impressed with the timing of it all. Of course it’s easier to be kinder to Dunham when she’s no longer a threat to making the generation-defining show about twentysomething New Yorkers that you yourself wanted to make. When Dunham was an upstart force, her future must have seemed agonizingly limitless: she had the buzziest show, the buzziest boyfriend, the buzziest friends. Now that she’s gone through public heartbreaks, serious health issues, and a post-Girls creative period that still seems unsure of itself, she suddenly becomes more likable, doesn’t she? The apologizers are less like penitents and more like gloaters: we hobbled her good, didn’t we?

I’ve often wondered what a contemporary Lena Dunham would look like and whether she would get the same amount and type of hate. The answer to the second part is undoubtedly yes, the caveat being I don’t think a genuinely new Dunham could exist. There will be those who somewhat mimic her. However, “Hannah Horvath but in wide-legged jeans” is not a genuine reincarnation. Dunham was the last of her type, arriving at the perfect intersection of monoculture and online culture, where the latter had yet to cripple the former: a Goldilocks era of new and old media, where more people than ever before felt they had a shot at becoming famous — magazine-cover famous, not Twitter lolcow famous.

Dunham recalls how she and her family looked down on “the commonness of wanting to be seen.” However, it was fine to want one’s work to be renowned. If it just so happened that some of that renown spilled over to personal celebrity, then that could be acceptable. A nice little side effect that can’t be helped. In the introduction, Dunham states:

I didn’t start this looking for celebrity. Instead, I’m here because of an almost unrelenting drive toward self-expression, which manifests as workaholism AND single-minded obsession that actually runs counter to a skilled manipulation of fame.

Dunham isn’t some trend-hopping clout-chaser, and Girls endures because it’s a work of art with a singular vision. But claiming not to seek fame when your “unrelenting drive toward self-expression” revolved around putting your extremely personal thoughts and experiences into the spotlight is a distinction without a difference. For artists who want to be celebrities but won’t admit it, making art about themselves is an ideal roundabout way to achieve that gauche goal of being seen. In her essay for The Cut entitled “I Was Caroline Calloway,” Natalie Beach writes:

It was 2013, and the internet felt like the future of writing, at least for girls. The boys from our classes were churning out different versions of Fear and Loathing in Bushwick, but I believed Caroline and I were busting open the form of nonfiction. Instagram is memoir in real time. It’s memoir without the act of remembering. It’s collapsing the distance between writer and reader and critic, which is why it’s true feminist storytelling, I’d argue to Caroline, trying to convince her that a white girl learning to believe in herself could be the height of radicalism (convenient, as I too was a white girl learning to believe in herself).

What an intoxicating idea that was, that the pursuit of celebrity, the creation of art, and the advancement of social progress could all be blended together to form an ideology whose core tenet was that the more of ourselves we put out there, the better the world would be.

Had Girls been set in the past, or been a murder mystery, or been about alien invaders — or a combination of all three — the resentment against Dunham would’ve been much less. But because Girls narrowed the gulf between art and artist to almost nothing, the show’s very existence on America’s most prestigious cable channel was seen as the specific promotion of a specific person, a specific demographic, and a specific culture that many of us knew all too well.

At first, I too was reluctant to pay attention to all the things that Girls represented. A funny detail I’d discover about the show in one of my many rewatches is that Hannah and Marnie were born the same year I was. I’d known girls like them — and the guys in their cliques — in college. I did not like those people, so why would I want to watch a show that apparently glorified them? In Famesick, Dunham references a snarky Gawker piece where all the main actors were identified as daughters of their famous parents (e.g. Allison Williams would be called “Daughter of Brian Williams”). I remember reading that piece and having a good laugh.

But in early 2014, I was visiting NYC and, because I had some free time, I figured I should at least hatewatch the show about the city that everybody was talking about. It only took me a couple of episodes to realize I’d been wrong, that the show wasn’t some auto-romanticization by and for snooty twits. Instead, it was an incisively (even viciously) self-aware examination of a cultural cohort that seemed destined at the time to make Obama-style liberalism a permanent American reality.

In stark contrast stood something like Master of None, a show I began watching at around the same time and immediately called bullshit on for being so smugly clueless about its own blind spots. Consider the persistent criticism of Girls for its lack of racial diversity. Girls had far more insightful things to say about race, precisely by accurately reflecting the predominant whiteness of its world. That spoke volumes more about the reality of race relations, even in self-consciously progressive and gentrifying Brooklyn, than the wishful diversity in shows like Master of None. Dunham is also far too sharp a social observer for it to have been an accident that among the Asian American characters, the straight female and gay male characters were more enmeshed in the culture depicted in the show (Soo Jin is Marnie’s gallerina frenemy and Chester is Hannah’s classmate at the Iowa Workshop) than the straight male ones (Yoshi lives in Japan and Byron comes from a more yuppie crowd, and both are love interests to Shoshannah, the biggest misfit of the main characters).

But though Dunham refused to glorify her Girls characters, she also didn’t stoop to sneering at them. Hannah, because of her well-realized flaws, remains a deeply relatable character to many, including myself. When I first began watching the show — I would’ve been about Hannah’s age — I felt compelled to write this email to my closest high school friend after watching the season three scene where Hannah quits a relatively well-compensated job as an advertorial writer at GQ because she is insecure that it makes her a sellout, especially when Adam and Marnie are seemingly having their breakout moments in their creative careers:

I remember being at college and wanting so badly to be a writer but being so scared of starting because then, I could’ve ended up failing. That’s why I was so depressed on my 21st birthday, because it felt as though time was flying by and I was never going to accomplish anything. And every time my parents tried to talk me into being a lawyer, it felt as though they were telling me that I’d never be able to accomplish my dreams, so I might as well fall in line like everybody else. Of course that’s not what they meant, I now realize. But at the time, that’s what it felt like, which is why I had periods when I wanted to be a journalist, magazine intern, or a theatre intern, or even just a retail clerk for a bit. ANYTHING that would’ve loudly told the world that my dreams weren’t dead or stupid.

Furthermore, writing meant being alone. I wanted to be liked and loved. You can’t be liked or loved if you’re in a cafe or library for hours a day while writing something that may end up supremely sucking. I have to admit that one of the reasons that I loved the idea of becoming a writer is because of how much I loved writers. I imagined myself receiving that love from lots of people and it made me feel good about myself, which is something I often didn’t feel at that age.

I understand the desperation and insecurity that creates the need for such external validation. Because you lack such self-esteem (you’re not that attractive, you’re not that popular, you’re not that smart, you’re not that athletic), you think that the only thing that can redeem you is your writing. Perhaps if you could jujitsu your neurosis and turn it into literary gold, perhaps then people will like you. Maybe even love you. And because so much of yourself is riding on this lone ability, you’re petrified of finding out that you can’t actually do it that well. Your lack of confidence extends to your One Chosen Craft as well. Hence, the constant need to seek signs that you are indeed that good without the risk of putting your work out there.

At the end of “One Man’s Trash,” an episode in which Hannah spends a weekend with an affluent older doctor separated from his wife, Hannah breaks down in front of Josh — the doctor, played by Patrick Wilson — and laments how happy she is playing house with him in his beautiful townhouse with its tasteful furniture, backyard grill, and soft sheets. She says she’d always vowed she would take on every experience in the world, especially the bad ones, so she could write about them like some nobly suffering saint. Then she confesses that maybe she just wants to be comfortable and content like everybody else.

The little speech is meant to make Hannah look comically self-aggrandizing. But Hannah is just expressing a desire to be special. She’s deduced that she’s not part of the lucky few predestined to live exceptional lives by virtue of their great wealth, beauty, or prodigious talent. But she still wants such a life, and she’s accepted that the only way to have a shot at it is to subject herself to all life’s horrors and humiliations.

Had Girls been a bad show, Dunham would’ve had fewer, not more, haters. She would’ve been easily dismissible as yet another undeserving rich white girl, the latest exhibit proving that the system had to be disrupted. It’s interesting that for all of Dunham’s real-life and fictional insecurities, she was never seen as a relatable figure. I have to wonder if that’s because, for all her publicly declared body image issues, she never acted like a loser.

When I hear people say they want to be in creative circles, I suspect what many of them mean is that they want to be around beautiful, rich, and cool people (creativity being optional). Dunham, in real life, ran in such circles. That must’ve drawn the ire of those who also wished to belong to such cliques. Had Dunham been Hollywood Hot or even Hollywood Cool, then that could’ve been the explanatory factor. But she seemed to be there almost entirely on talent, the one currency almost all outsiders believe is their ticket into the exclusive club. Dunham even speaks the language of the one who’s never quite in the innermost circle. “It was only when fame entered the equation that the party came to me,” she writes. But instead of eliciting feelings of “She’s just like me!” this provoked “Why her and not me?”

In retrospect, people in the 2010s simultaneously acted as if they were living in a period of abundance and scarcity. My friends and I refer to this time as Zero Interest Loan Culture Heaven, or ZILCH. A thousand Gen Z YouTube video essayists wax wistfully about Millennial optimism during that era. Traditional media may have been dying, but the internet was going to save us somehow. And everybody, if they just worked hard enough, was going to get a TV show or a book deal. That created more opportunities, but also much more competition. And a generation only gets a few shots to define itself. Maybe only one.

Deep down, we all knew it was bullshit, about as authentic as an Amherst grad cosplaying as a lumberjack in the most expensive city in the country. Subconsciously, we knew it was unsustainable, but we dared not say it out loud, in case the utterance would accelerate the demolition of this gigantic playground we’d built for ourselves. But Dunham, from the inside, recognized this bullshit and called it out for all to see.

Millennials are vintage now. Our prime is over. Everyone who thought they could do a better Girls has either tried and failed, or had the opportunity window closed and accepted that. All we can do now is look back at what was made and evaluate it, free of personal agendas. The 2010s aren’t that long ago, but so far, Girls is standing the test of time, only getting better with age as the Obama Era becomes harder and harder to remember. Even younger generations are embracing the show as their own.

I was happy that Famesick is such a good book. “She’s still got it,” I thought, because I’d watched Too Much last year and found it disappointing. Sharp Stick has its charms, but it could’ve been made by any number of directors. If Dunham never comes close to replicating Girls, would that be such a terrible fate? Is one outstanding achievement better than five merely good ones? How about 10? Famesick is great, but it still relies heavily on Girls to be meaningful to its readers. Should that matter, though? If I were Dunham, while I wouldn’t coast on Girls for the rest of my life, I also wouldn’t feel like a failure if I never made anything of that quality and relevance again.

Even the title of the memoir is an olive branch, as though Dunham is telling her former haters that this fame they all coveted nearly ruined her life, so they can relax. “Never mistake maintenance for care, attention for love, or even love for empathy,” writes Dunham in the most neon-sign-worthy quote of the book.

I think of Jessa’s tearful apology to Hannah in the penultimate episode of the show, something that the otherwise stubborn Jessa would never do, except that she has realized their friendship is, if not over, then forever frayed. Hannah cries too and says she’s sorry, that they were both just trying their best, as terrible as their best turned out to be. Both are ready to move on.

Dunham’s admirers and haters alike are also ready to move on, and so both can say: “We had it pretty good, didn’t we? And nobody captured us like you did, Lena.”

Chris Jesu Lee lives and works in New York City and has previously been published in The Metropolitan Review, The Believer, The Cleveland Review of Books, and Current Affairs. He writes the Substack newsletter Salieri Redemption.

Adjectives cling to Ben Lerner like cockleburs. He is “subtle and sinuous,” per James Wood in the New Yorker. His work is “virtuosic,” in the words of Tao Lin for The Believer. The MacArthur Foundation bestowed a fellowship upon him. Of or pertaining to the intellect — these are the descriptors that pile before his feet. It predated his turn into fiction, too. Back when he was exclusively a poet, his post-Language melding of theory and lyricism was similarly feted for its erudition. C. D. Wright declared that he possessed “an unfettered mind” when his first book of poetry, The Lichtenberg Figures, was published in 2004. (Lerner was only 25 years old at the time. He was precocious too!) The praise is accurate enough. His books contain dense paragraphs on Spanish prosody and historical trauma. But that misses the most important aspect of his work, the one that provides much of the pleasure his books offer. Lerner, you see, is funny.

Take his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station.1 It’s the story of Adam Gordon, a twentysomething guy who bears an extremely strong resemblance to Lerner himself. It is 2004, and Gordon is studying in Madrid on a Fulbright fellowship. He is there to research the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, with the aim of composing some elegy or tribute to the brave souls who gave their lives in the struggle against fascism. He does no such thing, however. He mopes about in his room, smoking and Gchatting. He tries to woo a young Spanish woman with a truly bizarre pickup method, claiming that his father, an even-keeled psychiatrist, is actually a cruel and unremitting fascist. It is the sort of senseless, patently absurd fabrication one could imagine Larry David committing on Curb Your Enthusiasm. In the prose, Lerner plays it completely straight, never once winking at the reader to gain their sympathy, which only makes it that much funnier. It is a comedy about youth meant for adults.

Lerner has written three more novels since then, including the just-published Transcription. They are all strong in particular ways. The hype is real. But none are quite as funny as his first. The plight of youth made for ideal comic material in that one. But Lerner writes novels that are highly steeped in his own biography, which means that his protagonists age at roughly the same rate he does himself. The effect recalls a film like Boyhood, which was filmed over the course of a dozen years to capture the time-lapse growth of a young man, or the Up documentary series, which begins with a group of seven-year-old children, then checks in on them every seven years in perpetuity. Time is Lerner’s medium as much as language. Time has made him an adult, with responsibilities and children, and that simply is not as funny as lying to girls when you’re in your 20s.

Lerner’s highly autobiographical fiction puts him in league with other practitioners of autofiction, like Karl Ove Knausgåard, Rachel Cusk, and Sheila Heti. The protagonist of My Struggle is even called “Karl Ove,” which heightens the queasiness endemic to such a personal mode. Lerner is slyer, however. As mentioned, Adam Gordon is the protagonist of Leaving the Athocha Station. The narrator of 10:04 seems to be Lerner himself, or a version of him. Adam returns in The Topeka School, along with several other characters, including his parents and a childhood friend, a troubled boy named Darren. The slipperiness owes much to Lerner’s origins as a brainy poet, one enamored with the ways identity can slip in and out of different registers. Transcription is arguably his most poetic novel, and not just on account of that slipperiness. The entire structure of the book, the way each section compresses its material while balancing against the other sections, recalls the deft architectural thinking of modernist and postmodernist poetry. Think of the five sections of The Waste Land, or the way Lyn Hejinian wrote My Life with 37 sections when she was 37 years old.

Open Transcription and you’ll see that it’s organized into three sections: Hotel Providence, [Hotel Villa Real], and Hotel Arbez. The brackets: so chic! Even before you open the book, you’ll notice that it’s slim, like a volume of poetry or a European novella. The first section opens with our narrator, yet another authorial alter ego, arriving in Providence, Rhode Island. He is there to interview Thomas, one of his former professors. The university in question is clearly Brown, where Lerner studied, and which has long been home to a distinguished constellation of experimental writers and artists. Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, the husband and wife avant-garde poets, taught there for decades; the character of Thomas appears to be based partly on them. Other luminaries who have taught there include Robert Coover, Brian Evenson, and Eleni Sikelianos.

The interview looks to be one of those Paris Review situations, where a writer talks to a more esteemed author further along in their career, discussing early influences while noting the afternoon light slanting through the window and illuminating the tasteful furniture. Indeed, Lerner himself has twice conducted interviews for the Paris Review, with Rosmarie Waldrop and Eileen Myles. Our narrator settles into his hotel room, preparing to walk the familiar undergrad streets on the way to interview Thomas. Before he can do that, though, he suffers a particularly modern pratfall: he knocks his phone into the sink. It’s ruined. He was going to use it to record the interview, then transcribe it later, hence the title. But he can’t do that now that he is, in a wonderfully distinctive phrase, “deviceless.”

The bricked phone is a welcome instance of Lerner’s humor, though it suggests a harried sitcom dad more than the caustic, desperate wit of his earlier work. It also elicits more of that patented Lerner prose: swooping clauses of thought that glint with insight and humor.

I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting.

Maybe he can explain the situation to Thomas, and they can do the interview later, once he’s bought a new phone from the Apple Store? But our narrator is unable to pull it off, for two reasons. First, he is a neurotic mess incapable of broaching awkward topics; and second, Thomas is a torrent of speech, launching into lectures and tangents from the moment the narrator enters his home. There is simply no stopping him. And so our narrator sits, and he listens.

The second section finds the narrator at a conference in Madrid. A memorial conference, it turns out. Thomas has since died. Colleagues and admirers from across the globe have gathered to offer tribute, including our narrator. We learn that he did publish the interview with Thomas, by recalling Thomas’ words as best he could and adding his own extrapolations. He told no one about this, however. It ended up being the last interview Thomas gave, and thus acquired a retroactive elegiac air. During the conference, the narrator reveals the true circumstances behind the interview, thinking Thomas would have appreciated the irony.

He may well have. The gathered mourners, however, do not appreciate it at all. They feel betrayed. This is a familiar Lerner dilemma, wherein our narrator prioritizes literature and art over human connection, and expects others to do the same. Will this conflict reach full boil in the third and concluding section?

Not directly, it turns out. Our narrator barely plays a part in the third section. Instead, he listens to someone who we learn is Thomas’ son, Max. Max and Thomas had a difficult relationship. It’s not easy, after all, to have an arcane wizard for a father. Through a switchbacking, Bernhardian monologue, Max describes his struggles as a son, and as a father, too. His own daughter experiences nutritional difficulties, declining to eat almost any food. Thomas calls her “the hunger artist,” recalling the Kafka story. Evocative, yes, but not exactly helpful parenting advice.

The humor glimpsed earlier in the book mostly recedes by this point, and in its place we have emotion and loss, as Max’s twin roles as son and father tug at him, and at our narrator, who listens throughout. It is genuinely affecting. I’ll admit it: I cried. Coming as it does at the end of a short and succinct book, the final pages feel less like a poem and more like a concerto’s satisfying resolution. Yet I also missed the earlier humor, enough that it compels me to ask a different question.

Let us consider, then, the case against Ben Lerner.

The usual evidence in such a prosecution consists of identity markers. Lerner is a privileged white man who moves in, and writes about, spaces of immense privilege: hip New York neighborhoods, European conferences, art colonies in the Southwest. He writes about those enclaves and their denizens as if they all constitute one immense graduate seminar, ready to cite just the right experimental artwork with just the right $20 word.

All of that is true enough. Yet it does not bother me at all. Lerner writes so well, with such a knack for phrase-making, that I’m perfectly happy to read his navel-gazing accounts of his quotidian existence. Gimme gimme gimme. No, where I sometimes find myself growing impatient with Lerner, as I’ve followed his career for two decades now, has more to do with his own excess of patience. His increasing insistence on doing the right thing, or perhaps, being the right person.

Every poet is tempted to pander to their audience, to emote just the right lyrical aside about the state of the world to elicit that self-satisfied sigh. Lerner is no different. The most egregious instance of this occurred in his last novel, The Topeka School. That novel mostly takes place in the 1990s, telling a kind of origin story about what one could call “toxic masculinity.” That material is highly compelling on its own. Yet the final chapter sees a jump in time to the present day, where the Lerner stand-in attends a protest against the Trump administration, all but begging the reader to pat him on the back. And I resent it. Transcription thankfully does not feature anything this cloying. The references to the pandemic carry a more bemused air. Yet one can still sense Lerner calibrating his lyricism just so, striking the appropriate balance of awareness and concern.

Moments like that make me wish Lerner would stop caring so much about what others think. Strange as it is to say, I wish he would act a bit more like his contemporary Tao Lin. Lin has spent the past decade curing his own autism, ingesting psychedelic drugs, and cavorting with feral pigs. Some people consider him a joke, or even a fraud. Lin does not let that bother him, because he does not care what others think of him — at least, not enough to calibrate the traits that others find irritating. He continues on his own way without worrying what judgment others might pass on him.

I want Lerner to follow that example. I want him to quit caring what I think of him. I will continue to read every word he writes, for his felicity with language is extraordinary, and I hope that doesn’t matter to him at all.

Adam Fleming Petty is a writer living in Michigan. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Commonweal, and many other venues. He is the author of a novella, Followers. He maintains the newsletter Very Distant Lands.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, is a cop out.

Rhetorically, it’s clear, easy to agree with, and safe to pronounce in even the most banal contexts. But if anyone besides me or Charles Dickens uses it, feel free to ignore the rest. They’re most often trying to run out the clock.

To the best/worst of times view, one might respond: pick a fucking side already. Few will.

In the novel Grime, Sibylle Berg picks a side and argues that we’re in the worst of times. Grime is the rare contemporary novel that can make you feel like a conspirator for reading it. This is a book that must have taken real rage and a strong stomach to write, and for the author to put their name on. It demands the same strong stomach and rage from the reader.

GRM Brainfuck was the original title of the book, first published in Germany in 2019, then renamed for U.S. audiences. The book gets up to that same pitch quickly enough, carrying the fondest wishes and sweetest hopes of its characters with sandpaper gloves. Its terse, hard-boiled tone is reminiscent of James Ellroy, who writes largely about professional fixers and killers. Through its main characters — four kids entering puberty in Rochdale, England, and then London — Grime indicts our global civilization from top to bottom. Berg’s style is as unforgiving as their worldview, with no heroes, no safe spaces to pause in and feel good about what’s going on. The book resides in what’s left after you boil it all down. It occurs beyond euphemism or politesse. As in Ellroy’s books, there’s no interpreting our way out of any of it — what happens happens.

So, what happens? Our four protagonists all begin in Rochdale, where Karen is seduced, drugged, and pimped out for a month in an abandoned building by her boyfriend. Hannah’s mother dies in an understaffed ER when the doctor prioritizes a whiter, better-heeled patient, and her father is coaxed to suicide by a bad-faith euthanasia website. Don’s father flees and her brother dies of a poverty-related pulmonary disease, then her mother and brother are killed in a high-rise fire. Peter is raped in a flop house for migrant workers.

Our four protagonists find one another in squats, homeless shelters, and around Rochdale, and they vow revenge. They improvise ways to support and protect one another. They move to London.

The global society, whose footsteps are heard only at a distance in Rochdale, becomes ever-present once the characters relocate. It appears in the immigrant workers displacing the poor, the planetary elite displacing the merely rich, and the oblivious tourists.

The four kids find a squat in a section of the city that’s been forced to pause its condo-building. If hell is other people, London is just a bigger hell. London is where the controllers — the programmers, secret police, oligarchs, and fading aristocrats come into sharper focus.

Just as they arrive in London, a larger social shift occurs as the government starts offering universal income. After a moment of euphoria, the scheme shows its teeth as a carrot and stick attached to a new regime of surveillance and control, along with decreased services and opportunities. The people continue to be ground down economically, but with greater consequences for speaking out, and an officially sanctioned perspective that their misfortune is their own doing.

At every turn, Berg eschews opportunities for false comfort. There are moments in the story when the characters have a chance to do the right thing — a family might find common cause after a parent flees, or a father and daughter might grow closer after the death of the family’s matriarch. There are ample occasions for the characters to rise to the occasion. But except for our four protagonists, they never do. They’re too tired or harried or distracted, or they just have something better to do. The small failures that define the lives of the protagonists are endemic to the world of Grime, which illustrates the ways these failures are engineered into the very fabric of society through overwork, incessant entertainment, and ridicule.

Contemporary fiction is uniquely difficult these days. The world in 36 months (about the time it takes to write and publish a book) doesn’t seem like it will resemble the present. The best bet, for many writers, is just to interpret the present into the future.

This is one reason that dystopias are popular these days. And Grime occupies a dystopian near future, replete with AI-run governments, universal basic income, shallow digital sleights, voluntary self-surveillance by the population, and vertiginous social inequality. Is this the near future, really? Or is it simply that the present is slippery, hypersensitive, and litigious — making it safer to slide on the prophylactic of fiction?

Grime, while very much of the present moment, is also antipodal to much popular fiction. It’s no murder mystery set in a series of Architectural Digest houses. There are no young people in sweaters with existential crises who never wonder where their rent is coming from. No cats or dogs or simpering younger siblings get saved in the name of likability. No, Grime is a sharp implement to scratch a boil. And like when you draw blood from the boil, and have to accept that it’s really there, that it’s a real problem, the book hangs around and colors your perception afterwards.

The four main characters are all wounded and betrayed by people they trust. The misanthropy of Grime is one characterized by a child’s pain, which stands in sharp contrast to the opportunistic misanthropy of the technocrats. The book spends a lot of time with programmers, politicians, and patricians — and their unique brand of pessimism. They hate human beings because human beings don’t obey like machines. They hate human beings because they can’t be purchased outright, and because they cost so much to rent. They hate human beings because human beings don’t appreciate like assets, and because they take some trouble to dispose of.

Grime captures the shared sensation of barely hanging on as we plunge headlong into a future that promises lower costs and higher efficiency by shitcanning a lot of people who seem quite a lot like us. It captures the loathing and optimized indifference of a self-service portal whenever something goes wrong with health insurance or our travel plans or our career trajectories. (One of the last cogent conversations I had with my mother was a maddening back-and-forth about how to navigate just such a portal.)

The book is fiction. And maybe things aren’t entirely fucked. But it sure feels good to hear someone say in detail that they are indeed as fucked as we dare imagine. Grime does this without hitting a false note.

There’s quite a lot of child prostitution in the book. It’s employed as more than just a provocation. Over the past 20 or more years, as the market has usurped more of daily life, it’s comforting to think some things are sacrosanct, like children. But kids have an exceptionally hard time of it in Grime. Berg positions systematized child rape within the landscape of the book as a natural outcome of a global marketplace that has abdicated all moral authority with which to shame its winners.

The exploitation of children is the line at which the authority, majesty, and power of the one, Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church faltered and collapsed to a laughingstock where no one’s laughing. To let the same offenses slide for a fat-faced prince, politician, or billionaire would seem to make a sad joke of the human race. This is why a distracted public won’t let Epstein go. And it’s a point Grime returns to repeatedly.

More generally, sex and sexual arousal is one form of intoxication that is always pernicious, if not fatal, in Grime. One interesting subplot in the book is the introduction of a virus that neutralizes testosterone, diminishing the confidence, aggression, and sex drive in the men of London. This change brings about a calmer, less violent society in Grime, but also a duller populace, less equipped to stop the tightening controls being imposed on it. The removal of testosterone also brings about an acute state of crisis among the male villains, who have arranged their lives around aggression and sex, and now can no longer make sense of the world, or their place in it.

Disgust with the human condition is a more vibrant strand in European than American literature. The most prominent practitioner these days would be Michel Houellebecq. His unforgiving vision of human conventions, illusions, and desires across all the possible ends of the political and sexual spectrums has made him some enemies. But, as with Berg, his books are a breath of fresh air amid the smarm and happy talk that suffocates too many conversations these days.

Houellebecq’s perspective in Submission and Serotonin differs from Berg though, because all the things he hates in humanity are rather active — if not predominant — in his own desires. First and foremost, his narrators want to smoke, eat well, and fuck, and won’t pretend otherwise.

Berg — writing Grime in the third person — isn’t willing to make such concessions. Berg is straightedge, meaning they neither drink nor take drugs. And that relentlessness shows up in the prose. The point of view is locked in. The intolerance of hypocrisy is more or less absolute. The hedging, hemming, hawing, and hypocrisy that I allow myself is partly the result of the fact that the world often seems very different to me from one moment to the next. And being occasionally intoxicated has something to do with that. The perspective of Grime is a hard one to stay in. As the song goes: “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?” The answer in Grime is to burn down the world.

The protagonists do get revenge. But in the exacting landscape of Grime — the world of what it all boils down to — is that a triumph? Or are they just moving the nightmare around? Is this retribution or redistribution? This may sound like karma, but it also sounds a little like the logic of a truly global economy. In a global economy, there’s no place outside to exploit — no frontiers. There’s no place outside to dump waste. There’s not really any growth, so much as a series of schemes to move the poverty, drudgery, and misery around to another corner.

Outer space is a possibility for something, though we’re not sure what. The sections of the book set on Mars are full of billionaires sullenly golfing and trying to get excited about the colony’s stable of prostitutes, while awaiting guests who never arrive.

AI, the other supposed frontier of innovation, shows up in Grime as the buggy, Adderall-and-PowerPoint fever dream of a costless administrative gulag. It’s not magic, or even particularly advanced. It’s just a new excuse to forego the debts we owe one another in a functioning society.

The world the book shows us is one where we’re stuck with ourselves. Finding people to do the grunt work depends on the ancient and nasty business of capturing or persecuting another set of invisible, or at least deserving victims. Not that that’s ever stopped anyone. We all exist inside the walls of the same endless siege, and the same siege mentality. Cannibalism is a question of when, not if.

Grime leads the reader to ask if the global order upon which we all now rely is an inhuman zero-sum regime of cannibalism. Maybe “cannibalism” is uncharitable. We all live in a society. Give a little and take a little. The difference between cooperation and cannibalism may simply be a matter of a few percentage points. It may be a matter of morale. I work for a living most days, and my morale fluctuates. A big part of morale, though, is the big picture of what you’re working for. The big picture that the characters in Grime inhabit is one where a plausible concept of a decent collective future has vanished, and where the better-adjusted kids are an equally lost cause, largely because the grown-ups have sold off the next generation’s mental capacity to imagine a future to the tech and social media folks.

Is it the worst of times? There are plenty of people who say the world today is as good as it’s ever gotten, and we’re one iPhone upgrade, two vaccines, and an interest-rate tweak away from heaven on earth. They have a version of history to support them. They have statistics around things like life expectancy and infant mortality to support them. What’s not to believe? What’s not trust? I’m not sure, but there’s something wrong with their tone. If things are so great, then why are they so loud? Why do they seem so scared of letting a word in edgewise?

Berg gives these perspectives an airing, usually in the form of political or marketing rhetoric, whose subtext is “just stop squirming and this will all be over soon.”

In 2024, Berg became one of 720 Ministers in the European Parliament, having won election as a German representative in 2024. At the time, Politico named them one of “The 23 kookiest MEPs heading to the European Parliament.” Thanks, guys.

I’m not one to lionize politicians. In my opinion, the best of them are the ones who take constituent services seriously. But there’s something to be said for the author of such an aggressively bleak book wading into the hands-on frustration of a legislative body.

Grime settles several scores, and sets up more to come. My main gripe with the book is that after so much action, sensation, and scheming, it ends unresolved. The main characters grow up. Childhood ends. They begin to settle into the unsatisfactory rhythms of their adult lives and to drift apart. The end. But no!

There are two more books in the trilogy, waiting for either a translator or for me to learn German. Regardless, after reading Grime, you may need to take a break before diving back in.

Colin Dodds is an award-winning author and filmmaker who lives in New York City, with his wife and children. His essays appear regularly at No Homework, and his latest film, The Demon Core of Fresh Kills, is currently in production.

In one week, we will hold the next Metropolitan Review reading and party. You absolutely will not want to miss it. We’ll feature, among others, Emma Collins, Harold Rogers, Stephen Adubato, and Daniella Nichinson. Stick around afterwards to meet the writers, hang with the TMR editors, and have a fantastic time. Tickets are available, so get them now.

—The Editors

Rob Doyle’s Cameo has a distinctly “postmodern” resonance that seems almost archaic in the present moment. Three decades removed from its heyday in the Gen-X literature of the 1990s, Doyle writes in the stylistic lineage of writers like Bret Easton Ellis. The aesthetic legacy of this “postmodernism” was a recuperation of certain elements rooted in the literary “avant-garde” extended to the level of pastiche, and alluding to ideas more elevated and profound than what was actually communicated at the level of text. Ellis was virtuoso in this regard, a novelist of pure instinct and “vibe,” possessing an almost unmatched ability to imply some underlying profundity, intelligence, and depth that was more often than not absent. Most of his oeuvre, superficially brutal and unpleasant, also seems in retrospect to be curiously sanitized despite the depravity of its subject. It was a literary equivalent to concomitant processes within cinema and television that has resulted in the normalization of gratuitous violence and explicit sex even within the most staid, pedestrian, and uninteresting cultural outputs. Indeed this was avant-garde ‘transgression’ for the ordinary punter, the middle-brow aesthete, the general reader: the normie.

Ellis’ novel Lunar Park centered on the exploits of a fictionalized protagonist who bore the same name as the author, and Rob Doyle’s Cameo — and his previous novel Threshold —adhere to a similar narrative conceit. I remember going to see Ellis read Lunar Park during its promotional tour in 2005 at Oran Mor in Glasgow. It’s hard to believe now that this was a sold out event, packed to the rafters with hundreds of people. However, I don’t remember the crowd being particularly ‘“literary,”’ and in retrospect seemed more comparable to the “Influencer” meet and greets of the present, albeit for a more rudimentary internet age. My most distinct memory was that everyone wanted to have their copies of American Psycho signed. I suspect that when most people think of American Psycho they’re mostly thinking of the unintentionally comic (and surprisingly seductive) nihilism of its film adaptation, which, like Kubrick’s The Shining, is a vastly superior work of art to the literary original. Ellis’s Lunar Park was a good example of the peculiar redundancy of 90s postmodernist transgression, and the fundamental inadequacy of its aesthetic possibilities, namely, the failed attempt at a meta-fictional transgression of the self. In the end, this strategy always highlighted the author’s paltry narcissistic impulses as opposed to any real attempt to question their providence. No author has really succeeded in truly transgressing the authorial self, which in any case is an uninteresting artistic goal, and one which was effectively exhausted by the Nouveau Roman in the 1960s and 70s. Subsequently, the failure of the 90s attempt to expel the Self has had the unintended consequence of causing a manifold proliferation. This impasse is what, I assume, Rob Doyle’s Cameo is attempting to re-visit — but it is difficult to be sure to what end, if any.

I admired Doyle’s previous novel Threshold (2020), a work of autofiction. I first read it during the pandemic, when everything was in a state of flux. Threshold more overtly concerned transgression as a means to transcendence, albeit through the clichéd avenues of drugs and excess. It is temperamentally and intellectually in accordance with Aldous Huxley’s insights in The Doors of Perception (1954), refracted through the compulsory irony and dark humor of the Xillenial writer. Nonetheless, Doyle ultimately reproduces the fundamental philosophical misapprehension of Huxley. Upon re-reading Threshold, I’ve come to realize that my original admiration was spurred less by its specific aesthetic qualities (the style itself is modest, familiar, earnest — like if Nick Hornby had written about piss fetishists in the Berghain toilets). Rather, it appears that I was taken in by its frequent instances of “relatability;” a pathos inextricably bound up in some familiar imagery, or a sense of commonality felt with the author’s tastes and cultural referents, or the experiences recounted and their similarity to my own. These things are a solid basis for friendship, but less so when it comes to an honest appraisal of artistic merit. I have, no doubt unwisely, opted to pursue the latter in this review — which, amidst the general dishonesty of contemporary criticism, I will foolhardily attempt to re-brand as “radical honesty.” In retrospect, as much as I am loathe to admit it, the cumulative effect of Threshold was very much “affirmative” in the facile identitarian logic which governs much of contemporary cultural discourse, even if we allow that it was an understandable response to the negligible amount of contemporary fiction concerning the male heterosexual experience. The admiration felt was analogous to the pride of a small village towards the local boy come good, and the author of Threshold was for all intents and purposes notre homme infiltré; our man on the inside. Needless to say, I gave little thought then as to why he might have been permitted to be on the “inside” in the first place. Indeed, of all the myriad indiscreet fantasies of literary celebrity which Cameo invokes, the most implausible is also the most modest: the idea of a critical culture in which the primary considerations are artistic and intellectual, where there exists some interest in giving a writer’s aesthetic and philosophical project its proper due. In this particular vein, I have attempted to take this work seriously.

Rob Doyle is nominally an Irish Novelist™, but one who is clearly ambivalent towards this designation. His palpable discomfort provides one of the more interesting aspects of Cameo; an underlying contempt towards the idea of Irish literature as global brand, comparable in certain ways to the ubiquitous Irish pub, paradoxically provincial and cosmopolitan. Every man has two countries, Henri de Bornier once proclaimed: his own and France. But many people hate the French, whereas the Irish are an almost universally beloved people. They are, however, loved for specific reasons; openness, kindness, humor, warmth, conviviality … abject historical suffering. Such attributes make it difficult to cast oneself in any role that goes against the national stereotype, such as imperious literary enfant terrible. I suspect that this is a source of great frustration for a writer such as Rob Doyle, and one painfully evident — to an intentionally comical effect — in the speculative autobiographical elements of this novel’s alter-ego Ren Duka.

The basic philosophical conceit of Cameo is given to be Nietzschean. The final section — an interview with the “author” — attempts to convey some hint of this overarching framework:

To quote an author I long ago stopped reading, Friedrich Nietzsche, I can say that the entire Duka series stands as a monument to a crisis. Only, the crisis turns out not to have been mine alone, as I imagined it was when I wrote the first pages of the original novel. Ren Duka is the window through which I’ve viewed the world’s catastrophes and mutations. He’s the microcosm that contains the macrocosm.

The actual author may attempt to claim some semblance of ironic distance here, echoing the customary and inadequate defense of the 90s “post-modernist,” but the later reference to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo seems to confirm a specific connection. It was this text which our man Friedrich was composing when he had his mental breakdown in Turin. We may assume that the enfant terrible Doyle is similarly attempting to parse what he believes to be a comparably profound philosophical crisis: being a middle-aged bohemian hedonist. It is here that the outline of a rather crude intertextual pastiche emerges, a book which was also famously invoked the eternal recurrence of Nietzsche. The Turin episode also constituted the most powerful fixed ideas in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and “Ren Duka” appears also to be a perfect anagram of “Kundera.” If this level of meta-textual detail seems a tad on the nose, it also appears quite apposite and logical in sum. For despite some initial appearances, Cameo is itself very much a recurrence; a continuation of the auto-fictional thematic focus of Threshold. Fredric Jameson, writing in 2018 about Karl Ove Knausgaard, described his work as “surface writing” for “surface readers:”

We have, in postmodernity, given up on the attempt to ‘estrange’ our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways; we have given up the analysis of it in terms of the commodity form, in a situation in which everything by now is a commodity; we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and psychic events. All that is left is to itemise them. . . . (Jameson, London Review of Books, 2018)

On first glance, the exasperating itemization of quotidian reality employed by Knausgaard seems to differ significantly from the narrative apparatus of Cameo, which is largely comprised of book summaries of Ren Duka’s novels, written in the flat prose of a synopsis one might email to a literary agent. These summaries become more and more outlandish and picaresque as the narrative progresses, and we are to assume that many of these themes and plots could, in some parallel universe, have been written by Rob Doyle himself. But this conceit is quite similar in affect to the itemization Jameson describes. As such, its “estranged” effect is no more salutary for being ostensibly more “literary,” since it does nothing to lessen the “distressing unoriginality.” Indeed, a writer can attempt to transgress the “self” through verisimilitude, through honesty (“radical” or otherwise), through banal diarization, or through the invocation of shop-worn literary devices, but ultimately one must possess sufficient means to actually transcend the ‘self.’ This is where Cameo ultimately comes up short.

In 1937 Vladimir Nabokov was writing his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, on a typewriter balanced on top of the bidet. It was the only place he could work in a cramped Parisian studio apartment without waking up his infant son. They had recently fled Nazi Germany because of his Jewish wife, and a recent affair with another woman had come close to ending his marriage. Desperately poor, and looking for a way out of the European mainland to either England or America, he sensed that switching to English would allow him to keep working as a writer. The son of a Russian aristocrat and anglophile, he’d learned English as a child before he knew Russian. However he was deeply attached to the Russian language, in which he had written nine novels that were well regarded within the emigration. Though fluent, he was so unsure of his English prose that he had several acquaintances proofread the manuscript for him. The novel concerns an attempt by a narrator named V to write a biography of his recently deceased half-brother: a Russian-English novelist named Sebastian Knight. He had little contact with Sebastian since their childhood, and V’s overriding purpose is to counteract the effects of another, flawed, biography written by his brother’s former literary agent. V wishes to understand his brother’s books as a means to discover the mysterious truth behind his tragic “real” life. Needless to say, this undertaking is doomed to failure. Sebastian Knight’s novels are summarized in not entirely dissimilar ways to Ren Duka’s novels in Cameo. Interspersed with the descriptions of these non-existent books, and within the wider narrative, are various elements of Nabokov’s own ‘real life’; the pain of exile, the assassination of his father, the prospect of losing his language, the hate and resentment he felt toward the Bolshevik revolution which had deprived him of his motherland, the antipathy he felt towards his homosexual brother who would eventually die in a concentration camp, the passionate affair with another woman that caused him to contemplate suicide, and all of the other ways that his life had come perilously close to resembling the tragedy of Sebastian Knight. Was Nabokov then writing autofiction? Indeed, personal memory, the singular and subjective vision, was for Nabokov inextricable from his essential conception of art. But the “absolute solution” to the overwhelming effects of an undesired historical reality was for Nabokov a defiant restatement of the ideology of aesthetic autonomy. He would remain faithful to this ideology until the end. It was, however, a thoroughly modern aesthetic autonomy which abhorred regurgitation and pastiche, scoffed at cliché — one that strived constantly to attain an uncompromising uniqueness of style. Taken in this context, the hidden presence of such intimate and traumatic details from Nabokov’s own life begin to cohere. To write such intensely personal work at that particular historical impasse, when the majority of other writers and artists were swept up in the world historical political conflicts of the era, attests to the unrelenting individualism at the very core of the Nabokovian aesthetic. Yet it was individualism that was always in the end subordinate to the aims of art, that always transcended the self. He excoriated the programmatic literature of ‘social intent,’ yet possessed a gift of style so unique and persuasive — across two languages — that no one, not even his enemies, were capable of denying it. For Nabokov there was only one school, that of talent. If one wished to be a writer of style, and not of social intent, it was necessary to be a writer of pure style.

I’m unsure if Doyle aspires to be such a writer. However, it was a strongly held motivation for Martin Amis — whose work is a clear influence on Doyle. Amis’s strategy was extra-literary and more related to public relations and advertising than literature itself — partly involving name dropping Nabokov constantly and hoping that an association repeated and parroted by compliant journalists might somehow realign the cosmic order. In the actual practice of “pure” style, Amis always in my view fell tragically short: the most he could muster was the very English reliance upon “humor” and a torturously “correct” prose. Amis also wished to be an enfant terrible, to perform transgression for the middlebrow reader, but he could scarcely rise above the role of teacher’s pet turned ‘naughty’ public schoolboy. The Doylean strategy similarly takes recourse to this associative method, a form of manifestation and conjuration intended to deflect from the actualities of a rather familiar and ordinary style. This comes specifically from his constant invocation of “avant-garde,” which is repeated like a mantra throughout Cameo, when not hinted at through various hackneyed tropes.

This fantasy of the “avant-garde,” which bears little resemblance to actuality, is evoked throughout Cameo’s bourgeois bohemian landscapes. It is one redolent of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (published in 1918), but unlike that book — Doyle’s avant-garde fantasia, though at times ironic, is far from satirical, and is even at times painfully earnest. Much of the aesthetic touchstones of this fantasy are obvious and cliché, revel in the valorization of cheap transgression, and unsurprisingly — the geographic and spiritual focus doesn’t seem to have shifted too far away from Berlin, the contemporary bourgeois bohemia par excellence; a grimy and increasingly expensive theme park of drugs, techno and kink filled with mendacious mediocrities, where lifestyle and excess is seen as an adequate replacement for genuine artistic vitality.

The writer Adam Lehrer coined the term “Crypto Transgression” as a theory of how work within mainstream culture can show a superficial adherence to the lexicon of progressive liberal politics, whilst allowing for certain elements of cryptographic aesthetic subversion and transgression. It must be admitted that such a theory could only occur to a critic for whom transgression is the end goal of any worthwhile artistic activity. It’s difficult to disentangle the causes and motivation behind such a conviction, which appear to be the by-product of more than half a century of aesthetic revolutions that promised some radical departure — social, political, ontological — but in almost every instance, failed to deliver on its promises, and betrayed those who believed in them. There is a family resemblance between this Crypto-transgression described by Lehrer, and the normie transgression practiced by Rob Doyle — but they differ on the level of provenance. The former maintains some defiance, since it retains elements of plausible deniability, of legitimacy through covert oppositionality. But the latter is markedly more obsequious and compliant.

There have been many contemporary writers and artists in the “normie” transgressive mode that have managed to carve a niche for themselves within the liberal cultural apparatus because of a certain calculated cynicism. This exists alongside their putatively transgressive impulses; a careerism, political reliability, and a public neutrality or deferment of judgement towards what has become an utterly compromised, incoherent, and morally bankrupt centrist liberal consensus (“Slava Ukraina!” but: “it’s complicated” in Gaza). Nevertheless, even if we allow that Lehrer’s fixation with transgression is also, at base, rather unsophisticated — his own take on the auto-fictional genre Communions (which I edited and published through Hyperidean Press in 2021) was more interesting than most. It had such an unwieldy, energetic, and shamelessly egomaniacal honesty, was so un-ironically self-regarding and megalomaniacal that it was difficult to believe it was not parodic. The effect was quite thrilling; an unashamed and unapologetic work of “ego-fiction” as opposed to “autofiction,” one which dispensed with the flimsy pretense common to the ’90s postmodernists. Furthermore, Lehrer seems genuinely committed to transgressing and offending sensibilities, to highlighting obvious inconsistencies and blatant hypocrisy. Over the years he has gone from vocal Bernie Bro to irascible MAGA fanatic in the blink of an eye, only following energies and instincts, never holding back or moderating his oppositionality of expression. Despite the clearly protean nature of his views, how silly they might appear at times, and the distinct possibility that they will likely change in the future: he is nevertheless a faithful acolyte to the prevailing ideological aesthetic and “vibe” of any given moment, and an unfiltered practitioner of “radical honesty” in criticism. What is hard for most to admit is that this attitude — though foolhardy, absurd, indelicate, and at times cringe and embarrassing — is much more purely transgressive than the polite, calculated, media-trained careerism of most journalist/novelists. I’m unsure as to what Lehrer actually believes in other than himself, but I do believe in his commitment to the principle of transgression. If one must be transgressive, isn’t it better to commit to it fully? As far as transgression goes, isn’t it better to be an intensely loathed pariah, than a mildly tolerated prankster? Isn’t it better to be among the barbarian hordes of swinging dicks marauding against the battlements, than some solitary giggling eunuch within the hermetically sealed harem of contemporary culture? But transgression — whether “crypto” or Normie — is ultimately an infantile pursuit when pursued as an artistic telos. It is the mark of an impoverished and unrefined aesthetic sense that is, paradoxically, more compliant to the existing order because it is so easily satisfied and contented. The unruly child, after all, is easily and swiftly quieted when his irrational desires are indulged.

I believe the most salient expression of Rob Doyle’s philosophy of “normie” transgression is to be found in the following:

I wrote a story from the perspective of Mr. Manly; in a dungeon of hell, he recounts his last night on earth as a suburban echo of Christ’s ordeal at Gethsemane. I kept quiet about all this at school, but a strange tenderness, even a kind of love, grew inside me for Mr. Manly. In my final school year, under the influence of transgressive French Literature, I developed a private mythology that venerated the paedophile as the last existential outlaw, thrown into a world where he is universally despised, an object of revulsion whom the community can hate without restraint. I imagined Mr. Manly as an abject saint who dwelt in a zone of truth inaccessible to the human family from which he was a born pariah.

This is the darkest and the most representative example of the essentially “normie” transgressive aesthetic and philosophical qualities of Cameo. These are the adolescent musings of a Doyle alter-ego Henry K. Dillon, author of the Ren Duka novels, writing about a pedophile teacher at their school who committed suicide after his crimes were discovered. The adolescent context is intended to dissuade any outright judgement. But this puerile quality is essential to the novel’s counter-cultural and avant-garde pretensions. In its weak allusion to transgressive French Literature, almost in the manner of a product placement, we cannot help but note a characteristic indolence that pervades the novel. The entirely deliberate and reflexive lack of specificity anchors the text firmly within the realm of the middle-brow. What transgressive literature is being alluded to exactly? To be specific here would risk alienating the intended audience for this work, who are content with the half-hearted allusion, and the broadly deterministic narrative implications (if one reads weird French books, one starts to have weird ideas!). More significantly, it might also risk revealing the extent of the author’s own apprehension of the value of transgression, thereby revealing its lack of sophistication. It is apparent nonetheless.

According to this contrarian logic, one should admire the pedophile because of his status as “bad subject,” as an outsider, because he’s hated by society, by “the man,” by the establishment; he is an “abject saint,” somehow an echo of the original and most profound scapegoat, Christ himself. He is misunderstood, hated and loathed, but permitted access to some profound and divine truth. What is this truth? If one follows the determinism also hinted at in the above, it appears to be an ultimate commitment to individual egotistical desire, loyalty to the passions of the self at all costs. But the great paradox of a narcissistic personality is that its excess of ego is merely a symptom; evidence of a compensatory procedure that attempts (unsuccessfully) to unite the disparate fragments of a fundamentally divided self. It is a pathology born from a fatal uncertainty.

It occurs to Ren that Augustine’s secret motive in writing his Confessions was to promote celibacy among the young so as to lessen the goading evidence that others were getting what he no longer could. Confessions might have been a better book, Ren decides, if Augustine found no respite in God but mediated ruthlessly on erotic regret, on being banished from the garden of earthly bliss as his biological organism underwent the cruel process of dissolution — in short, Confessions would have worked better as a Ren Duka novel.

As elsewhere, the knowingly ironic and absurdist elements of fantasy do not obviate the earnestness of these unseemly delusions of grandeur. Thus, what could have potentially redeemed this work is continually foreclosed. Doyle is ostensibly an authentic seeker of higher truths, but always reverts to a comforting projection of subjective pathologies; dismissing the divine, the “eternal recurrence” is a boundless fascination with the motivations of the Self.

On the level of Philosophical enquiry, Doyle is to some extent in his natural element. An unmistakably sympathetic facet of his fiction is the disarmingly earnest status as a seeker. But a seeker is only sympathetic insomuch as he preserves some degree of naivety and unknowing. This was the case in Threshold, but is less so in Cameo. Aside from the Nietzschean meta-text, there are references to The Bhagavad Gita, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nagarjuna, among others — all hastily grouped together as philosophers of the “void.” Nevertheless, there are certain points within the work which approach something resembling revelation and insight. In one scene, the alter-ego Henry K. Dillon, who works as a taxi driver, has an exchange with a visiting German composer about the nature of art. This section, without a doubt the best in this novel, was the moment at which I came close to apprehending some overarching purpose, since it concerned a philosophical and fictional allegory that I have also been pondering lately vis a vis the “liberal” political worldview. At first I began to rack my brain, to remember if in our discussions and conversations we had touched upon this specific parable, and what Doyle’s attitude towards it was. A very wise man, who is now sadly quite far gone, once told me that this parable concerned the fundamental question that determines what type of morality an individual follows. Stumbling upon this section, I momentarily felt the pull of comparability I had on reading Threshold, an echo of some mutual intelligibility and affability. However, the resolution only seemed to reveal how divergent our artistic sensibilities and loyalties might actually be.

Like the frequent incantation of “avant-garde,” a similarly indolent allusive technique is used by Doyle to convey the grandest philosophical questions of life and existence. Perhaps the intent is to convey these complex metaphysical questions at a level comprehensible to the general reader, an admirable quality for an artist, an act of noblesse oblige and grace. But in order to be successful in this regard, one must have stared into the burning bush and come away with some perennial and esoteric knowledge, some singular truth. However, there doesn’t appear to be any monomaniacal obsession propelled by any such knowledge, no singular adamantine resolve, hard won or otherwise. What remains are a few askew glances at the mirror, refracted relentlessly through different angles and viewpoints across the fictional threads of this work. In the end, there is only one truth, that of the persona of Rob Doyle; the sum of a single life and existence, past and future, contemplative and speculative, presented for our consideration through indiscreet fantasies. In place of hard truth there is flaccid contingency, a flailing around, and an impotent grasping for profundity. Doyle’s potential as a philosophical novelist is still to be fully realized. And yet if the style had been pure, in any way virtuoso, if it was actually avant-garde instead of content to mimic the most obvious poses, we may have been able to forgive Cameo its fateful contingency. I make allowance for the philistine pedigree of those who may have had undue influence in the final shape of this work. But one cannot be on the inside and claim to belong outside; be both arrière-garde and avant-garde. In art, as in life, there is nothing but outside.

Udith Dematagoda is a writer, musician and scholar from Scotland. He is the Editor in Chief and publisher of Hyperidean Press, and writes the Substack Immanent Dissolution.

Seldom does a book predict its imminent descent into textual illegibility, but Cairo Smith’s Scenebux ends with an interesting flourish I have yet to see in other similar works — an afterword containing a lengthy list of references that are “extremely specifically situated in time from the death of Pope Francis to mid-July of 2025.”

The effect is to create a map-like web of ephemeral signposts and hyper-localized cultural references, sufficiently layered such that even the Extremely Online reader will find it hard to catch all or even most of them.1

Scenebux is a short, snappy novella about a young underemployed writer named Ben Extina who embarks on a modern Pynchonesque tour of “the scene,” or the contemporary online ecosystem of niche intellectual figures. This landscape is primarily focused on a lively anatomical slice of a particular right-coded intellectual subculture backed by A Certain Silicon Valley Oligarch, but isn’t fixated on a single persona or figure — the novella’s center is its rapid momentum and flurry of events, scene changes, and characters.

In this respect, Scenebux isn’t quite situated as an internet novel since the online intellectuals that Smith is referencing are corporeal characters that the protagonist meets in real life. Here the novel encompasses a broader effort to recapture the dynamic, gonzo-style hijinks of 20^th-century protagonists who experienced the world through acts of human agency rather than the graphical user interface of a screen or the surprisingly passive creative-class jobs that seem to dominate book jacket summaries these days.

Smith is at his best when he seizes onto a certain manic Zoomer energy in the first chapter of the book: a tightly-packed, high-energy introduction to our narrator through rapid-fire observational comedy in a decidedly contemporary voice I haven’t encountered among other writers of his generation. Here the book starts off promisingly, and this opening sequence calls to mind Jay McInerney’s breezy Bright Lights, Big City, which captured a certain movement and sense of motion that sustained it throughout. At its best, Smith’s voice-driven prose draws you into a very particular stream-of-Zoomer-consciousness:

I’m a cusper, twenty-five years old in 2025, stuck between Lehman-traumatized Millennial dorks and algo-fried pornbrain Zoomer illiterates. In a way, I got the worst of both, an early childhood on a lawless web rawer and sicker than anything we’ve got today. I like to joke I was molested by the internet. I really think I was. That’s why I quit.

Scenebux is an interesting book and Smith is categorically different from most young indie male writers who typically produce literary fiction with varying levels of quality. He writes quickly and prodigiously, with a rapidly-growing oeuvre that spans literary works, genre books, and even films and screenplays.

What most prominently separates Smith from other writers in this grouping is a lack of dourness. The failure mode of the outsider male novelist lies in the over-reliance on nihilistic repetition: many young male writers without the backing of the professional-MFA-publishing complex over-anchor on a very particular form of grimdark-sex-writing — a circular regurgitation of the sex-addicted male with accompanying existential angst, which has long become tiresome.

The problem with these writers, in contrast to Smith, is an excessive heaviness to their work, insufficiently leavened by humor and left unbalanced as a result. Smith’s repertoire has a wider breadth and is decidedly lighter and, in the case of Scenebux, driven by a persistent wit.

The plot of Scenebux follows the sort of classical madcap adventures of the typical protagonist in a Pynchonesque literary comedy — there is, nominally, a sequence of events here that is initiated by Ben’s altercation with some bikers, but the book rapidly loses momentum after the first chapter. Unlike the persistent narrative thrust of McInerney’s NYC-based novel — the spiritual sister of this book, in my view — Scenebux feels like a chronology of events sequenced together to create a carousel-like effect of rotating the reader through a litany of online/IRL subcultures and their associated characters.

Here the humor lands somewhat inconsistently — the jokes are sometimes impactful, and other times not — but Ben’s internal state remains largely even throughout. Detached irony is perhaps the appropriate tonal voice for the protagonist in a lighthearted literary comedy, but I was left wanting something more from the character of Ben Extina.

It’s not that the execution here is at any point bad, it’s just that a novel reliant on a steady stream of humor-driven narrative beats is exceedingly difficult to execute. There are indeed quite a few gems here, but they’re not tightly packed enough to sustain deep interest in the story, even one of its relatively short length.

But when Smith is clever, he’s clever — and his short, intellectual brand of humor reminds me of Tony Tulathimutte: “On the tenth picture I see the biker who decked me holding a PBR. He looks like a fat Ryan Gosling with eyes a little too close together, like he’s got some kind of chromosome abundance.”

The meat of Scenebux follows a fairly clear structure: there are some hijinks, an interesting character (or two) representative of a particular online/IRL subculture gets introduced, Ben injects these events with a steady stream of internal commentary, and another event rotates the carousel into the next subculture.

Captured are a variety of contemporary intellectual spheres, including various forms of technofeudalism, national-security suits, BAPtist or BAP-adjacent American Dynamism entrepreneurs, EA-Butlerian-Jihad terrorists, and peptide addicts.

The difficulty with each of these sections is a progressive loss of narrative momentum tied to the lack of stakes for Ben as the primary character — his ironic detachment makes it hard to sustain interest in the plot and feels like an excuse to keep rotating the carousel.

That said, there are moments of brilliance throughout these middle sections where Smith’s talent shines through and he captures pearls of interesting ideas into self-contained micro-capsules: a character describing his cuneiform-trained LLM, or the morbid curiosity of an Asian woman explaining why she’s joined a cult of genocidal white supremacists.

Indeed, Smith’s strengths as a writer sometimes feel anchored to the capsular — to short, clever exchanges of dialogue that invert or upend conventional framings or assumption-sets:

“I don’t read a lot of Nazis,” I gripe.

“There were no Nazis in 1922,” she hits back. “You would probably call a Platonist a Nazi. You would probably call your grandparents Nazis. If you take the positions of a failed Central European political party and define yourself entirely in the inverse you are still letting them build your frame of morality, which ironically validates their beliefs as an infallible oracle of goodness, through anti-goodness. You end up opposing things like animal rights.”

Scenebux — if I may partially spoil it for you — ends with an abrupt shift into the more somber and serious, departing from the madcap tone of the first 90 percent of the novel. The critique of the millennial writer is that they have often turned to irony-poisoned detachment as a redoubt from sincerity and a retreat into moral relativism. By contrast, Scenebux concludes with a clear moral thesis, ultimately repudiating the ethnosupremacism of the new American right and the self-ratcheting genocidal logic of racialism taken to its extreme.

Given his rate of output and ability to intermittently reach some literary high notes, it’s tempting to speculate that Smith merely needed to take longer to write this novella — to redraft it a couple more times and to let it cook.

But given the transient nature of the world he wanted to capture — which is already dissolving only six months later — I can’t quite blame him for taking the literary equivalent of a photograph, and for giving us a map to help future readers situate it.

ARX-HAN is the author of the novel Incel and writes the Substack newsletter DECENTRALIZED FICTION.

Artist Molly Crabapple’s monumental Here Where We Live Is Our Country is by and for the dispossessed, including diaspora Jews who cannot now, or never could, imagine Israel as home. For the Jewish Bund, “The diaspora was home,” writes Crabapple. “Bundists created the doctrine of do’ikayt, or ‘Hereness.’ Jews had the right to live in freedom and dignity wherever it was they stood.” A comprehensive account of the Bund threaded with personal history, the book chronicles a vanished organization that few now remember. Yet the people, ideas, and conflicts it describes are still relevant today, as are the questions it compels us to ask: what we believe, why we believe it, and what we are willing to live and die for.

Founded in 1897 and reaching its peak in interwar Poland, the Bund was, in Crabapple’s words, a “sometimes-clandestine political party whose tenets were humane, socialist, secular, and defiantly Jewish.” Bundists “fought the tsar, battled pogroms, exalted the Yiddish language, and built vast networks of political and cultural institutions.” She’s written the Bund’s story to resurrect its legacy and proffer its ideology as a righteous alternative to the Zionism many Jews still believe is necessary to their survival. Although the Bund was “largely obliterated” by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, she writes, its opposition to Zionism “better explains its absence from current consciousness.”

Crabapple is the proudly anti-Zionist great-granddaughter of the Bundist artist Samuel Rothbort. Her admiration for the Bund is refreshingly pure and frank, but it doesn’t blind her to the flaws and limitations of the organization or its members. The book, which features her artwork as well as her words, does what all great works of history aspire to do: it reanimates the dead. She writes as vividly as she draws, and the thoroughness of her research is clear — she spent years poring over archives, learning Yiddish, reading Bundists’ memoirs, hiring translators, and tracking down members’ descendants. In doing so she has transformed the Bund from forgotten heroes, dusty banners, and out-of-print newspapers into a movement so dynamic, thrilling, and palpable that a person living today can imagine joining. Because her subjects are her ideological and literal forebears, she conjures them in careful and loving detail.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country shows how we could build a world in which Jews and all people can thrive in safety where they live, and move freely if they can’t. Crabapple credits the Bund with creating networks and institutions — summer camps, youth groups, sports clubs, a top-of-the-line facility for working-class young people at risk of tuberculosis — that prefigured such a world without downplaying the obstacles to sustaining it. From 1897 to 1948, the main period the book covers, Nazis and other antisemites slaughtered Jews en masse, regardless of their politics. Crabapple believes the Bund was defeated not by its own faults and errors, but by opponents and purported allies who turned their backs on Bundists, and all Jews, in their time of need. The Bund did not fail, she writes; it lost — to the greater force posed by “vast armies of organized killers” and the genocidal indifference of the West, which “paid lip service to freedom and humanity while hewing to the crude doctrines of might” and “played nice with Hitler in the early years, then shut their doors to Jewish refugees who fled from the hell they helped enable.”

Crabapple draws parallels between the Bund and contemporary organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and the resurgent-since-2016 Democratic Socialists of America. But these groups do not advocate violence, and part of what she admires about the Bundists is their willingness to fight their oppressors with brass knuckles, iron bars, homemade explosives, and guns. She is outraged by the erasure of their contributions to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. Of Polish Bundist Marek Edelman, who led the uprising after Mordechai Anielewicz died, she writes, “Though he was fêted across the world, Israel never forgave him [for refusing to endorse Zionism]. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin traveled to Poland to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the ghetto uprising, the uprising’s commander was not permitted to speak.”

Though she wants the Bundists to be remembered and recognized for their courage, Crabapple questions the usefulness of their sacrifices. “Death is not glorious,” she writes. “It is pain, then nothing. There was no grand moral, just the dissolution of an irreplaceable self.” Philip Larkin made a similar point in his 1977 poem, “Aubade,” which is not about martyred revolutionaries but horror at the inescapability of death: “Courage is no good: / It means not scaring others. Being brave / Lets no one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Yet as Crabapple points out, whether or not it spares anyone from death, courage can be a form of service to others. She recounts that in 1943, when the Bundist Pati Kremer — then around 76 years old — was rounded up and later murdered alongside other Jews and radicals, she suggested that they sing the Bund’s anthem: “Then death will not seem so terrible.” Edelman, who led an armed uprising, said it was more difficult to accept the inevitability of dying at the Nazis’ hands than it was to resist it. In 1976, he told the writer Hanna Krall that those killed in Nazi gas chambers “went quietly and with dignity. . . . It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one’s death. It is definitely more difficult than to go out shooting.”

It’s difficult to commend those who bravely resist oppression without glorifying or excusing violence, but Crabapple is subtle enough to manage it. Like other political groups that were at times driven underground, the Bund had militias and enforcers who beat and killed their enemies — most often, in their case, in self-defense. But oppressed people are also capable of cruelty. As Crabapple writes, “We all have the capacity to be victims and tormentors, as well as bystanders, staring blankly at a burning wall.” Here is how she describes a Bundist attack on a rival group that had been violently assaulting Jews and Bundists in Warsaw: “They were not tailors and porters anymore but conduits of vengeance, and the ruined faces of their adversaries did nothing to assuage their rage. . . . [Bundist enforcer] Bernard Goldstein ordered his men to finish, but they didn’t want to. They were enjoying it too much.”

Later she asks, “So why did I write this book about the Bund — who lost, who were failed — and not about victorious killers?” Though she is referring here to Zionists, not Bundists, the answer is telling: “Because I am sick of monsters — whether they belong to my group or any other.”

Here Where We Live Is Our Country is a tribute not just to the Bund, but to the beauty and necessity of upholding the ideal of global solidarity across differences. “Such solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed,” Crabapple writes, “but it is all we have.” The book is so blunt about the difficulty and cost of defending this ideal, and so unflinching in cataloging its violent suppression, that it can be painful to read. A number of passages caused me to flinch.

The Bundists were prescient and often right. Henryk Erlich warned in 1938 that “if a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs), and eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs).” Fascists and butchers overpowered them anyway. Yet it’s impossible not to be moved by their stubborn conviction that they owed it to all of us to keep fighting, no matter how dire the conditions or high the cost, for a world where all people could live freely and fully where they are, without sacrificing their language, culture, identity, or religion.

Crabapple relates that when W. E. B. Du Bois visited the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1949, he credited the ghetto fighters’ “deliberate sacrifice in life for a great ideal in the face of the fact that the sacrifice might be completely in vain” with having “reinforced his commitment to universalist socialism.” Like the fighters they led in the uprising, the Bundists were surrounded by enemies throughout their existence, from the tsar to viciously antisemitic neighbors to traitorous ex-comrades, well-armed Nazis, and paranoid communists. But they never stopped believing in the fundamental brotherhood of man, nor succumbed to the delusion that one group of people can achieve safety and freedom by destroying another.

This book will do for Crabapple’s brand of anti-Zionism what the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto did for Du Bois’ socialism. “The Bund was a Jewish group,” Crabapple writes, “but its history is not for Jews alone. It belongs to all of us who believe in the necessity of human solidarity.” At the book’s end, she declares that history is “never settled”: “Bodies rot, but ideas remain. They resurface like land mines or buried gold.” Here Where We Live Is Our Country brings roaring back to life ideas some tried to bury forever. Others will use them to rewrite the future.

Raina Lipsitz is the author of The Rise of a New Left. Her work has appeared in The Appeal, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New Republic.

One shouldn’t look to fiction for historical phenomenology, but I’m not sure of another art form better suited to communicating to our contemporary selves what life felt like in the distant past. The philosophical notion of phenomenology was an attempt to understand previous eras on their own terms, instead of imposing our present mores onto them. This would suggest that the best way to get a sense of the past would be to read first-hand accounts from various periods, which might provide a sense of their prevailing zeitgeists. Thus, anyone seeking verisimilitude of the Civil War in America, say, ought to read something like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Yet unlike diaries or journals or reportage, fiction is affected by its contemporaneous culture in much more ambiguous ways — so mysterious, in fact, that accurately extrapolating insights from novels is practically as difficult as extracting insights from the culture as a whole. Diaries and journals are private forms, still obviously influenced by the world around them, but less public-facing than the capitalistic enterprise of selling books. Journalism, always susceptible to corruption and deception, is based on a power dynamic between the privileged and the general population — sometimes it is controlled by the powerful, sometimes it undoes them — so even unreliable nonfiction can provide fascinating context for complex situations. Novels must sell or disappear, meaning their content is, in part, always filtered through a company’s desire for profit. This can lead to compromised texts, which don’t merely follow its hopeful demographic’s societal decorum but actually depict it — effectively taking prescriptive ideas about how people should live and presenting them as if that was how people did live. Jane Austen isn’t going to dramatize the less presentable aspects of early 19^th -century English gentry, even though her project was to satirize them.

Max Watman’s Tomorrow, the War is historical fiction, which as a form seems to contradict the very foundation of phenomenology, by viewing the past through a present lens. But as a comparison point to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a work with which Watman’s novel is in conversation, it’s fascinating to note the differences. For example, Tomorrow, the War features many elements that contemporaneous novels of the period left out or de-emphasized, creating a more realistic portrait of life during slavery. There are some savage moments here, showing just how pervasive and inescapable the horrific violence of slavery was for everyone. Yet the novel also contains not one use of the N-word, a choice that reflects modern sensitivities but denies experiential reality. Stowe’s novel teems with the epithet, occurring first on the second page. In this regard, Watman’s novel is certainly a bit easier to digest, as the constant use of racist language — even when historically accurate — can be draining and distracting. At the same time, its absence might create a very different impression of its setting, a kind of whitewashing for the sake of digestibility. Then again, who wants to read a white author throw around disgusting slurs?

The plot of Tomorrow, the War delves right into the various machinations of American slavery. In the 1850s, Bodkin’s Hundred, a neglected plantation in Virginia, falls into the hands of Oliver Bodkin VII, a progressive abolitionist uninterested in running the property. He frees the nine people his family had held in forced servitude, but it turns out that two of them, brother and sister Raleigh and Temple, are his half-siblings, a result of rape by his father’s hand. Oliver decides to raise and educate them as free people, eventually teaming up with Rose Knaupf, a widow using her late husband’s wealth to open a school for girls, which Temple attends. Raleigh, meanwhile, learns piano and discovers he’s got quite the knack.

This tenuously content time comes to an abrupt end when a neighboring slave owner named Zeb Newcombe, angry at Bodkin’s disregard for the ways of the region, burns down the property, killing Oliver. The fire is blamed on Raleigh, who flees, though everyone is told that he was killed. Raleigh believes that Temple was also killed, but she was “saved” by Newcombe, who then buys her despite her status as a free woman. When Raleigh ran, he took their documents with him, as he didn’t think Temple needed them anymore. Temple, then, is forced into slavery again, while Raleigh lands a gig with a traveling troupe of performers.

In a separate narrative, a young man named Jeb Stokes sets out on his own, leaving behind a Jewish family who hadn’t ventured out beyond their homestead in a generation. The place is even named after them: Stokes Mountain. Jeb’s father and aunt were killed in an accident, and it seems likely that his mother and uncle orchestrated it. “There’s got to be a real life down there,” Jeb tells them, referring to Richmond, the city where he initially plans to go. A real life as opposed to the Hamlet-y hamlet of his youth.

At first, he camps just outside the city to slowly acclimate himself to his new environment. He witnesses something extraordinary and traumatic. A group of 20 slaves all chained together by their necks and feet are being forced onto a boat, but they stop before boarding and, as a single unit, they plunge into the water and drown themselves. “They had found a moment of freedom,” the narration reads, “in the space between the shore and the boat, and they had decided to stay there.” Jeb winds up volunteering for the Army and, with a fellow soldier and a Native American named Red Joe, robbing a mining camp and murdering a sheriff. He becomes an outlaw, in other words.

The teacher, Rose, who moved to California before the fire, eventually sees an advertisement for a local show featuring Raleigh, who she also had believed dead. In a risky moment, Temple had written Rose a letter in French telling her that she was enslaved again. Rose then writes a letter to Raleigh with this information (which is delivered in an interesting procedural sequence by a moody Pinkerton). Raleigh then blackmails Jeb into helping him break his sister out of her prison. This rescue mission comprises the novel’s finale.

These numerous threads are weaved by Watman with dexterous aplomb, for the most part, with the exception of an extended period when Jeb disappears from the narrative for too long. In a big tale teeming with characters and set-pieces, balance is paramount, and Jeb, already a taciturn and inarticulate person, loses some of his prominence during his absence. Additionally, Watman doesn’t abide by the convention of maintaining points of view within sections or chapters. There are times where the perspective jumps from one character to another. In the beginning of one chapter, the prose reads: “Father Rice, a well-kept man of solid middle age, only slightly worried about how proud he found himself of himself at times.” Then, the very next paragraph, this: “Marie Newcombe felt she could hear him capitalize the pronouns.” A reader may, in such an instance, believe at first that, since it seems we’re in Father Rice’s POV, this line about Marie is not an accurate description of what she thinks as she listens to his sermons, but rather what Father Rice thinks she thinks. The language of third-person narration tends to reflect the thoughts and opinions of the characters. Choosing which perspectives to illuminate and which to withhold and when is what makes novels work. When there are too many shifts, I lose trust in the novelist to make choices. Watman doesn’t do this so often that it sinks his novel, but these slips in cohesion do allow a little too much water onto the ship.

Tomorrow, the War is, ultimately, a wonderful mix of propulsive plot and historical enlightenment, an old-fashioned yarn with more going on than just the momentum of the story, which nonetheless crackles with energy. Watman has clearly done his research, which he’s used to create a believable and humane portrait of a barbaric time.

Jonathan Russell Clark is the author of three works of nonfiction. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, LA Times, and numerous others. He is also the reviews editor for Punk Eek.

Emoji-faced Bennett Cerf, founder of Random House and star of the YouTube-friendly game show What’s My Line?, is no longer remembered. In his lifetime, he was close to Frank Sinatra (a pallbearer at Cerf’s funeral), Truman Capote (declined to be a pallbearer — too waifish?), William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, Dr. Seuss, etc. etc. etc. Each one easily worth a monumental biography; yet in Nothing Random Gayle Feldman gives Cerf and his publishing kingdom (only after his death an empire) the 1,000-page treatment. Until his death, Cerf was as famous as any of these — even Ol’ Blue Eyes.

The first 10 percent of any biography is skippable. Generally the childhoods of the famous are tedious; Bennett Cerf’s is no exception. He was not Arthur Rimbaud. I confess I fail to care about where precisely he lived or New Yorkers’ prestige-based sub-subdivisions by street address (as Groucho Marx once said to Dick Cavett, he himself was born on 78th Street, “between Lexington and Third”). The least class-conscious people in the world are always the most. Cerf would later change his office’s official address to avoid having the unfashionable Third Avenue on the headed paper. It is good enough for me to know that Cerf was born in Harlem and died in Westchester County. I am not particularly interested in his grandfather’s tobacco business, nor that his father was good at baseball. Feldman has to do this work, and a reviewer has to read it, and it is fascinating to no one. It seems to have been along the lines of the typically slow Jewish tri-generational trajectory: peasant — fur trader — Nobel Prize winner. Or, rather, Cerf’s authors would win the Nobels for him.

Here we go. He had a middle-class and not particularly Jewish childhood and was brought up reading boys’ adventure books. Like everyone born in the 19^th century he put together a childhood newspaper to sell to neighbors. He goes to Columbia; edits the college newspaper. Cleverly, he fails an eye test in order to survive WWI — then the decision is reversed, and he’s shipped out to Virginia to become an officer and artilleryman. The Armistice; Phi Beta Kappa; middlebrow tastes (“Wells, Kipling, Arnold Bennett”); inheritance; Wall Street; month at the New-York Tribune (fired); Vice-President and Director of Boni & Liveright; buys Modern Library from Liveright; travels Europe; names firm Random House. By this point, Cerf is still in his 20s.

Cerf had been mentored by the incredible Horace Liveright, a tragicomic Falstaffian character often found in flagrante delicto at work. His bleak decline is in poignant contrast to Cerf’s whistle-stop ascent. In 1925, Liveright sold Bennett and his colleague Donald Klopfer the Modern Library, a deal which bankrolled the rest of all three of their lives. It produced cheap reprints of books from Europe, and would in the 1990s be responsible for the infamously ubiquitous list, “Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels.” Random House was a start-up imprint of Modern Library, founded 1927, and intended to publish a few contemporary books “at random.” Soon, Random House was an even greater success than its parent.

More than business, less than friendship, the publisher-writer relationship has a peculiar intimacy. I would likely not attend the funeral of a business contact, yet Cerf flies to Mississippi for Faulkner’s. (We learn that nobody in Oxford or Faulkner’s family has read any of his books, yet they insist all businesses close at 2 p.m. for a quarter hour to honor their great son.) Feldman’s real gift is — ironically for a writer of a great, long biography — microbiography. The capsule life of Eugene O’Neill is thrillingly told, as is the longer story of United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses.” Book-chat folk will delight in stories of Alexander Woollcott and Gertrude Stein, of Roth, Mailer (almost assaults Cerf), Rand, Cormac McCarthy. Coups for progressive Random House were Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou; likewise Isherwood, Auden, Spender, Coward, Capote. There is a ceaseless honor-roll of Hollywood, from Cerf’s first wife, Sylvia Sidney, to Anna May Wong, Ginger Rogers, Shirley Temple, Claudette Colbert, Marlon Brando — etc. There are the Broadwayites: the Gershwins, Kaufman & Hart, Rodgers & Hammerstein. There are McCarthy & Cohn, and Hoover, and Kissinger. Cerf hated McCarthy, and stood up against HUAC. He was related to Hoover by marriage, and though the FBI kept a file on him, Hoover had it sidelined. In later years he met Kissinger at Frank Sinatra’s house and invited him to his country place, hoping to publish him. My advance copy does not have an index, but it must be incredible.

Half literary and half gossipy, these parts are diverting. The extravaganza of showbiz goings-on, in 2026, reads like the lament of The Wanderer in the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem: Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa? Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas? Where has the treasuregiver gone? Where are the seats at the feast? Where are the revels of the hall? Everyone Cerf meets assumes he cannot really be reading the books he publishes, yet a century before our brainrot age we see him sit up late to read Proust, Faulkner, Joyce. Gertrude Stein playfully calls him “dumb” — but they all respect him. Are our middlebrows now reading Absalom, Absalom! and À la recherche? We who for gods would look to JoJo Siwa and MrBeast?

Yet, as a literary study, there can be no depth. It is about a facilitator, not a real writer. I’m writing this the same day the New York Times has said Cerf is as worthy of Feldman’s 1,000-page biography as New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses is of Robert Caro’s. Yet Caro uses Moses as a bonesaw with which to vivisect corruption. His subject is politics: the amassment of power. Feldman, her Random House biography published by Random House, lacks the wagon she might hitch to Cerf’s star. There is no “motive,” or “idea” — this is a stately, scholarly, expansive, exhaustive and exhausting study of 20^th-century publishing and of the somewhat tiresome Bennett Cerf.

Obsessed with publicity, Noël Coward’s dictum, “Television is for appearing on, not for looking at” might well have been Cerf’s motto. Except that, as Feldman reveals, he used to obsessively watch himself on television, once leaving a party to do so when he discovered the hosts did not have a set (incidentally, ctrl+f “party” reveals 155 matches). News begets news. Cerf was one of the few people who seemed to realize that book sales could be fed by publicity around the publishing house itself. He made himself a celebrity, and it made Random House. He wrote weekly columns that reached tens of millions. What’s My Line? was for a period the fourth-most-watched show on television. And Cerf was himself a million-copy bestseller, writing humor books and anthologies of gags, 24 of them, which were inexplicably adored. There will always be people who vote the wrong way and there will always be people who find New Yorker cartoons funny.

But Cerf, beneath thick strata of frivolity, was complex. He did champion Ulysses, fighting a ban to have Joyce published in a non-piratical edition in the U.S. This is beautifully told in Nothing Random, as it is in Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce. It is the reviewer’s privilege to repackage these and other anecdotes as if he has discovered them. Here’s one: Cerf and his lawyer Morris Ernst had to force the customs inspector to search their suitcase and then force him to seize Ulysses. They’d admitted to smuggling contraband and the inspector was too hot and tired to care. Seeing the copy, he said, “Oh for God’s sake, everyone brings in that.” Here’s another: after Finnegans Wake, Cerf wrote to Joyce proposing he do another book in a “more popular vein.”

There’s a book to be written on Jewish American history and how Modernism was sold, and championed, by publishers like Cerf. A brief version of it would be: pre-First World War “WASP family firms” such as Dutton, Harper, and Scribner were naturally more conservative, publishing grand trad types like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, and Thornton Wilder. As Modernism exploded in Europe as a cultural force, it was always slightly too esoteric for mass appeal, or indeed was censored outright (on a scale, say, from the British censorship of Lawrence at one end to Nazi book burning at the other). Modernist writers began to make real money when passionate new Jewish publishing houses based in New York gambled on them: Random House (Faulkner, Joyce, Stein, Auden), Knopf (Lawrence, Stevens, Eliot, Pound). Modernism was the chic way of being a social pariah. Consider that Joyce, Stein, Lawrence, Eliot, Pound, and Auden were all expats. Things are really fucking bad if you have to move to Paris. I once did.

And, of those, Cerf met and was friendly with Joyce, Stein, Lawrence, and Auden. He refused to publish Pound, considering him a “traitor,” but reversed his decision after a massive backlash against censorship led by Auden. Later he was prepared to publish Lolita, only relenting when an editor with a daughter the same age as Dolores Haze complained — Cerf allowed himself to be overruled. The same editor would veto Mailer’s The Deer Park (JFK’s favorite Mailer according to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.), which Cerf called “very dirty” but which he would otherwise have published. Cerf was able to contradict himself. He would publish the young Philip Roth, yet he also considered Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be a “deliberately pornographic . . . . dirty book.” He was not a crusader for writers’ freedoms, so much as someone with ad hoc prejudices and a hatred of being dull.

Feldman took a quarter of a century writing this biography. It’s a piece of colossal infrastructure: it’s like a very important freeway interchange, from which many other interesting locations can be accessed. Should a biography have novel-like editing, narrative vim, gusto, pep, dash? Cerf’s own memoir, At Random, has. He’s vaguely humorous and fits his high-profile life into 200 pages. Feldman’s biography of him has 200 pages of endnotes. It has achieved comprehensiveness. I now know that Cerf had “always driven Cadillacs” but his wife “lobbied for a Buick convertible.” I’m also not really interested in the exact specification of house Cerf bought in Westchester County (guess what: it’s white, Colonial Revival, with columns). This is not Feldman’s fault — a biographer has to biographize. But am I surprised that a rich New Yorker had a nice car and a nice house near New York City and another in New York City? Compare for example biographies of Saul Bellow, where his house does matter, because it is a central element of Herzog, or where his car matters, because it is a central element of Humboldt’s Gift. In biographies of those who aren’t sublimating their possessions into their art, it’s just forgettable décor. This really is the issue: Bennett Cerf’s personality is not worthy of biography. He is the vehicle — a dignified, high-spec Cadillac, no doubt — to tell the story of Random House.

The best part of this biography is when its subject, Bennett Cerf, dies. The epilogue details in another zippy microbiographical history the last 50 years of book publishing. Dozens of mergers, acquisitions, firings, and hirings lead to Penguin Random House (2013) and eventually the Justice Department quashing PRH’s purchase of Simon & Schuster (2020–22). Such business entanglements are foreshadowed by what Cerf does to Random House, tying up film and Broadway and books, indeed trying to buy Penguin several times, and in this he and his firm are like a genteel, 20^th-century version of the 21^st’s present superficial ghastliness, the Cadillac to our Tesla.

Now that every film is made by Disney or Netflix, and every significant cultural product is controlled at arm’s length by various private equity firms, I long for all-smiling, happy-go-lucky publishers like Bennett Cerf, who really did read the books he was putting out, and really would have you to the Random House “palazzo” to chitchat about novels. When AI focus groups begin to decide, literally soullessly, on the exact formula of profitmaking efficiency for every work of art we are to ever experience, either we lock in, blissed out in the slop, or we decline to, and return to a new primitivism of anti-elegance.

It is simply amazing how the haute-haute bourgeoisie, those who own the magnates, have willingly alienated themselves from their own labor, and will continue to do so, accelerando, as they outsource their opinions to artificial intelligence; which is like feeding your blood into a predetermined Saw trap whose purpose, when full of your blood, is to guillotine you. Three cheers, then, for Bennett Cerf: tedious, inane, kindly, and human. Read this biography, abundant with erring lives, to see how much we have to lose.

Ben Sims is a novelist from London, UK. He publishes Short stories once a month. His debut novel will be released in November.

Susie Vogelman is young, beautiful, loaded, and completely and hopelessly addicted to OxyContin. After her roommate overdoses on prescription drugs and dies, Susie drops out of NYU. We meet her as she’s living in the sprawling Los Angeles mansion that belongs to her father — corporate counsel to the Sickler family, a thinly veiled stand-in for the Sacklers, of Purdue Pharma fame. While our protagonist Susie is dealing with the early stages of her own opioid addiction, the city of Los Angeles is dealing with a string of horrific murders, referred to simply as “the killings,” which are targeting opioid addicts, largely living on the streets. The murderer — or murderers, as the case may be — is killing addicts and mutilating their corpses beyond recognition: beheading them, cutting their bodies in half, affixing their nipples to their eyelids. The killings proceed in the background of Susie’s story, terrorizing the most abject corners of the city as this sordid tale of wealth, addiction, and corruption unfolds in the fore.

I read Luke Goebel’s Kill Dick (2026, Red Hen Press) in the weeks immediately following the brutal murder and maiming of Rob and Michele Reiner at the hands, allegedly, of their son Nick. That family’s nightmarish story was top of mind for me as I devoured Kill Dick over the course of a few days. The book is fast-paced and propulsive. I was compelled straight away by the entitled, drug-addicted, aspiring painter protagonist, Susie. As the plot unfolded, the Reiner family tragedy wouldn’t leave my mind, not only because it was dominating the news cycle then, but also because of how closely their story of drug addiction, wealth, privilege, and ultimately, terrible violence, mirrored the themes of this novel.

Like Susie and the countless victims of “the killings,” Nick Reiner was battling addiction when he allegedly killed and maimed his own parents as the result of what we might assume to be a drug-induced psychosis. Much like Nick Reiner resented his father and his success in Hollywood, Susie resents hers for his work representing the Sicklers and their impossible-to-overstate role in the opioid epidemic. The way the Reiners’ story echoes in Kill Dick is quite eerie. “I fantasized about bashing my parents’ skulls in with the gardening implement,” Susie confesses at one point. At another, she refers to “the Menendez twins who ended the decade and their parents’ lives in a Beverly Hills mansion worth fifteen million.” In both stories, drugs lead to violence, leading to death. Bloody, horrific deaths. Parricide is a unifying theme.

Both the Reiner family tragedy and Kill Dick are emblematic Los Angeles horror stories — warped by money, fame, and influence. Kill Dick, in voice and theme both, reads like a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The author clearly drew inspiration from The Shards and American Psycho, among other of his books. Even the repetition of the generic term “the killings” (always in scare quotes), is reminiscent of how Ellis ominously refers to his serial killer character in The Shards as “The Trawler.” Much like Ellis, the writing here can feel slightly removed, keeping the character’s consciousness just out of reach for the reader. There’s a certain intimacy that’s missing. Instead, the story is plot-heavy and action-packed, which can feel like a refreshing departure for a work of literary fiction.

Also in line with Ellis, Goebel seems to be very concerned with the issue of empire. In Ellis’ 2011 essay for The Daily Beast, “Notes on Charlie Sheen and the End of Empire,” Ellis argues that American culture and its participants can be divided into Empire (Anderson Cooper, Bruce Springsteen, Fran Lebowitz, Madonna) and Post-Empire (John Mayer, Kanye West, Eminem, the Kardashians). Goebel too, is obsessed with the fall of the American empire (“post-America,” he calls it), as well as with the would-be emperors who rule in this post-empire world. He refers not only to a thinly veiled version of the Sacklers, but to other members of the ruling class, including disguised versions of Jeffrey Epstein’s cabal and a church not too dissimilar from the Church of Scientology.

Los Angeles has a particular type of dark, seedy underbelly that I don’t believe exists in the same way in other cities. In addition to the Reiner family, I’m reminded, reading this book, of a young woman — also dealing with addiction — whom I met a couple years ago in rehab. Originally from Southern Illinois, she’d moved to Los Angeles and found work as a cocktail waitress for an underground poker ring. She quickly became close friends with her fellow waitress, one of whom was then brutally murdered in her own apartment before being sawed in half and stuffed in a fridge at the hands of some brutal Angeleno killers. Right away, my friend’s family summoned her back to the Midwest, far away from the dark, sinister energy brewing in LA. Addiction. Murder of the most heinous variety. Without access to our phones or the internet, she and I would sit together in the common area, glued to the TV, waiting for any updates on her friend’s case. All of these cases — my friend’s, the Reiners, the murders in Bret Easton Ellis’ oeuvre, and “the killings” in Kill Dick — all have a distinctly Angeleno flavor to them.

Goebel’s writing is self-referential in style, even outwardly acknowledging the fact that the narration switches frequently between first and third person. “I hate to talk about my addiction like this in first person,” Susie explains:

It’s not that I can’t tolerate the truth about the addict I was, it’s just such an oversaturated genre. Confessionalism is so cliché in this day and age, and addiction stories are limp. This is about so much more. I’m going to dip into third person, take an asterisks break, and proceed forward in 3-D.

Maybe this is a matter of personal taste — I do love an addiction memoir —but I found the switching of perspectives a bit distracting, with the strongest chapters being told from Susie’s first person point of view. While yes, this is a tale about far more than one girl’s addiction narrative, I believe it could’ve been told all from her perspective, or at the very least, Goebel’s writing process didn’t need to be spelled out so plainly for the reader, taking us out of the story, if just for a moment.

The subject matter of Kill Dick is dark and profoundly disturbing. And yet the writing, packed with pop culture references and rich descriptions of LA, keeps it readable and highly entertaining. In addition to its merits as a serial murder mystery, the novel is highly political. While not concerned with capital-P politics, it offers an incisive criticism of America’s ruling class, in all its greed, corruption, and the surface-level politeness that conceals a world of violence. Neither conservative nor liberal, the political thesis of the book is centered on a critique of the elites at the head of industry, government, the church, and civil life in America. “These people would turn into loser liberals,” Goebel writes, “distracted by race, gender, sexuality — any category of victimhood the DNC could weaponize — while the party kept dodging pharma, genocidal war, and poison food, its leaders stuffing their faces with veal and pills.”

Decidedly unconcerned with identity politics, Goebel instead points his critique at more foundational economic and political power structures. He draws parallels, in the book, with Jeffrey Epsteinian hazing rites. He writes:

In sum total, was the world really owned and run by occult hermeticism, holding perverted orgies like this, like people suspected, in top-secret conspiring societies, who’d taken, a thousand or more years ago, false knowledge to the extreme? Was it all really just sex rituals, entrapment, liberation through perversity and shared excess?

Just as I was reminded of the work of Ellis while reading Kill Dick, I similarly couldn’t stop thinking about the podcast True Anon, and even wondered if Goebel had been listening to the show as he worked on this book. Like Kill Dick, the podcast, which is hosted by Brace Belden and Liz Franczak, defies conventional political categorization. Instead, it takes aim at the neoliberal establishment, the intelligence community, and the conspiracies they orchestrate in order to maintain societal power and control.

There is a strong ideological bent to this novel, often stated in explicit terms, particularly for a novelistic work. Personally, I found myself nodding along to these passages, in complete political alignment with the position the book seems to take on the ruling class and their approach to running institutions and dictating cultural mores. One critique of mine, though, is that Goebel has a tendency to get up on a soapbox, stretching certain plot points to assert his worldview in long soliloquies. These tend to be well written and compelling in their own right, though sometimes they feel a little forced, as if the reader can see the inner workings of Goebel’s writing process, in which these essay-like excerpts don’t always feel completely organic. In spite of that — or perhaps by way of explanation — Kill Dick is an ambitious novel, tackling a vast array of our society’s deepest issues and most entrenched power structures through the lens of addiction and violence. It captivated me, both in plot and in language, and kept my attention through the very end. As Goebel himself explains in the text, this is not an addiction story in the traditional sense, but one that seeks to elucidate some of the systemic harm being done at the highest levels of our post-empire society while never failing to entertain the reader.

Emma Burger is a Chicago-based writer, originally from New York City. She is the author of two novels, Little Rich Kids (2025) and Spaghetti for Starving Girls (2021). You can find her work in Hobart, X-R-A-Y Lit, and The Republic of Letters, at emmaburgerwrites.com, or on Substack at emmakaiburger.substack.com. She is an essays editor at Zona Motel.

In June 2020, a friend and I were walking to a Black Lives Matter protest in Columbus, Ohio. Pristine downtown storefronts with boarded-up windows made things feel fake-apocalyptic. Then we heard the sound of glass smashing and people screaming. My friend wanted to leave, but I insisted we turn the corner to see what was happening. We stuck our heads past the faux-brick wall and saw no one. The screaming and window-smashing cut to dialogue. It was coming from a television in someone’s apartment. The protest, when we found it, was also an overproduced phantasm. Mainly, my memory is of people with signs marching around a blond and smooth-faced boy who lounged atop a shiny Mustang, phone in hand, chains glittering in the ringlight. As an outlet for collective outrage, the protest was very successful. It endures as a feeling captured in iPhone videos that no doubt garnered millions of views on that blond boy’s TikTok. But other than setting a moral agenda, the protests of the 2010s and 2020s achieved no tangible political outcome. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act never made it through the Senate, and the post-2020 police department budget cuts have been restored, even augmented. Police violence has increased; in 2019, cops killed 1,098 people. In 2024, that number was 1,271. But Jeff Bezos, defender of “personal liberties” in the Washington Post, did (let’s not forget!) redraw the Amazon logo to say “Black Lives Matter” in June 2020.

Anton Jäger, a Belgian political theorist who teaches at Oxford and contributes regularly to the New York Times opinion section, argues in Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences — published in February by Verso — that the spectral nature of protest is a consequence of the spectral nature of political parties, institutions, and social cohesion. From the mid-2010s to now, Jäger identifies:

[A] new mode of interaction between public and private. It is dynamic, intense, and polarizing, yet also ideologically diffuse, visibly modeled on the fluidity of the online world . . . low-commitment, low-cost, and often, low-value . . . a Carrollian grin without a cat.

This era is hyperpolitics.

Like Baudrillard before him (and de Tocqueville before him), Jäger belongs to an intellectual tradition of Europeans who look to America as a case study in the political present, and as an augury of the global future. The result is a sleek little book that compiles and reworks essays that appeared in The Point, New Left Review, New Statesman, and Jacobin, providing a compelling and ambitiously broad overview of our current political era, gathered from a variety of sources: Michel Houellebecq’s novels, Wolfgang Tillmans’ photos, Weber, Habermas, Putnam, Graeber, Hobswam and Sloterdijk, Fisher and Žižek. All are placed in conversation by Jäger who deftly orchestrates with a dispassionate and perceptive ear.

Baudrillard gets the first word, in Jäger’s preface. In 1986, the French theorist diagnosed the U.S. with a case of hysteresis. America, Baudrillard said, is like a character in the Alfred Jarry story Supermale. It has died mid-bicycle race, but its corpse continues to pedal even faster than before, because sometimes dead systems function better than live ones. Since 1986 ⏤ when Baudrillard published America, six years before Fukuyama declared the “end of history” ⏤ a necromancer has been busy. The 2020s have seen an increase in political activity and a decrease in political outcomes. Voter turnout in 2020 was the highest it’s been since 1900, at 66%. Sixteen assassination plots against Trump plus 13 against Obama is a dramatic uptick from the two against Bush and five against Clinton. Indignation expressed through protests and capitol-stormings is the norm. But this political frenzy comes from an inactive, mushy civic body, whose workplace and community associations have dissolved in the “acid of deindustrialization and triumphant market logic.” No connective tissues ⏤ no political parties ⏤ remain, yet the ghost of politics flailingly animates the dead body politic in a semblance of frenetic activity.

Four eras make up Jäger’s reckoning of the past century: mass politics, postpolitics, antipolitics, and hyperpolitics. The period from 1914 to 1989 marked the era of mass politics. In 1918, Weber offered its definition: “a slow, strong drilling through hard boards.” Politics required a “passion and a sense of judgment” and, for Weber, a populace whose total political involvement, supported institutionally, was a given. Unions, clubs, and party membership formed the basis for political action, especially in the case of workers’ rights in Europe, because these institutions were able to pull the levers of governmental power. Unions were heavily involved in Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, and the outcomes of the Civil Rights movement ⏤ changes to voting law and educational reform ⏤ were protest’s tangible results.

Postpolitics, from 1989 to 2008, followed. The cover of Hyperpolitics is an emblematic photo of the era: a caution-yellow border frames a 1989 photo of a blissed-out woman in a nightclub dimly lit by a moon-like disco ball. Her eyes are closed, lips parted. A man reaches from out of frame, fingers laced through her hair. This moment of lazy ecstasy is called “Love (Hands in Hair)” by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. For Annie Ernaux, another chronicler of the postpolitical era, “in the humdrum routine of personal existence, history did not matter.” In 1989, in this warehouse devoid of the industry whose crashes and clangs inspired the techno that the woman in the photo is dancing to, Tillmans captured revelers in Berlin and London in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a rite of deliberate “collective amnesia,” an “after-the-orgy” in Baudrillard’s terms, when the bloodlust of both World Wars was forgotten, hippie love-ins morphed into board meetings, and the pleasurable tentacles of capitalism began to stroke consumers’ egos on a global scale. The personal pursuit of freedom (to consume) and enjoyment (of products) was everything. An era in which William S. Burroughs starred in an ad for Nike. An era in the U.S. not of Watergate wiretaps or large-scale Presidential child rape-murders, just simple extramarital White House blowjobs. An era of NGOs, consultants, slashes to union power, and shrinking church congregations.

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The erosion of public political life under postpolitics uprooted political institutions, resulting in the mudslide into antipolitics (2010s), landing finally in the hyperpolitical gulch of the 2010s to now. George Putnam, in his 2000 suburban sociological treatise Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, suggests that the end of civic life in the ’80s and ’90s was a result of longer working hours, car culture, shopping malls, and that “tombstone of postwar loneliness,” television. Though Americans were bowling, they weren’t joining leagues anymore ⏤ they were bowling alone. And this dissolution was felt most strongly by the left, an intervention of Jäger’s I’ll return to later. Jäger says that all this bowling alone produced the antipolitical era; Mark Fisher’s “depressive hedonism” and Sam Kriss’ “boozy nihilist perspective” were typical modes of politics in this era. Antipolitics, unlike postpolitics, was also characterized by populism and indignation. The anti- prefixed the status quo, and it manifested mainly on the left: as Sanders and Occupy Wall Street, as the Podemos movement in Spain, as the Movimiento 5 Stelle in Italy, and as support for Corbyn in the U.K. But it also had some right-wing manifestations that have, it seems, surpassed their left-wing equivalents: the Tea Party, Boris Johnson, eventually Donald Trump, and Matteo Salvini. Parties were further hollowed out, supported by external funders rather than membership dues. Now we have politics without parties, hyperpolitics:

[A] permanently volatile, diffuse phenomenon. Whereas populist parties at least made the first steps towards reinstitutionalization, “hyperpolitical” refers to a general atmosphere rather than to specific actors . . . a redoubling of antipolitics, a mode of viral panic typical of the internet age with its short cycles of hype and outrage.

Hyperpolitics is all vibes ⏤ and bad vibes, at that.

“Hyperpolitics” was originally coined in 1993 by Peter Sloterdijk. As social cohesion dissolves, said the Dutch political theorist, the once steady ship of state has become a high-speed super-ferry “so vast as to be almost unsteerable, plowing through a sea of drowning people with waves battering the hull and anxious conferences unfolding onboard.” Sounds like the annual luxury cruise of The Nation! For Jäger, a failure on the left was responsible for the shift to panicked hyperpolitics. In the U.S., Democrats did not rebuild political parties, but instead made a muddled, consultant-driven attempt at uniting opposing constituencies (becoming, to quote Christian Lorentzen, “the party of anti-monopolists and Silicon Valley; the party for immigrants and for border security; the party of family and of freedom; the party of ceasefires and the war machine; the party that opposes fascism but abets a genocide.”) The second issue is that Putnam’s thesis ⏤ that the dissolution of associative life leads to political atomism in Bowling Alone ⏤ is true more for the left than for the right. A study called “Golfing with Trump” showed Trump trouncing Romney in 2016 in Rust Belt and Midwest counties where golfing and other communitarian associations remained comparatively intact. On the right, there may be a civic renaissance afoot. Could hyperpolitics be history?

Jäger’s book, unsurprisingly, doesn’t end on a high note: “Our patient has awoken from a coma to a state of frenzied activity, without ever coming to terms with the symptoms.” Bouts of mania and melancholy (Jäger is paraphrasing Freud here) are a common response to losing something precious. And we have lost memberships in groups that once made it possible for us to exert some control over our political destinies. Groups ⏤ physical associations ⏤ sustained not only stable political entities but also our senses of self and agency. So, what’s a hyperpolitical leftist bowling enthusiast to do? “The prospects for any renewal will have to be sought in everyday life ⏤ in those circumstances in which people still regularly enter into contact with others.” Where are those places? Daycares and retirement homes, says Jäger. Jesus Christ. That’s fucking depressing. And neighborhoods, adds Jäger, unhelpfully.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Jäger’s book is its gloomy nostalgia; for all his wide scope, packed into fewer than 100 pages, Jäger lacks the mischievous ironizing of a Baudrillard, or the innocent excitement of a de Tocqueville. If social media has made the ultraconservative slope slipperier than ever, it’s because the image the alt-right has cultivated and disseminated online is that it has fun. January 6^th, with its carnival and pageantry, its Wagner horns and facepaint and parkour stunts around the Senate floor, looked like a good time. Pussy Grabs Back rallies? With those floppy pink vagina cat hats? Not so much. QAnon hint-drops were exciting, like the next installment of The West Wing wasn’t. The right has re-enchanted politics in a way that frumpy leftist consensus-pessimism simply can’t. No, my idea of fun in 2020 wasn’t watching an e-boy draped like a showroom dummy over his muscle car, but my idea of fun isn’t sitting in a drab two-hour DSA meeting, either. My idea of a party is, well, a party. Let’s go knock on Zohran Mamdani’s door and see what he’s up to.

Madeleine Adams is a writer living in Brooklyn, whose fiction and nonfiction reviews have appeared in The Baffler, Dirt, and Public Seminar. She is a contributing editor to the journal of literary philosophy, Book XI.

Around the corner from where I’m writing this in southern Stockholm, clean center at the dark heart of suburbia’s placid, unquivering normalness, lives a young couple who wake up every day and pretend it’s still 1929. She dresses in Hooverettes and rayon slips, he in a top hat and double-breasted British Warm. She reads housewife magazines from the late ’20s, he polishes the vintage silver sconces. At night she executes 1930s recipes while he sits in the “smoking room” listening to Artie Shaw. Occasionally, when I go out for walks, I can see them strolling along the street. One needn’t squint or look twice. The piled fur lapels are hard to ignore.

Sure, one could be a little suspect of it all, but at this stage of life in the 21^st century, theirs seems about as sensible a way to live as any. Don’t care for contemporary life? Don’t like its banality, its ugliness? You could hardly be blamed for locking the doors, hoarding a trove of relics, putting on the Gershwin brothers and drifting off into the past. For the many of us not yet content to give up on the future, we’re stuck with the unenviable task of figuring out how we ended up behind Lewis’ doors of hell, locked from the inside.

Inglorious fate had it that we were born to a century shrunk solemnly beneath the towering shadow of its predecessor. With every sallow year of Hawk Tuah girls and Bob Marley biopics, it’s becoming ever clearer just how badly we miss whatever was going around in 1967. The 20^th century was a kind of new renaissance, a breadth of excellence not seen since the days of the Medici, which means that now we’re condemned to find life a little wanting. W. David Marx certainly feels that way. “The profundity of cultural invention in the twentieth century gave us a false faith in its permanence,” he writes, in his introduction to Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, a book whose title attempts to give name to a concept that all of us must, in one way or another, instinctually recognize. That formless ennui, that sour smell of dissatisfaction, that unshakable impression that whatever we’re interacting with — song, film, book, painting — seems hardly worthy of comparison to its forebears. Why, O muses, have you forsaken us? Why, mother of Art, do you make us want so much yet give us so little?

Weeping at the altar of the past is nothing new. Eighteen centuries ago, St. Cyprian was chastising the unacceptable social and cultural decline of his age, longing for the good old days to return. With the death of Michelangelo in 1564, the Italian culturati shuddered at the thought of what fruitless, insubstantial attempts might be made to surpass the unsurpassable perfection of the previous century and a half. Even in the early 20^th century it was thought by some that modern life was irretrievably ossified, inert, cast dead by immovable images and well-worn words; that nothing short of revolution would do. Humans, in other words, have forever indulged in a graceless penchant for hyperbole, vague discontentment, and ahistorical whining.

But it’s fair to say that the enormous legacy of the 20^th century has somewhat upped the ante on our dissatisfaction. Now, every hour in every country, inboxes fill with the latest cultural lament. Blank Space may take a slightly girthier form, but its impetus comes from the same place: a nebulous feeling that something is deeply wrong, that our culture is sick, that our art is worthless and that, crucially, there still appears to be a way out. Marx’s method of charting the malady is to turn over almost every name-recognizable American cultural product of the last 25 years — “a cultural history of the 21^st century” is what he subtitles the book — to locate the signs of cancer. Maybe it’s still in early-stage progression; maybe, if we catch it in time, we can tame the malignancy.

And yet it soon appears that this sort of optimism belongs to a bygone era. What Blank Space instead becomes, and in rather short order too, is a glowing exemplar of the aesthetic ignorance, the intellectual sterility, and the moral confusion that has led us, in a kind of slow dismemberment, to today’s legless travesty of a culture. Those desiring to find more than vibe-based consolatory conclusions and threadbare generalizations should be warned away; Blank Space has nothing for you. That you ever expected it to is perhaps a cautionary sign, a suggestion to step back and see that if you’re still looking for a skerrick of self-aware criticism in a prestige hardback, published by a Big Five imprint and written by a Harvard-educated, cosmopolitan, pop-culture-addicted, too-online, oh-so-well-meaning liberal American “culture” journalist, you need a wake-up call, maybe a stiff drink, better yet a lobotomy. If it’s true that we need books of Blank Space’s ambition more than ever, we can no longer afford books of Blank Space’s self-conception. With a misconceived frame of reference, its anti-art premises, its penchant for paralogisms and rhetorical bluster, and a slew of feebly-drawn conclusions, Marx’s book brings us no closer to digging our way out of the shithole. If anything, it exemplifies just how hard it is to get the stink out of a good man’s clothes.

If you set your mind to the stars, the moon will only disappoint you. “Where society once encouraged and provided an abundance of cultural invention, there is now a blank space. Over the past twenty-five years,” writes Marx, “culture has prospered as a vehicle for entertainment, politics, and profiteering — but at the expense of pure artistic innovation.” Straight away we encounter the first flaking of Blank Space’s chintzy carapace. Though based in Japan for the last two decades, Marx has done little to dilute his West Atlantic attitude towards novelty with the regard for longevity found in his adopted home. He still has a fetish for originality, a kink which turns out to be, over the course of Blank Space’s 384 pages, more than a little masochistic. He longs for the days when “cultural inventors” and artists “challenged convention,” “advocated new value systems,” and “re-shaped established culture at its symbolic core, tweaking human consciousness to reveal new ways to perceive the world.”

What exactly it means to “tweak human consciousness” is a question perhaps not beyond what Marx can think of, but certainly beyond what he can in this book. All W. David can do is spurt out a few dusty vagaries about re-shaping culture and then spend a few hundred pages trying to figure out what exactly he means by that. The book’s mechanism is fairly straightforward: take one cultural product, trend, or “moment”, juice it for a light dribble of pulp, reach a tendentious conclusion, and then proceed after a paragraph or so onto whatever comes next on the conveyor. Flaccid prevarications abound: a song “re-shaping” this, a news outlet “revolutionizing” that, all sense of causation and direction drifting into exactly the kind of airless forgettableness Marx so laments in the book’s opening paragraphs. Among the cats Marx pulls from the bag, we read that “with the iPhone’s arrival . . . anyone could now be online, anywhere, at any time,” or that “despite their chaotic nature, stans contributed significantly to online culture.”

Instead of honing in on the few cultural products he personally considers most consequential — instead of dispersing with the illusion of objectivity and lending a personal version to this “history” — Marx surveys, with treacly and temperate professionalism, the breadth of the cultural swamp. (Maybe, instead of its originality fetish, this attitude of philandering expediency is the book’s most American quality.) From Glee to “Get Lucky,” Steve Aoki to the MCU, Luigi Mangione to Paris Hilton, Tidal to Stüssy, Gwen Stefani to Vanity Fair — it’s a span of references meant to impress, connoting a kind of voracious pop sensibility that would make Marx, theoretically, the ideal intellect to comprehend and synthesize the high-paced eclecticism of culture in the internet age. What intrepid terrains this sensibility won’t cross are hinted at in the book’s opening chapter, which muses on the Strokes, Terry Richardson, VICE, and the rise of Hipsterism — a taste of the book’s real frame of reference. If it didn’t make it to Bedford Avenue or the Lorimer L, it isn’t worth mentioning.

Hipsterism had a two-fold significance. First, it was the earliest sign of a burgeoning Millennial culture, borne of post-9/11 disillusionment, suckled on Fisherian capitalist-realism, reveling in a LARP of bohemian decadence, an attitude of me-first hedonism without the white-dust traces of iniquity nor an ounce of the political mettle one found in the Boomer movements of the ’60s. Secondly, it was arguably the last “movement” that drew its essence from life in a physical location, meaning it was the last movement that could have feasibly belonged in the 20^th century. Henceforth we were in the new millennium, stuck with the indignities of its namesake generation.

2002 saw the first pangs of Millennial self-consciousness. Ten years later they had become a professionalized class of strivers and decadents, distilling their cry for help into a self-serving whimper of virtue. Eschewing the Ruskian idea that a society channels its highest desires and aspirations into its art, or the softer, Jewish version that culture could be the religion of the nonbelievers, the Millennials opted to assume en masse the notion that work, which for many of them meant tech, should be a force for good. Along with the Gen X litter-runt too geeky and “techno-optimist” to belong amongst their own kind, the Millennials had, in the span of only a few years, brought us Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Instagram, Tinder, Twitter, and, of course, Facebook, whose IPO in May 2012 created the first class of Millennial billionaires. Apple, the dream factory “connecting” us all, had displaced Exxon as the world’s most valuable company. Jonah Peretti’s early experiments with tailored HTML and keyword-exploiting headlines at the Huffington Post were suddenly de rigueur among the media class. YouTube had figured out the bones of its monetization program, inaugurating the “content-creator” who regularizes his posts like an old mill-worker punching his timecard. Corporations were the culture. This was Millennial reality. We are still living it.

Once market value was conflated with moral value, it would only be a matter of time before aesthetic value fell by the same sword. Soon art became ensnared in its own desolate tunnel: on one end, freaks, eccentrics, and nostalgics; on the other, corporate raiders and the self-styled cultural “elite” dreaming of making art their living. Corporate culture having hoovered up the last crumbs of a selling-out taboo, the artists and audiences began synonymizing commercial and aesthetic success. In Marxian parlance it’s called “Ultrapoptimism,” and it signaled art’s accedence into its lowly Faustian dilemma. There were endless pools of cash to swim in, if one could accept that the art itself would be at best a pleasant diversion, but probably a niche irrelevance. And there, in the halls of decadent privilege, real art has mostly stayed.

I have always rejected the idea that art, film, persona or music becoming commercial means it cannot also be considered cool. The rejection of commerciality “just because” is such a boring and immature argument that is perhaps more suited to some mediums than others but in general I find to be elitist in a way that does not thrill me whatsoever.

So writes Charli xcx, the world’s “realest” pop star, in a long, unedited Substack post entitled “The Death of Cool.” She continues:

My fascination with the combination of high and low has always been a big driver within my work. People who are interested in things deemed as high brow or high art or left of centre seem to feel that undercutting art with something low brow or mass produced degrades the work and people who are more interested in things deemed as low art or popular or utilizing a directness in language seem to find the acknowledgement of theory or history as pretentious. I enjoy the in-between space that this creates.

One imagines Charli gleefully whirling down the vortex of that “in-between space,” together with Andy Warhol (who she mentions), Taylor Swift, and George Lucas. Once her slickly-produced pop slipped into the algorithm and combusted into virality, it made its creator an apostle of the 21^st-century concept of artistry: poptimism pure and ascendant. Having now toured every corner of the globe, discovered her political heft (“Kamala IS brat”), and banked a lifetime’s worth of money — in other words, having become a kind of corporation herself — she wants to believe she can return to the silos of cool that she always imagined she’d inhabit. But Charlie has no interest in being David Lynch or Brigitte Bardot. The goal of her art, she now writes, is to find “the apex of cool and commercial.” Staunchly her image eschews the kind of grubby fingerwork of the corporate masseuse we see in many of her contemporaries; in oh-so-lightly-edited Substack posts she plays up her approachability, her willing descent from the stars back down to earth. Marx calls her a “pop rebel.” It’s hard to call it cynical, easy to call it “self-aware” and “too real.” Most of all it’s just naïve. Whatever chance there was that cool could coexist with corporate aesthetics, technology took up the scythe and laid it clean. If there are two things that are the antithesis of cool, it’s tech and corporations — which are our culture.

Perhaps the only thing giving them a run for their money are the insert pages of legacy media, of which W. David Marx is another oily product. Blank Space resounds with the thundering echo of the establishment, not only in the cultural products it references and tastefully readable voice it adopts (Dave Eggers, eat your heart out), but in the class of commentariat it seems to deem authoritative. Its touchstones are Gawker, The Face, Pitchfork, The Atlantic; NPR is sacred gospel. It quotes commentators with their titular qualifiers — “the internet culture critic Katherine Dee,” “novelist Will Leitch,” “political analyst John Ganz,” “journalist Marisa Meltzer” — to legitimize a class of culturati who we otherwise wouldn’t know, like, or care about. “The film critic A. S. Hamrah” (former stalwart of the hallowed pages of n+1) assures us that Hillbilly Elegy was considered “one of the worst films of the year by pretty much everybody who saw it,” and because he’s a film critic from n+1, we can believe him.

For many of us who no longer consider Pitchfork relevant or that writing a book about Sassy Magazine makes you a “journalist,” Blank Space reads like a ghost story, a white-on-white drawing, a genre tableau populated by nonentities. Marx’s appetite for pop culture may have predisposed him to research the 21^st century, but his establishment rectitude makes him among the least prepared to understand it. Making clearheaded sense of Blank Space’s immense disparity of references would require, among other qualities, a stronghold philosophy or viewpoint — aestheticism, nihilism, spiritualism, anything will do really — buttressed by a sense of historical sweep, a knack for insight, and, if only for the reader’s pleasure, a decent aptitude for turning a fresh-sounding phrase. In other words, everything you’d never find in your weekly Vox newsletter. And if Marx didn’t learn to analyze, to write, or to come up with an assertive attitude, one can’t help but wonder what the four years at Harvard were for anyway.

Whatever wisdom Blank Space can muster is used up in its sections on fashion and Millennial malaise. The rest of the book quickly becomes a chore, all hyperbole and stiff-lipped liberal earnestness. Considering the cast of characters and events it assembles, Marx’s book is almost impossibly unfunny. Only when the humor almost writes itself can Marx generate a laugh, like when Paris Hilton names her two business idols — Trump and P. Diddy — or when, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Baz Luhrmann tries to meet the moment by fast-tracking his ridiculous Gatsby adaptation. Otherwise Blank Space goes by without a giggle, reminding us that if you’re not going to have a philosophy, you can at least have a sense of humour about it all.

The nearest Marx comes to an overarching principle is his kink for originality, but even then he’s more than a little flaccid. He is so ambulant is his terminology — “pure artistic innovation”? — that one begins to wonder if Marx might’ve benefited from a long evening with the Merriam Webster. Lengthily he expounds on the cultural impact of “manifesting, astrology, and other mystical practices,” movements that have been floating around Western consciousness for three quarters of a century and occupying a central position in Eastern life for millennia. On music, where he seems most keen to venture, Marx labels the balefully ordinary Chappell Roan a “daring new voice” but later completely misses on hyperpop, one of the very few uniquely 21^st-century aesthetics, so that 100 gecs, who, all reservations aside, could reasonably be called “cultural inventors,” get one sentence in Marx’s “cultural history.” Perhaps he was warned off when he realized hyperpop hadn’t been covered in The Drift.

Strangest and most misbegotten of all is the book’s wonky scope. It may be that writing a book styled as a long-viewing chronicle yet only spanning 25 years discourages you from grasping a few hearty truths. A fuller context of human and especially art history might indicate, for example, that originality is startlingly rare and hardly the only sign of auspicious creative happenings. If originality, novelty, or “invention” were the hallmark of a blossoming culture, how many more than a handful of epochs, between the age of Aeschylus and the days of Delacroix, could be said to have reached their spring? Why, in other words, would we keep condemning ourselves to disappointment?

Ask your average Substacker and they’ll give you a Levitical tractus of reasons why they believe culture has come to its shuddering nadir: overexposure to the achievements of the past; the fatigue of content overload; a sense of all art and culture immediately drowning in its antecedents, giving everything the silvery smack of meaningless; a relentless pressure to keep releasing work, even if it’s not fully realized; a lack of cool; the total assimilation of art and commerce; and “social media.” Most of it, naturally, has to do with the internet.

But the sense of a nadir — here I go with the time frames again — predates, by several decades even, the World Wide Web or the Commodore PET. In a 1959 interview with Georges Charbonnier, Claude Lévi-Strauss went on a lengthy and rather compelling fulmination against the paucity of the era’s cultural achievements. “We have reached a sort of impasse, and realized that we are tired of listening to the kind of music we have always listened to, looking at the kind of painting we are used to looking at every day and of reading books written according to the patterns we are familiar with. All this,” he said, “has given rise to a kind of unhealthy tension.” More depressing was how counterproductive our attempts to break the gridlock proved to be. Having become “too self-conscious” in our “determination to discover something new,” we had forgotten that these crises never, ever, find their saviors in “people . . . trying deliberately and systematically to invent new forms.” All efforts were not only futile — they were ruinous.

And yet somehow things feel worse today than ever. Lévi-Strauss, an art aficionado named after Claude Lorrain, looked back on the evolution pictorial art had undergone since his namesake’s epoch and yet could not, by 1959, see clearly whether it was a sign of construction or destruction. Now that question has been answered, resoundingly, in all art forms and media. Marx’s “blank space” has less to do with originality than it does the slow and systematic deconstruction of the boundaries we used to use to understand and classify art and culture: genres, disciplines, formats, institutions, and, most critically, standards of taste. This is what Marx calls “Cultural Omnivorism,” the total inverse of the old Greek derivation of critique — krisis — meaning choice.

The irony of Blank Space is that, generally, Marx’s own tendency is not omnivorous enough. His demonstrable preference for fashion and music prejudices him against other forms of cultural production which a 21^st-century recapitulation ought to include. He’s mute on literary matters, glaringly apathetic to podcasts, and after claiming Vin Diesel “remained” at the end of the 2010s a “cultural fixture,” his curt glances at cinema feel mostly merciful. Given the attention he lends it, he seems to feel that music is the key to understanding the culture, but in his writing he shows almost no sensitivity for musical elements besides a beat, a lyric, a vibe. He chastises Lady Gaga for laundering conventional pop appeal through the illusion of “radical creativity” and a “glamorous, boundaryless life,” but sees nothing so suspicious in the “pioneering” achievement of “Old Town Road.”

Here Marx’s book concretizes one of many damning revelations about the current state of cultural commentary. Marx, and almost all of his media cohort, seem to be functionally art-illiterate. Weaned in the shallows of pop culture, the voices quoted in Blank Space take the kind of credulous approach to art and entertainment that belies a mind looking not for the subterranean spirit of a thing but for its baldest, most comprehensible “message.” Analyses of shows like Gossip Girl and Glee demonstrate a willingness to nourish oneself only on first-order interpretations, narratives, and characters being taken always for what they “represent.” Rich kids having fun means an endorsement of “aristocratic” politics, and queer romances and “subplots” featuring characters with Down syndrome “expand representation.” It’s undergraduate stuff, and the inverse of Marx’s intemperate cultural appetite: a short temper for the possibility of abstruse readings.

By the end of Blank Space, a flummoxed Marx, having persevered through the kampf of his diagnosis, tries to summon the clarity to recommend a few amelioratory avenues. Mostly he’s on point, especially when arguing that standards of judgment need to be reaffirmed and “critics and tastemakers” championed. “To have great poets,” wrote Whitman, “we must have great audiences,” and, as the book’s conclusory chapter reveals, W. David Marx agrees. But how hollow it all seems after almost 400 pages of his own aesthetic confusion and critical dilettantism.

Which is, in part, what makes Blank Space so infuriating and depressing. How will we ever extricate ourselves from this morass if we can’t name its form? Some generations ago it would have been unthinkable to analyze a Gothic church by focusing only on its pillars and windows. Now, matters of the spirit, the inchoate, have slipped into obsolescence; everything is rudimentary content, a bare-faced declaration of intent. The collapse of critical apparatuses is not excuse enough; we have also forsaken almost all critical faculties, educated our way out of them, sewn virtuous ideologies into our eyes instead, and finally convinced ourselves that taste with too high a brow is not democratic enough and that all preconceptions pale against the need to be inclusive. But who ever believed that true art, or cool, or vision was inclusive?

Call it an archive of ephemera, call it a survey of stagnation, but if it’s not a history of cultural aesthetics — how things look, sound, and present themselves — what is Blank Space but a history of cultural morals? If one sounds like a much more exhausting and hectoring experience than the other, let me assure you, it is. The incurable malady of Blank Space is its indifference to any distinction between the truths of life and the truths of art. That the two might be worth differentiating seemed more or less obvious to a few centuries of artists yet apparently didn’t occur to the author, nor the editor, nor the fact-checkers who brought us Blank Space. But it should have, because when the book inevitably finds its way to the really critical stuff, it is found utterly, brazenly wanting.

Here we come to the big two, the events that most devastated and revolutionized 21^st-century culture: 9/11 and Trump — neither of which Marx seems, in any remote way, to “get.” His curious blindness to the impact of the first is an innocent foretaste of his willful blindness to the realities of the second, culminating in the reader’s dazed wonderment at the book’s end, at how someone so resolutely determined to ignore Trump could possibly believe he was ever qualified to interpret the 21^st century.

But first came 9/11, which for many of us came to mind as our bloodthirst was being perturbingly sated by the death of Charlie Kirk, in what functionally amounted to a live-streamed assassination. Here, it was almost impossible not to think back to the glittering image of the world’s largest pair of towers, in the heart of the world’s most iconic skyline, exhaling their final sinister plumes. Warhol had prefigured it with his Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963): the voyeurism, the violence, the disgusting allure, which, just as it drew our eyes to the extraordinary terror of Flight 175, drew our gaze, a quarter-century later, to videos of Charlie Kirk’s murder or Vince Zampella’s fatal car crash. Violence we had seen, but nothing with the scale and definition of 9/11. Its dreadnought symbolism was broadcast everywhere, inescapable, in full color and in devastating detail, gawked over almost instinctively. All over, for free, horror in high-definition: this was the 21^st century.

It seems bizarre and somewhat negligent to write a book about images, media, and commercialism, and to let 9/11 go almost entirely unmentioned. If the will to transgress got the better of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who called 9/11 “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos,” the heart of the statement — that 9/11 will live on as perhaps the most indelible, extraordinary image many of us will ever see — seems not without its prescience. Yet W. David Marx, with good right-thinking rectitude, quotes Stockhausen not to ponder the undercurrents of his assertion but to inform us that, in the wake of his utterance, all performances of his music were cancelled. Just as those who “‘got’ Pop . . . could never see America the same way again,” our culture divides between those who see the Warholian realism they’re living in and those who don’t. It’s all a bit lost on W. David Marx, who in 9/11 sees almost nothing and in Andy Warhol sees only the guy at the centre of a “downtown scene.”

Why Marx keeps his discursions on 9/11 tersely forgettable shortly becomes apparent: he was saving his ink for Trump, about whom the author has reams to say, all in the kind of language that recalls something of a Hollywood liberal righteousness and something of the CNN chyron. Those who get past the ladling of rhetorical platitudes one perhaps naively thought we’d moved on from — “decency and progress,” “dystopian absurdity,” “male-oriented ecosystems,” “steamrolling over ethics and morals” — are then greeted with every sort of woo-woo trick of discreditation and disrepute-by-association Marx can muster from the #NotMyPresident playbook. In two marathon chapters, one in the middle and another that provides the dénouement, he activates Deplorables mode in a tour de force of proper-noun accusation. Proud Boys, Pizzagate, Kanye, Bronze Age Pervert, Milo, Azealia Banks, Louis C.K., Kyle Rittenhouse, 4Chan, Peter Thiel, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, Pepe, Martin Shkreli, Ariel Pink, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and “slovenly Steve Bannon” — this inculpation, the stuff of “Trumpism,” is just one great fetid lump of political excrement, which apparently, in the world according to W. David Marx, slid straight off the wall. “Despite wielding maximal political power,” he writes, “Trumpism struggled to make a cultural dent in the late 2010s.” It’s an extraordinary conclusion for a professional thinker to make, and one that, in light of Louis’ return from cancellation, the exporting of the edge-right’s conspiracism into the mainstream, the continued ascendancy of The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, or Peter Thiel’s associations first with the intellectual dark web and then with the Dimes Square mandarins, seems more than a little revisionist, and certainly less than candid.

Trump once said that Hilary didn’t have “the Presidential look,” a phrase which, like the Warholian litmus test, perfectly delineates the haves and have-nots in the Trumpian world. There are those of us who understand what Trump meant symbolically, and there are the W. David Marx’s, still taking every utterance literally, bloomers clasped in the name of “liberal decency,” a phrase Marx uses unironically. But then, it’s hard to see something clearly when you’re still in a state of shock about its happening. Marx has yet to quite accept the Trump paradigm — yet to “get Pop” — perhaps because he is still so blinded by a Trumpian aesthetic he finds barbarous and uncouth. It’s a downstream consequence of the incapability — here I go again — to separate aesthetics from ideology: the same incapability that made Pharrell offer an oleaginous mea culpa for his song “Blurred Lines,” which he “didn’t realize” had “catered to . . . chauvinist culture”; the same one that encouraged Vulture to conclude, apropos of Hamilton, that “in order to dislike it you’d pretty much have to dislike the American experiment.”

Naturally, Marx’s “conclusions” about Trumpian culture are a little askew; so too are his presuppositions. The jig is up as soon as he diagnoses Trump’s base as a group of people who merely want “higher cultural standing,” who, in other words, are just as culture-brained as Marx is and thus want only to be able to afford a shack in Santa Barbara and be “celebrated” for their love of Pabst Blue Ribbon and maybe permanently substitute Chappell Roan with Reba McEntire on the Billboard charts. Of course, all of this renders Marx hopelessly short-sighted about the nuances of post-Trumpian culture. Cancellation, for one, is a topic he doesn’t even bother thinking about, perhaps because it’s not culture like Charli xcx is culture. With a blithe equivocation he dismisses it as an age-old phenomenon, one that was just as active in the ’60s when record producers and film studio bosses practiced “cancellation by taste.” Later, in the backlash against Trump, Black Panther garnered guffaws from the critical establishment and made a billion dollars, which Marx predictably views as a triumphant demonstration of “the commercial and critical potential of progressive filmmaking.” Or, to put it in the Vulture formulation: to have an aesthetic or artistic problem with Black Panther, you’d pretty much have to dislike civil rights.

All of it smacks of that fungal, fetid, corrosive idea which got us here in the first place: that art’s job was not to make beauty but to make the world a better place. Not only is it tiresome beyond words, it’s a philosophy that has encouraged a class of over-educated, overly-online, virtuous “culture” journalists to pretend that using phrases like “progressive filmmaking” will take us anywhere. W. David Marx, who, in his desire to make culture new (again), ignores any separation between art and content, performative morality and true virtue, aesthetics and ideology, society and politics, imagined he was writing the great indictment of our inauspicious age. But in reality, no matter how justly he might castigate the moneymen and the fellow-travelers, he failed to wonder what his own part in the story might be. Blank Space should have been a book that helped us clear away the dead leaves and catch a glimpse of spring. Instead, the detritus seems as immovable as ever. For the moment, the rot remains.

Elroy Rosenberg is an arts journalist from Melbourne, Australia.

A portrait of the artist in 1986 finds him at Woods Gramercy, an upscale restaurant in what the New York Times is calling “the year of the column in restaurant decoration,” and it’s just about the only restaurant right now that’s trying to make a name for itself with vegetables, of all things; in fact the “Steamed Vegetables” is among the most talked-about dishes on its menu and the most affordable (always a good sign), and what we find here, in contrast to the peach-colored walls, striped with steel-blue columns, are what Susan Squires of the Los Angeles Times describes as “the tables of Manhattan’s publishing power lunchers,” all of whom are “spaced discreetly apart” but if we arrange the dolly shot so that it wends a path, and dips down here and there over shoulders, you’ll hear them talking about things like “the veracity of Thomas Pynchon’s vision of Los Angeles,” or whether it’s smarter to advertise a new hardcover by optimizing radio spots versus “store windows,” and finally we settle on a profile shot, paces back, of the writer himself — somehow both man-sized and boylike — sitting aside from the publishing people in a ladder-back chair, chain-smoking, gulping three mimosas in a row. Freshly 21. “Absolute Beginners” just dropped and it’s wafting in from different directions and 40 years later it’ll still be his favorite Bowie single.

If the serious young author looks “lost and vulnerable,” don’t worry — he’s a college senior and this whole Brooding Author shtick is part of the package. Sad-eyed and sleepless. He wrote a book that “disturbed” reviewer Michiko Kakutani and people in the business seem to appreciate that, thank you Bret, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t quibbling about what this kid is: a boy wonder or a fake. Writing a terse talentless novel and calling it “minimalism.” Yeah OK. Two hundred pages long and it’s got, what, 90 chapters? That’s not minimalism. It’s a music video.

The release and subsequent popularity of this debut novel, Less Than Zero, will soon slingshot the author’s body into an emotional wall such that he spends two weeks sobbing in bed, not quite knowing why, panicked about his future, stalled on the second novel for which he’s already been paid a ton of money (in the $200,000 range, most likely) and isn’t even sure anyone will enjoy it. His editor, Robert Asahina (35), is a calming presence. “We figure we’ll get [the second novel] by the end of the summer,” he says, “but if he needs more time, one month, six months, it won’t matter.” His publicist Marcia Burch is another of these adults who is Keeping Bret Calm, asking if he’d be willing to sign books at, say, a Barnes & Noble, and the answer’s yes, and so she says OK, well, how about a reading at one of these —

“No,” Bret’s quick and firm, “I couldn’t, I’m sorry,” explaining — in what reporter Susan Squires describes as a voice that’s genuinely regretful although, she notices, his face is blank — that if he goes and reads at a bookstore or a gallery he’ll feel guilty about the people who just went there to browse, enjoy themselves, not to hear some kid read his book into a mic.

Burch says OK and then lets it go. She tells Squires, off to the side, “I don’t like to push him.”

Bret Easton Ellis at 21 is tall and broad like his halfback father but he’s thin, slouching, not quite filling the sport coat he bought at the Salvation Army. His “thick white socks [are] crumpled into ancient black loafers with chewed-up heels.” Looking around at these publishing people he confesses to Squire that he can only remember one person’s name, and that he doesn’t understand why they’re fretting over him, trying to make him famous, when all he did was write “a sort of a book.”

He is still very trusting of reporters. Saying things like, “I believe in, more or less, humbleness.” At least two of them will write that he had more than multiple drinks during their interview.

“It’s probably presumptuous,” he says to Squire, “to tell them I don’t want to promote [my next book, The Rules of Attraction], because probably no one will want to talk about it anyway.”

Young enough, in other words, to believe that what they’re selling is a book.

“I think he understands that this is a business,” says editor Robert Asahina, “and he’s been a very good soldier. He’s accommodated us, even though it’s made him unhappy.”

Ellis, Squires will write, “has had to grapple with being an icon to some and a cash cow to others, and his manner of adaptation has been simply to submit until he couldn’t stand it anymore.”

The novel came out and he earned lots of money and attention and then had a breakdown and sought therapy and got better. But it wasn’t a one-time thing. Nine years later, promoting his fourth book, Bret Easton Ellis tells a Vanity Fair reporter about talking with professionals but also using exercise as therapy. The reporter confirms that Ellis, 30, is besieged more by anxiety than depression but that he “controls the problem with a drug called Klonopin.”

But in 1986 Bret was already nearly done with his second novel and thank God he didn’t sell it before the first one was published. Less Than Zero was seen as a risk at Simon & Schuster, a likely write-off. One editor, Herman Gollob, famously protested the book by writing, on the manuscript’s in-house cover sheet where editors circulated their opinions, “If there’s a market for callow, fragmentary fiction, about rich, self-indulgent, coke-sniffing, cock-sucking zombies, then let’s buy it.” But there’d be a small printing, with a low advance, and no advertising budget.

Which was fine for the author. “I thought that book was going to sell no copies. I was just happy it was being published.” Hence he took his $5,000 advance with a smile (that’s about $15,000 in 2026) and when it was locked into the Spring 1985 schedule, for a print run of 5,000 copies, he sold the film rights for $7,500.

Then the book was published.

Less Than Zero sold 70,000 copies in hardcover over the next two years. Then Vintage (an imprint at Random House) acquired paperback rights for $99,000 and sold 200,000 of those.

If he’d waited until after publication to sell the film rights, he might have earned a lot more money. But maybe it wouldn’t have become the minor cult classic it is today, with a young Robert Downey, Jr., and maybe the Bangles would never have recorded “Hazy Shade of Winter” for the soundtrack.

You never know with these things.

The Less Than Zero movie was released in 1987 starring Andrew McCarthy and Jamie Gertz and Robert Downey, Jr., and by then the second novel was released in hardcover with a neon book jacket designed by George Corsillo; it wore a motif of horizontally slatted neon collage, very similar to Less Than Zero, which now made the “Bret Easton Ellis” on the cover into a kind of brand name.

Critics took it as more of the same.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times: “His characters are so sketchily defined, so uniformly jaded and drugged out as to be indistinguishable from one another, and we’re left to echo their own refrain: ‘It’s all so boring.’” The book didn’t sell nearly as many copies as its predecessor but the author was developing a style. As a teenager he’d fallen in love with Ernest Hemingway, reading The Sun Also Rises in one day or, depending on the version you hear, twice in one day, and the bigger flashpoint came when a high school teacher assigned Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Susan Squires saw the influence and called it out in that profile from 1986, saying Less Than Zero reads “like a pubescent version” of Didion — “less artful, more shallow, but similar in style and with an equally anesthetized protagonist.”

Rules of Attraction has three central characters who narrate alternate chapters about the same love triangle. It’s an exercise in voice this time. Modulating a sentence to convey the emotions that a character is too fraught to articulate. He’s experimenting with this idea that the prose style, more than the language, is the medium for communication.

Critics were mostly annoyed but the reviews didn’t matter because the book had done something way more important than cement his literary reputation, or win friends, which was to set him up financially so that, once he graduated, Ellis could finally escape Los Angeles. Find a place in New York. A continental remove from his father.

The former realtor.

Now, in 1982, a general partner in the Robert Martin Ellis Company Incorporated. Selling skyscrapers. Recently separated (her request). Bret tells the New York Times that this is when Bob Ellis “bought a Ferrari and a condominium and wore ‘age-inappropriate clothing,’” chasing younger women but also veering back toward Ellis’ mom, half-successfully, on-again-off-again with perhaps a little more leverage after brokering a sale of the US Steel Building, for which his fee (as Bret recalls in Lili Anolik’s Once Upon a Time . . . at Bennington College podcast) was in the millions.

This is when his son was reaching college age, wanting to study music, but Robert said no, he wouldn’t finance a liberal arts education. “My father just said, ‘It’s a fucking waste of time. You are flushing money down the toilet. I want you to go to business school at U.S.C., regardless of your grades, I can get you in.’ Because he was so connected to whatever.”

This is when Bret’s paternal grandfather stepped in, R.C. “Red” Ellis. A hotelier in Nevada. One time when his mom found pot in his bedroom Bret had to go spend a punitive summer at the ranch, bussing tables at one of his grandfather’s “kinda shady hotels,” and this is the semi-mythologized summer when a 14-year-old Ellis took his first real stab at writing a novel. He’d written a children’s book at age 10, or thereabouts, called Harry the Flat Pancake “about a boy who wakes up one morning to find out he’s a pancake,” an amusing premise that, as he explained to Jaime Clarke in 1999, “also ended up being a study in chaos and corruption for some reason.”

This new one, written in Elko, was about a boy like himself, doing the sorts of things he himself was doing. It was precipitated by a feeling of displacement and marked a point of change in his life.

These are the circumstances under which all of his subsequent novels would be written.

“I’m fairly certain,” he would later write in a semi-autofictional horror novel, “the reason my grandfather paid [my] outrageously expensive tuition had to do with the fact that it would upset my father greatly, which it did.”

Red Ellis was tall and broad like his running-back son but wasn’t such an athlete himself. His sport was buying and running hotels. Bringing entertainment to Elko. He owned the still-operating Stockmen’s Hotel and then he bought the Commercial Hotel and gave it a “$250,000 facelift,” according to Elko’s Daily Free Press, that included a gigantic taxidermied polar bear. White King. Rearing up on its hind legs in the lobby. Ten feet tall in a glass coffin. Sort of a conversation piece. And then later, when business was steady and the purchase practical, Red bought a second taxidermied polar bear, this one for the cafe. He hosted celebrity performers. Resurrected the years-dormant Elko Rodeo. Floated around outdoors like the mayor, tall and red-haired and hazel-eyed and freckled, grinning with his box-candy teeth, tipping Stetson back, when somebody came up to tell him thanks for sponsoring the local baseball team, or giving jobs to folks in need.

A long-ago visitor wrote on Facebook about sitting in the Commercial Hotel’s cafe with his family when Red Ellis stopped by to say hello and lavish attention on the kids. On leaving he reached into his pocket and presented them with a trademark treat:

Two pairs of bright red dice.

Emblazoned on each: a polar bear.

Bret Easton Ellis claims, in Lunar Park, that Robert C. Ellis (grandpa) and Robert M. Ellis (dad) were embroiled in a complicated legal battle when it came time for his college tuition and Red paid the tuition to piss off his son.

But he clarifies, in an email, that this isn’t quite how it happened.

“Ok,” Ellis writes, “I thought my father was probably relieved” about not having to pay tuition, “but I found out my grandfather was always going to pay for his six grandchildren’s college education — so it wasn’t as if he did it to spite my dad which I suggested in a Vogue article I wrote 30 years ago. I learned this after the article was published — I got it wrong. Shrug.”

And yet there’s truth to it. Some strange parallels. Ellis describes his father, in fiction and essays and interviews, as an alcoholic. Manipulative. Prone to violence and spontaneous rages. “He pushed me to the floor, pummeled a bit, punched. It was not a continual thing. It was just something that would happen every so often. I assumed that was how fathers were.”

In Lunar Park Ellis characterizes his father as “careless, abusive, alcoholic, vain, angry, paranoid,” and claims that, even after leaving the family home in Sherman Oaks, “[Bob’s] power and control continued to loom over the family . . . in ways that were all monetary.”

Maybe, in the novel (as in the Vogue piece he refers to, and which I could not find), Bret Easton Ellis took an imaginative leap and mirrored his own father-son relationship in the generation above. Some triangular powerplay. Father sabotages son; son sabotages father via grandfather.

Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

All he knew about his third novel when he got to New York was that it would have something to do with Wall Street. And so he used connections to get in touch with some young guys who worked there. Traders and analysts. He’d wait til the markets closed and join them at Harry’s, a famous basement bar in Hanover Square. Power lunch-type place. Darkwood everything with moody lighting on twinkly golden fixtures. Leather and steaks. At one point there’s an electric stock board blinking transactions above the bar that nobody looks at but it’s part of the vibe. Tobacco haze and ashtrays everywhere. Masculine energy. According to the founder, Harry Poulakakos, the indoor smoking ban killed “60 percent of our evening bar trade.” He’s shaking his head as he tells this to the New York Times in 2003. Says they used to make almost as much money selling cigars as they made selling Scotch.

So here’s Ellis, 22 or 23 years old, he’s putting on a suit and adopting the proper poise and then popping into Harry’s where he shakes hands with all these guys who are all probably richer, more suave, more “sophisticated” than he is (they’ve certainly been in New York a longer time) but Bret’s not intimidated because they know who he is already. Or they know “Bret Easton Ellis.” Less Than Zero was such a hit in ’85 and everybody’s heard about his Rules of Attraction book party at the newly reopened Cave Canem, an ancient Rome-styled bar and restaurant operating out of a former bath house in the East Village, where they did gimmicky shit like serve quail with the claws still intact, saying Romans used them for toothpicks, and people wore togas, crowns, and someone spotted Judd Nelson and Matt Dillon and the clothing designer Miriam Bendahan showed up in an outfit she described as “late-’70s leopard punk,” standing there enunciating so that they get the wording right, and the whole thing got written up by Liz Smith, a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News, who mentioned Bret quite a lot in those early New York years before she learned about his third book and decided he was bad.

So when he meets these Wall Street guys they likely take him for one of their own. A Gen X “elite.” Somebody who shares their values. Hence the immediate candor when he shows up, “[meets] the new bimbo they’re dating,” lights a cigarette and orders a vodka grapefruit and then just listens to them

talk about buying a car, talk about houses in the Hamptons they wanted to rent, which club to go to, where their dealer was, buying suits, clothes, trips, etc. So after two exhausting weeks of hanging out with these people I understood that my narrator would be a serial killer.

Thirty-five years later if you want to make a reservation at Harry’s you can go on their website and see right there, on the homepage, there’s a big proud banner in elegant letters:

Immortalized in renowned novels such as Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and

Brett [sic] Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.

While writing American Psycho, Ellis would devote the workweek to writing and research, then on Fridays he’d revise the week’s work, and Sundays were off. He kept seven-hour workdays to better-align his schedule with his friends’, with whom he’d reward himself, afterward, by getting together for drinks and then dinner and probably a club after that, maybe Nell’s (“that’s how our evenings usually rolled”), which was actually a bit of a “concept” when it first opened, in ’84. None of that discotheque sprawl, left over from the ‘70s. Nell’s was sealed-off, intimate, dark. Five-dollar entry on weeknights and $10 on weekends — and allegedly even celebrities had to pay. They were small and affordable but they had standards, and good energy, and they had a bouncer at the door with a red velvet rope who took your cash and either let you in or else he said no — pushed you back — no jeans, you can’t come in here with jeans.

“I’d go to parties fucked up out of my mind,” Ellis told Vanity Fair in a 1994 profile, “and then plan on escaping the party to get even more fucked up.”

Drinking like he did in those early profiles, where interviewers all commented on how quickly this kid threw back his mimosas or vodka grapefruits, like he wasn’t so much interested in the taste as he was in the numbness.

“Numbness as a feeling” is how he would later characterize his work.

During the years he worked on American Psycho, it was also a destination.

He claims to have laughed a lot while writing the prose for American Psycho and claimed, at one point, to have cried while writing some of the violent parts; but really he only said that during the controversy, when his book tour got canceled due to all the death threats (pre-publication death threats, meaning they came from people who hadn’t read the book, threatening to murder him for his violent thoughts).

It makes the process seem emotional but really the writing was so technical, operating within such strict stylistic parameters, that the actual events of a scene — funny or sexy or shocking — didn’t have much influence on the author’s mood. Plus a lot of the research was boring, paging through magazines about clothes or tech or jewelry or whatever his young, murderous, yuppie narrator Patrick Bateman might be obsessed with. Sometimes it meant paging through books about serial killers or pinning magazine cutouts to the wall above his desk but just as often it meant sitting on his bed and listening on repeat to the albums that Bateman himself would listen to, and expound upon, within the text. Bret just smoking, pacing the sparsely furnished apartment, skimming the liner notes for Sports or Invisible Touch to inform the three long, pedantic, error-laden essays Bateman delivers throughout the book.

“I have never in my life had a more difficult writing experience than the month I had to write about Genesis.”

Or he’d get up from one of his white metal folding chairs, like what wrestlers get hit with, and he’d walk around the apartment. He’d open the fridge. Step out onto the 450-square-foot terrace and stare down at Union Square Park, “filled with junkies and homeless people,” and then he’d go inside after a while and open the fridge a couple more times and finally sit back down and write something.

He wasn’t possessed so much by the novel as by the solitude. The cozy tucked-away vibe in a pre-gentrified East Village studio with clean wood floors and white walls and “some patio furniture scattered around,” books piled up on the floor and leaning into walls like a skyline, “along with an elaborate stereo system that had an insanely expensive turntable” and some huge top-of-the-line TV whose specs he could tell you about.

But none of it claimed much space.

And so the prevailing optics were the whiteness of the walls. The high ceiling. The clean surfaces. The “simple wooden desk” and the chair in front of it and the simple white mattress on the floor.

It wasn’t “chicly minimalist,” Bret says, “just empty.”

And so he filled it with people.

Maybe more than he should have.

He wanted his parties to look like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, “where everyone is just smashed into each other,” “packed and fun,” chatting and shouting, shoulder-to-shoulder with 200 other people, leaning in for conversation, shouting over whatever he’s got playing on the insanely expensive turntable, and meanwhile the wallflowers at the party are hugging their drinks, off at the perimeter, bending or kneeling down to skim the tall neat piles of CDs (Genesis, Eagles, Whitney Houston) and books piled up on the floor, towering sometimes 20-volumes tall, and then over by the desk and the chair, where his writing material isn’t exactly on display, their eye might drift across the white of the walls to settle on the magazine cut-outs he’s taped there: men’s fashion, stereo equipment, designer brands.

“Research,” apparently.

Two hundred guests shuffling in and out onto the impossibly long terrace where maybe there’s someplace to sit. A neighbor occasionally calling in a noise complaint toward dawn but that’s when the party would’ve broken up anyway. Everybody leaving, tipsy, Bret included. Stay out all night. Crash at a hotel while a cleaning crew infiltrates the apartment so that when he did go home, later that day or early the next, it would look like nobody’d been there.

Like nothing had happened.

Eventually the building owners told him he couldn’t keep renting, that he had to buy it or leave, and so he called his dad for advice, Mr. Skyscraper out in Century City, who listened to the terms of the sale and said, “What!”

Incensed.

“One hundred eighty per square foot?! Are they out of their minds?!”

Bret bought it anyway.

Happy here. Throwing parties. Making headway on the book. Plus he was living with his boyfriend Jim — whose career, as a lawyer, demanded a closet more opaque than Ellis’ own. And so the relationship was low-key. Intimate. Partly because that’s what gay men of their generation simply decided was the safest thing to do, under the specter of AIDS; but he was also living this way because — remiss as he might have been to say it at the time — it’s what he “always wanted.” In public he needed to sustain this image as the spokesperson for transient, fluid, detached experimental sex. But really, as he said in a 2024 podcast episode, all he ever wanted was “to have sex usually with the same person, in a nice bedroom, after we’d taken showers.”

Growing up closeted in Los Angeles, and suddenly living on the opposite coast, with money and clout and freedom, was its own transgression; being bisexual or promiscuous was edgy for an MTV audience, enough to make you famous, but still not so taboo as just being (somewhat) openly gay, contented, in love.

“I never wanted to fuck a stranger.”

Plus Jim was a stabilizing presence, “a quiet, levelheaded Princeton grad who was always calm and low-key, never prone to drama.” Which made it all the more menacing when, after they’d been dating for a year, Jim asked about the book (which he’d been writing since they met) and so one night, in bed, Bret gave him a couple chapters — a date scene, leading to a rape scene, leading to a murder — and Jim looked up from the pages and told him, off the neighboring pillow, “You’re going to get into trouble.”

Bret hadn’t thought of that. He’d “begun [thinking] of American Psycho as so stylized that it bordered on . . . experimental,” something that “hardly anyone would ever read.” After a beat during which the idea settled, and chilled him, he blinked and performed calm: “Who am I going to get in trouble with?”

“Everybody.”

He always starts a novel in longhand. This is the first draft. “The outline.” Prose on some of the pages and then memoranda all around, for himself, about characters, their quirks, their tics, their verbal habits, physical attributes, various things to keep in mind as he’s puppeting them through scenes — of which he’ll write different versions, in different registers. Maybe just fragments, to see how it works with a certain kind of syntax or rhythm.

So the way he assembled it was to say, for example, that in this first third of the book we’ll see Patrick Bateman go to the dry cleaner, and it’s a long set piece where he’s yelling at them for not getting blood stains out of his sheets, and also there’s a scene where he’s on the phone trying to get reservations at Dorsia, in a panic, because it’s the only way he got some new romantic interest to agree to go on a date with him.

But which scene goes first? And why? The sequence of events is important because the narrator is unravelling throughout the novel and so . . . OK: Bateman will be embarrassed, by the fact that he can’t get the reservation he promised, and this is another straw upon the camel’s back, and it’s why he falls into a bit of frenzy at the dry cleaner’s — except someone will walk in, a woman who wants to go out with him, and we’ll see that he still has the presence of mind to compose himself. But only barely.

Alright so the frenzy needs to be ratcheting up, scene by scene, and so his notes, in the outline, explore the technical aspects of showing, in language, how a person’s losing their mind. What’s the tone for his various moods, and what triggers him from one to the next, and how do you modulate the prose to either swell the feeling of frenzy or bring it down . . . ?

The outline for American Psycho also dictates the handicaps that will be imposed on the language, as a result of the narrator’s personality. Bateman will constantly refer back to “status, products, clothing” as a way of seeing and understanding the space he’s in. Sounds simple enough. But now the novelist’s real challenge, with the prose, is to come up with a system, a syntax, a rhythm that makes these brand-name observations read smooth, natural, almost unnoticeable after a while.

Another parameter for the narrative voice, dictated in his outline: no “metaphors, similes, anything where Patrick Bateman can see [one] thing as something else, because [his perception] is too surface-oriented for that.”

The outline was as long as the novel itself. The first draft in longhand, then three more drafts on a typewriter. There are roughly 10 scenes with violent murders and he left those for the end because they required their own special research about serial killers and decomposition and injuries. He had a friend of a friend hook him up with some criminology textbooks used by the FBI and he’d consult those when the time came.

Another reason for waiting to write those murder scenes until the end is that, by the time he reached the end of the manuscript, he would have been living with Bateman’s voice for three years. He would know all the notes he needed to hit, and how to hit them. As Jay McInerney recounted it to the Times, decades later, “Toward the end of that time he got pretty depressed and wigged out. He had locked himself away. He was morose and depressed. . . . I finally went down to his apartment one night, just to kind of pry him out and take him out. I just thought somebody better shake him and make sure he was alive.”

It would be a few years before he had occasion to talk about the process in earnest.

“I cried a lot, I drank a lot. . . . I was genuinely unhappy; it was not fun.”

In his mid-20s now, nearly broke, he sent the manuscript to Amanda Urban in December 1989.

ELLIS: “Binky Urban, my agent, is the first person who sees everything I write.”

INTERVIEWER: “Has she ever suggested any changes?”

ELLIS: “No.”

Urban sent it ahead to his editor, Robert Asahina, who’s 40 years old when he sits down and reads this novel and finds it annoying at first. Stressful. Bret’s been working on this for three years and it’s just . . . it doesn’t work.

He starts scribbling a frenzy of marginal notes.

Then, around 10 pages deep, he realizes what’s happening. That this is a narrator “who’s completely unreliable,” and he settles into it.

Laughs throughout.

Loves it.

In a conversation on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, almost 35 years later, Ellis tells him he can’t remember sit-down sessions where they edited the book. Asahina tells him, that’s because there weren’t any. He suggested, for instance, that the book’s three long essays about pop artists (Genesis, Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis) be reduced to one single essay. He refused. “Is one music review psychotic? No. Three is psychotic.”

Otherwise, as in the first two novels, he suggested a few tweaks here and there, Ellis accepted about half of them, and then they sent it to Copyediting.

Same thing happened here.

After he sends it to the copyeditor, Asahina reaches out to cover artist George Corsillo, who made brand-establishing motifs on the covers of Bret’s last two novels. He wants George to do the same thing for this one and George says sure, send the manuscript — and so he sends it.

After that, Bret’s out of the picture. Asahina starts to run it through the standard pre-publication procedures, in-house.

This is where things fall apart.

At the pre-sales meeting in July 1990 Asahina circulated a pitch memo, or “tip sheet,” which normally included the book’s jacket summary and whatever info might set the recipient up for coverage: the author’s notable press coverage, if their previous books were bestsellers, pertinent credentials.

“The mistake I made,” he said, “was to attach, to the tip sheet, two scenes” from the book. The first scene showed

one of the grislier murders [and] the other scene was just Patrick being Patrick: downtown and drugs and drinking and so on. . . . I presented [the tip sheet] at this pre-sales meeting which took place in a conference room with . . . 20 or 25 people sitting around, my giving an oral presentation of what’s already on the page in front of them, and what seemed most striking, in retrospect, is that nobody really cared.

There were some, he claims, who remarked on the violence. How extreme it was. But otherwise the meeting was professional. Unremarkable.

The excerpts leaked.

Time magazine breaks the story on October 29.

It’s a simple headline in the Books section: “A Revolting Development.” The reporter, R.Z. Sheppard, shares a brief excerpt in which the book’s narrator, Patrick Bateman, cuts strips of skin off a woman’s leg “while she screams in vain” and then starts biting her head.

“I had to draw the line,” says cover artist George Corsillo, of his decision to quit the design for American Psycho. “I felt disgusted with myself for reading it.”

Sheppard reported: “Some women staffers [at S&S] are especially outraged by Ellis’s descriptions of atrocities against females. But no one wants to say so on the record.” Sheppard’s prose is indignant. Trundles forward listing fuckup after fuckup. He contacts the publisher to see how they feel about this horrifically offensive thing they’ve paid six figures for, asks if they think they’ll be able to offload the paperback rights on anyone after it creates so much outrage.

“We’re working on it.” Simon &Schuster reps appear to be in crisis mode already. “No takers.” Like they’re transcribing a CEO’s urgent pantomime. “No comment.”

Spy magazine’s December issue lands a few days later. Joan Rivers on the cover in a green mascot costume. A banner over her head teasing “PARAMOUNT’S NEW GODFATHER.” Another one at her feet, in smaller font, “Plus: Bret Easton Ellis’s $300,000 Deal with the Devil.”

The one-page feature by Todd Stiles features a pair of line-drawn mugshots at the top, male and female, small and cute with big smiles. One says “Bret,” the other, “Binky” — a nickname given to Urban by her grandmother.

Stiles mentions that American Psycho is listed in the Simon & Schuster catalogue for January 1991 with a five-city book tour. Like he’s happy about it. Then he quotes, from the novel, a paragraph in which Patrick Bateman pours acid in a woman’s vagina and rapes her severed head.

The article’s tone starts out flippant but gets angry quick. More righteous than Sheppard in Time. Stiles excoriates, by name, Robert Asahina himself for acquiring the book, which makes sense, but also his boss, editor-in-chief Michael Korda, and then his boss, Simon & Schuster’s CEO Dick Snyder. Shame, shame, etc. Says that “Binky” Urban should remember, next time she’s at a fancy lunch with these guys, that their meal was paid for by sentences like this one: “In my locker . . . lay three vaginas I’ve sliced out of various women I’ve attacked in the past week.”

He suggests Simon & Schuster isn’t just slated for controversy, but a financial timebomb. Penguin Publishing, he reports, has “declined to exercise its paperback reprint rights, and meanwhile Simon and Schuster’s first hardcover print order is 40,000 copies,” which would be a nightmare to cancel — especially when, as Phoebe Hogan will report in New York magazine a month later, 19,400 of those copies have already been ordered, paid for.

“Not much could be more sickening than the misogynist barbarism of this novel,” Stiles wraps, “but almost as repellent will be Ellis’s callow cynicism as he justifies it.”

But Simon & Schuster wasn’t scared off. They were brainstorming. Thinking of maybe tagging the book’s cover with a warning label, or something on the title — in fact someone says maybe a “bellyband” will do the trick, instead of sealing the book in plastic wrap like it’s porn, there’s just this label that wraps across it with a warning about graphic content.

It didn’t sound great, no, but they’d have to get creative because, as New York magazine would report.

“[F]orfeiting the $300,000 advance and dropping the book was never a serious consideration.”

Except for Dick Snyder. Editor-in-chief.

As Asahina would say on the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, 35 years later, Dick Snyder was a difficult boss, “a son of a bitch,” but also a “genius” for picking out editorial talent. When he brought you onto his team, he trusted you, didn’t scrutinize his editors’ “list” (of acquisitions).

But he was restless by nature. Volatile. Maybe lonely, too. He got married four times and he was perhaps extra touchy in this particular year, this particular month, slogging through the final stages of a miserably public and prolonged divorce from Jodi Evans, another publishing luminary. The separation got so nasty their colleagues were being deposed. Testifying. Dick’s income got leaked; now the New York Times is showing he makes $375,000 (about $2.3 million in 2026). Another article talked about Jodi’s cooking habits, and how they treat the cleaning lady, and how he and Jodi “had great sex after he shot a snake.” Plus he just quit smoking. Of all possible times. Colleagues report walking into his office at 7 p.m. and he’s drenched in sweat, climbing his Stairmaster, 90 minutes deep, mindful about whispers, people talking behind his back, saying he was foolish to give Ronald Reagan $5 million for a two-book deal and now it’s November, the first one’s coming out and it’s living in the shadow of that fucking Trump book, people saying, Dick. Look who voted for this guy. You think they read books? Reporters actually bringing it up to him in interviews! Asking him, to his face, What were you thinking?

All that going on and now he’s got pressure from every direction to cancel American Psycho, a six-figure acquisition, not even two months before publication. It’s embarrassing. He tried to save face by saying he had no idea what was in this book but it’s backfired. Now people are saying he’s either negligent or lying.

Embarrassment aside, there’s Urban.

She’s gonna collect.

It’s November 8 and Amanda Urban is at the New York Public Library’s Decade of Literary Lions gala. Their biggest event of the year. The lion statues flanking the steps outside are dressed in black bowties and top hats. Anna Wintour is here. Ralph and Ricki Lauren. Kurt Vonnegut is here with Jill Krementz. Barbara Bush and her pearls. Tom Wolfe is wearing black.

According to New York magazine, this is where CEO Dick Snyder spots Urban. They step aside. Snyder tells her, all grave, that he’s got concerns.

There’s no account of what Urban tells him in response but subsequent remarks to the press indicate her position:

Refusing to publish a book at this 11th hour, without explanation, raises the question [of] whether there was a form of censorship going on here. What is involved here is a giant corporation responding to pre-publication controversy and . . . abandoning its own tradition of fearless publication.

Then someone hit the gong.

They went back inside for dinner.

It’s November 9 and Urban gets a call from a higher-up at Simon & Schuster who makes his pitch:

“Bellybands.”

It is Friday.

Urban, according to Phoebe Hogan’s reporting in New York, is noncommittal about putting a girdle on 40,000 American Psycho hardcovers. Says she’ll have to get back to him. Hangs up.

But meanwhile there’s no point in even fussing anymore because Dick Snyder, likely shaken from his encounter the night before, decides he should probably read this thing and so he takes a copy of American Psycho up to his country home that weekend, the 75-acre Linden Farm in Cross River, to see what the fuss is about.

He’s not pleased.

He wants a cigarette.

Dick Snyder doesn’t need this right now.

The book’s cancellation is announced on Tuesday.

“American Psycho is not a book that Simon and Schuster is willing to publish even though Mr. Ellis is a serious author whose work Simon and Schuster has previously published.”

No elaboration.

Later, in an interview with the Washington Post, he shed light on nothing more than who’s at fault and where the buck stops: “In my opinion, there was an incorrect decision” by Asahina, in acquiring the book, and that “it was I who decided we should not put our name on this book. It’s a matter of taste.”

Ellis claims in hindsight that he wasn’t surprised when he got word of the cancellation, just two months shy of its release; he’d already been hearing “whispers” about American Psycho causing problems at Simon & Schuster (beginning, presumably, with that sales meeting in July) and they’d gotten “louder and louder throughout 1990,” such that his first reaction — as he remembers it decades later — was “‘Jesus,’” exasperated, “‘this fucking business. This fucking business is so ridiculous.’”

At the time, however, he was a bit more shaken. “Flabbergasted,” according to the LA Times. “I literally couldn’t believe it. I was sick, completely sick.”

“I’m still completely shocked,” in Newsday. “I’m basically numb—and a little bit angry.”

“This might sound dopey, but I have been with Simon and Schuster since 1984. I thought I had a strong relationship with Simon and Schuster. I like that publisher. I thought I would always stay there.”

Staff at his publishing home voiced shock as well, with one anonymous staffer saying it was antithetical to their beliefs and that, if it’d happened with a book he personally had championed, he would resign.

“The most unfortunate thing about this whole controversy,” said the anonymous employee, “is that the book is a piece of shit.”

As Ellis remembers it, Urban was quick to tell him there was nothing to worry about: “I have a plan.” In that 2025 podcast conversation with Asahina he remembers telling her what other people had been telling him: sue.

“Binky was completely against that. She said, ‘Do not get caught up in a lawsuit here. You’re gonna go through a rough time with this book. A lot of people are not going to get it for a long time. And to have this and — no. Absolutely not. I’ve got a plan. I’ve got a plan.’”

Urban was on the phone, she said, to the press with one hand, publishers with the other. When Ellis suggested that there were two publishers with whom she was already in talks, but refused to name them, a third — Atlantic Monthly Press — raised its hand to say they’d be interested.

He headed home with his $300,000 advance and hopped a train back west for the holidays. He later told Vogue about trying to distance himself from the controversy, sitting in a San Francisco hotel room, turning on CNN and there was Gloria Steinem, talking about a boycott of the novel, how this young man will be responsible for violence perpetrated against women.

American Psycho, a topic of scorn in op-eds around the country, was now in limbo. It had cost a major publisher hundreds of thousands of dollars and humiliation for its higher-ups. It was radioactive. It was pornography. It was misogynistic. Dangerous.

It was in Binky Urban’s hands.

She sold it again in 48 hours.

Throughout the ensuing storm of controversy there was only one foreign publisher that didn’t drop American Psycho: Picador UK. They’d been with the author since Less Than Zero and believed in his work even if the [editor-in-chief] Sonny Mehta was no longer in charge.

Mehta was now editor-in-chief at Knopf, a prestigious American imprint of Random House.

A domestic competitor of Simon & Schuster.

Sonny Mehta was quiet. Didn’t say much on his way into the office. Kicked his shoes off at the door and moved around silently in socks. Jennet Conant describes his typical Saturday in a 1993 profile for Esquire:

Sonny Mehta will rise early, breakfast on a handful of pistachio nuts, and begin to read. He will read all morning, reclined on a sofa in the living room of his book-lined Manhattan apartment, getting up only to change CDs, of which he has hundreds, preferring classical music. . . . He will read without interruption until 4:00. . . . He will drink Scotch — Famous Grouse — starting at whatever hour suits him, and smoke — Silk Cuts — continually[.]

His days at the office didn’t look very different. Christopher Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, 10 years later, that when Mehta took over at Knopf from Robert Gottlieb, back in ’89, “he moved early to reinstate the office cocktail cabinet, the ashtrays, and the tradition of the bohemian lunch.”

Conant sat across his desk for the Esquire interview and, while pouring himself a small shot of Scotch, warned her in advance “that he loathes interviews, intends to say as little as possible, and will be abjectly miserable until the allotted time is up.” She described his demeanor as one of “eloquent disdain.”

Phoebe Hoban, reporting her American Psycho saga for New York, cornered Mehta at the National Book Awards ceremony late that November, after he’d acquired the novel for “[close] to $50,000.” Came with a question but Mehta dodged. Demurred. If you ask me about American Psycho, he said, I will set myself on fire.

A couple weeks later, at a sales meeting, Mehta gave an outline of American Psycho’s rollout: approximate sale window (March–April), size of the first printing (40,000), and cover price (“probably” $9.95). “Mehta told his colleagues that although [American Psycho] wasn’t the greatest book ever written, it deserved a chance to be read.” He also claimed that he’d sat with Ellis, discussed the book, and agreed to some editorial changes. When rumor spread that the version released by Random House would be markedly different from the version Simon & Schuster had just cancelled, Amanda Urban corrected the record:

“That may be Dick [Snyder]’s fondest hope, “because it’s his only chance to come out looking anywhere remotely good. But that is not going to happen.”

The editing, she said, merely aligned with Urban’s own contention that “some cutting should be done in the beginning sections.”

Far as Ellis recalls, Mehta had no grievances with the novel except a scene where Bateman releases a starved rat into a woman’s vagina (he’d tell Fisketjon, “Lose the gerbil”).

The edits, Urban said, would be light.

The book would not be changed.

Gary Fisketjon, creator of the Vintage Contemporaries line of paperbacks that would now release American Psycho, was tasked with editing the novel and what he really wanted to do, according to Ellis, was reduce the whole thing by maybe half.

Fisketjon wore circular eyeglasses and a dour expression and hair swishing down to the nearest swatch of denim or flannel or Aztec patterning, i.e. his shoulders. He was seldom found without a substance back-and-forthing to his lips: black coffee, cigarettes, cocktails.

Ash Carter, profiling Fisketjon for Air Mail in 2025, has to fetch process details from the authors themselves. How Fisketjon distills his work into a grab bag of lines. “I propose,” he told Tobias Wolff, “you dispose.”

“If you reject all my edits,” he warned Joshua Furst, “I’ll never work with you again. If you take all my edits, I’ll never work with you again.”

Fisketjon holds the editor/author relationship in sacred esteem. Confidential. Won’t discuss it. What he’ll talk about with reporters (sparingly) is the publishing industry, or his own methodology. That he edits at a rate of five pages per hour. That each book is roughly a one-month commitment. “Countless thousands of [authorial] decisions factor into the writing of any book,” he told Vice, “and it defies mathematical odds that each and every one was the best decision.”

One firsthand glimpse into Fisketjon’s work comes from Richard Daniel King, a scholar who pored through Cormac McCarthy’s archive, studying his correspondence with editors. Here’s Fisketjon, in a draft of No Country for Old Men (2005), helping McCarthy reconcile his timeline:

Fisketjon added the note: “. . . ‘[T]he day before’ would imply this [scene] is [taking place on] Monday, since Chigurh [the villain] killed those two on Sunday. And the goatfuck is in fact what Moss [the hero] stumbled across at the beginning, ‘two days before that’ [which] suggests [the goatfuck] happened Friday. . . .” To this, McCarthy has simply added “GOOD”

It’s not to say he’s miserly about these things, but this is the editorial sensibility tasked with American Psycho, a book whose narrator is digressive, irrational, and proudly wrong about almost everything; timelines are deliberately asynchronous, characters are constantly mistaking one another for somebody else; its narrator’s confusion is meant to become the reader’s.

It didn’t go well.

But all these folks are friendly anyhow.

It’s fine.

Back in June the New York Daily News reported they were all at the American Booksellers Convention in Vegas together.

A friend reports such dandy publishing gents as Sonny Mehta, Morgan Entrekin and Gary Fisketjon are cutting quite the sartorial contrast in the gambling desert. Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts are the normal dress code, and these New Yorkers are in suits.

Amanda Urban, the reporter notes, wore a pair of dice on her necklace.

Random House flew Gary out to Los Angeles, where Bret was staying with his mom in Sherman Oaks, and set him up at the Bel-Air. Bret drove back and forth over the hill, so they could work on the book together, until the bookkeepers at Vintage said fuck it, got him a room so he could just stay there. (“Yes,” Ellis told the Paris Review in 2012, “this is how publishers spent their money in the nineties.”)

Fisketjon marked up the book with an already honed methodology: green pen curling through the text, like vines up a lattice, margins cluttered with lowercase letters like bugs at an opera: questions, observations, corrections.

Ellis described it as “a three day frenzy of Gary making suggestions and me resisting them,” the author patiently receiving the small stack of Fisketjon’s several hours’ labor and patiently writing STET STET STET, leaving Gary “extremely frustrated.”

“I think his plan when he acquired that novel was to radically fix it. The problem was that I didn’t think it needed to be fixed.” In the end, Ellis said via email, he accepted about “two percent” of Fisketjon’s edits.

There’s no getting Fisketjon’s side of things because he treats the author-editor relationship as a sacrament. Makes interviews uncomfortable.

Slushpile: What is the craziest or funniest thing anyone has done to get you to read their manuscript?

Fisketjon: This approach never works with me, since this job is not my idea of a joke or a party-trick.

“Gary wrote me a very impassioned letter after the editing process was over,” said Ellis. “He told me, ‘You’re going to be very embarrassed by a lot of this book in five or 10 years.’ And I said, ‘Well, so what?’”

The book was published on March 6, 1991, a day before his 27th birthday.

He was already at work on another novel.

Something bigger.

Publication seems to have ended the controversy. If American Psycho had a direct opponent, it was Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Women. Bruce herself said it was not her or NOW’s desire to see the book cancelled, its author muzzled; comments abound from Entertainment Weekly to Fresh Air and the New York Times that NOW’s call for a boycott of not just American Psycho, but of all books by Random House, was an act of protest, not censorship.

You won’t see books being burned or fireworks when the novel is published. What you will see is our attempt . . . to show the gatekeepers of this culture . . . that the women of this country will no longer tolerate gratuitous violence for the sake of profit and entertainment.

Roger Rosenblatt became another opponent when he wrote an attention-grabbing op-ed for the New York Times called, “Snuff This Book,” also calling for a boycott. TheTimes was inundated with angry letters and later published a long rebuttal from novelist John Irving. “If you slam a book when it’s published, that’s called book reviewing, but if you write about a book three months in advance of its publication and your conclusion is ‘don’t buy it,’ your intentions are more censorial than critical.”

Meanwhile Bret was going out there, sparingly, and playing the role of Serious Author,

Like with Terry Gross, host of NPR’s Fresh Air. She had him on the show in 1991, after the book was out, and pressed him about its violence. Respectful but insistent. Asking why he’d put himself through this for three years, researching FBI casebooks, murderer profiles, details about Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer, “I’m interested in hearing what you [Ellis] were going through that made you want to enter this [serial killer’s] mind.”

Ellis gives a neat PR-style answer about the controversy. That it’s out of hand. The book is a satire. He doesn’t understand the outrage.

Gross is undeterred. She asks him: was the violent material something he was “trying to purge from [his] own personality?” To which Ellis answers no. The book is a novel. A satire, in fact.

Of Wall Street.

And, um . . . television.

“Still, though,” Gross working the body now, “when you’re dealing with [a narrator] who stabs somebody in the eyeballs, drills out their teeth, rapes somebody with rats” — getting him on the ropes — “there’s something beyond [an] interest in Wall Street or consumer culture of the ’80s that’s leading to that.”

But then, abruptly, Gross eases up: “I feel funny here!” Hasty, angsty, earnest. “I feel like I’m putting you on the spot.”

Bret says, “No,” consoling, “no no no —”

“I don’t think an author should be forced to explain themselves,” says Gross, sounding almost contrite as she invites this author to explain himself.

And then it sounds for a second like he might do it! The 26-year-old who’s been dealing with this shit for over a year now. Tired of it. A cautious hedge in his voice. He starts to say things like, “Of course there’s um a lot of undercurrents in those [violent] scenes also but um . . .,” trailing off. “I think in many ways . . .,” trailing off. “The violence seems so . . .,” trailing again; exhaling, “it seems so . . .,” pensive pause, “it’s so abstract,” and then the mask slips again —

“Would this whole fiasco have started,” he asks, “if Patrick Bateman was gay and was killing young men?”

And then something catches in his throat. He switches tracks with an audible wince: “The fact that I even have to ask that question just makes me cringe.”

Gross’ voice changes. So do her questions.

The interview lasts another 20 seconds and then Gross calls it a day. Her demeanor notably hastened.

Like something just clicked.

His grandfather, Red Ellis, died in 1991 and when his obituary in the local paper was only a few sentences long someone wrote a complaint saying they were not the voice of the community if they thought this man was only worth a couple sentences.

After that — for reasons related or not — Robert Ellis’ drinking got worse. Recounting, to theTimes, how Bob got wasted that Christmas and created a scene, Ellis told himself, “Okay,” still not burning the bridge, “let’s give it a year. Dads mellow out all the time, so let’s just see what happens.”

They hadn’t spoken in eight months when Robert Ellis died suddenly the following August.

He was 50.

Two years later, during his first major book tour, Bret would finally conquer his fear of flying (“with the help of vodka and tranquilizers”) but in the summer of 1992 he was still traveling between coasts via three-day train rides, “locking himself into a sleeper compartment with a transcontinental supply of marijuana” and a pile of books to pass the time.

He stayed at his mom’s house in Sherman Oaks while lawyers straightened things out with Bob’s estate. In a 2025 podcast episode, celebrating the career of David Lynch, Ellis remembers arriving in LA that week, not knowing what to do, and so going with his sister Amy to see Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. He remembers liking it, though the memory bleeds together with Unforgiven and Single White Female and Buffy the Vampire Slayer — other movies they saw that week.

Bob Ellis wanted to be cremated and so he was cremated and he wanted his ashes spread in Mexico but instead they were dropped into a safety deposit box and left there. James Ellroy, a fellow novelist at Knopf, had written to Bret with words of support about American Psycho, upon its release in 1991, but Ellis didn’t answer until October ’92. He apologized for the delay, explaining he was “dealing with sleazeball attorneys and demented trustee’s [sic] and my father’s golddigging 24 year-old girlfriend and whether my father was a suicide or not, an overdose of insulin, questions, major trouble with the IRS.” Thirteen years later, in Lunar Park, he would write about the fictional “Bret Easton Ellis” inheriting his father’s wardrobe, “revolted to discover that most of the inseams in the crotch of the trousers were stained with blood, which we later found out was the result of a botched penile implant he underwent in Minneapolis.” An interviewer for the Times asked if the story was true, and winced when he got the nod.

“Sorry,” said Ellis. “You wanted to know.”

The big book he’d been planning as a follow-up to American Psycho was delayed by his father’s death and the “protracted legal wrangling over his estate,” as he later explained to Rolling Stone, but also the fact that

“I was really incredibly fucked up all the time,” he says in a tone that is neither regretful nor self-congratulatory. “I drank and did every drug conceivable, and I was really paranoid and freaked out.”

Ellis explained, via email, that when the big novel was delayed, by personal and technical obstacles, it was his editor at Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, “who suggested the short story collection,” assembled largely from stories he’d written in college, “though he [Gary] saw it as a novel,” given the parallel narratives, and overlapping characters. Fisketjon, he says, didn’t want the phrase “short stories” on the book jacket. He thought it would be “misleading.”

“The recurring characters argued,” for Fisketjon, that it be categorized as a novel.

Novels also sell better. I asked how Sonny Mehta reacted to the “big novel” being delayed, and publishing The Informers instead; Ellis says he can’t recall a due date for the big fourth novel. “I don’t remember any pressure.”

Paul Bogaards describes, in a phone call, a similar environment. “Sonny had enormous patience. [He] understood the psyche of writers and what it took to get to the finish line and if there was an interim work he would be happy to publish it.”

In 1994, Ellis was on his first major book tour promoting The Informers, a set of 13 interwoven stories he’d written mostly in college, set in Los Angeles, mostly about disaffected young people like the cast of his first two novels but occasionally vampires and housewives, too. He promoted the book as a “novel” in some places (The Charlie Rose Show, KCRW’s Bookworm), telling a college radio station that The Informers was an intermittent years-long project that he never thought of as a collection. The position he holds now seems to be the one he shared with Jaime Clarke a couple years later:

JC: Do you work on several different projects at once? I read somewhere that you’d go to the stories in The Informers when you were stuck on something else.

BEE: The Informers [comprises] stories that I wrote in between novels. It wasn’t ever supposed to be a full-fledged novel, and I don’t consider it a novel. It’s a group of short stories, and I think it’s better to read it knowing that it’s a group of short stories. . . . [I]f you go into reading it as a novel, you’re utterly confused and you’ll have no idea what’s going on.

He’d been too nervous for a tour with the first couple novels and then it seemed like a bad idea to go out on the road promoting American Psycho when he’d gotten “13 anonymous death threats,” as the New York Times reported, prior to the book’s release, “including several with photographs of him in which his eyes have been poked out or an axe drawn through his face,” and another one saying he would be “raped with a nail-studded baseball bat,” and so they waited until people calmed down a bit and Ellis himself was just about 30. Meeting readers at signings was “strange,” he told the LA Times, and “scary” at times, but also, um, “good.” He wasn’t polished yet, is the issue, and readers didn’t know what to expect. “I get a lot of like, ‘I thought you were, like, this sort of jerk . . . and I almost didn’t come because I didn’t want to put myself through you being rude to me or something.’” As in almost every other profile of Ellis from 1985–95 he is described (even when the article is scathing) as seeming “rather shy and vulnerable,” with a near-constant reference to babyfat. Cherub cheeks. One reader, at the signing, asks if he liked Bennington. Ellis says, “Um, yes.” Another asks if his characters stay with him after he’s finished a book. Ellis says, “No, not really.”

It was his first book tour. “The Informers,” he told Jaime Clarke a couple years later, “[is] by far . . . probably sentence-by-sentence the best writing I’ve done. I don’t know if it’s the best book, but I do think that the writing is, let’s just say, very unembarrassing to me.” [Italics mine].

By far the best. Probably. At least the prose. Maybe not the story. It isn’t embarrassing.

David Cronenberg was committed to directing an adaptation of American Psycho, with Brad Pitt starring as Patrick Bateman.

Cronenberg “thought it was a fantastic book,” as he explained during a public Q&A for his 2000 movie Crash, but he simply “couldn’t find a way to replicate, on screen, the experience that I had reading the book.” He certainly tried. Recruited at least two screenwriters before abandoning the project. The first was Ellis himself, to whom he gave a few pointers:

I don’t want any restaurant or nightclub scenes, they’re a pain to shoot, so take all of those out.

Ellis thought, “OK, well that’s 70 percent of the book. . . .”

Also, I only want to shoot one murder, so take all the violence out.

“Well that’s another 10 percent of the book. . . .”

And I shoot about a minute and a half per page, so don’t write a full 90-page script, make it more like 70 pages.

“I thought, ‘What the fuck are you asking me to write?’” Ellis claims to have written the version he intended to write the whole time. A “greatest hits” assembly of scenes from the novel. Cronenberg “hated it,” according to Ellis, and bailed after the next screenwriter came up short as well (Rob Weiss took a stab as well; his draft allegedly ends with Patrick Bateman turning into a 50-story kaiju and destroying New York). Ellis invited Jim along on the tour and “we almost killed each other.”

Now, in his 60s, Ellis interviews young authors on his podcast and it’s one of the few topics on which he strikes a paternal tone: “[Y]ou cannot take a boyfriend on a tour.”

“It is all about you, all day long . . . I did it in ’94, for The Informers, I went to the UK with Jim . . . so many issues in the relationship come to the forefront when one partner is being continuously feted and the other one is not, and then they act out a little bit. . . .”

But their situation was unique. Jim was, as Ellis has said, closeted, because of his job, while Ellis (whose reputation at least allowed some sexual fluidity) was at risk, “in 1995,” of having his work “ghettoized into the gay section of bookstores,” a serious professional hazard he discussed with Chuck Palahniuk on the podcast in 2020. In the Vanity Fair profile, promoting The Informers, Ellis invited the reporter, Matthew Tyrnauer, to walk around his apartment but “loom[ed]” behind him the whole time, “ill at ease, a symphony of fidgets and tics.” When Tyrnauer asks about traces of another occupant, Ellis said, “My landlord.”

It might not have been the cause of their breakup, c. 1995, but it seems to have been a factor.

Thirty years later, Ellis would remember Jim fondly, on the podcast, and describe their separation as one of the most painful times of his life.

American Psycho again.

Mary Harron is attached to direct. She wrote a script with Guinevere Turner.

Ellis was paid to write a script, and it wasn’t used, but in 2023 he would explain, on the Wolfgang Wee Uncut podcast, why he deserves more credit:

“Everyone says, ‘Oh, Mary Harron did such a brilliant job reimagining American Psycho — ’ Every single scene and every line of dialogue [in her movie] is from my novel. It is {jabbing chest with finger} my dialogue. And yet Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner get [a screenwriting] credit and I get no [screenwriting] credit.”

Wolfgang Wee nods along. He asks, Are you angry about that?

Ellis corrects his posture. Lowers his voice. “It was frustrating.” Shrugs into the mic. “A little bit.”

But really, he clarifies, the frustration isn’t about pride of authorship; it’s about “residuals. If you don’t get that [screenwriting] credit, you don’t get those residuals.”

“So you have no royalties from that movie?”

“No. I don’t.”

He’s got the one credit on that movie that is, ironically, where the money starts and ends:

Based on the Novel By.

He finishes Glamorama. The big novel. According to Adam Begley’s review in the Observer, Knopf paid “a whopping $500,000” for this novel, and Ellis is prepared to give them their money’s worth.

A world tour.

He’s ready to be airborne, public, eloquent, mannered.

He’s being bustled around from airport to hotel to bookstore and back. He’s hitting his marks. Smiling at readers. Taking the same questions, dishing the same answers, and dodging all speculation about his sexuality. Smiling the whole time thanks to the counsel of Paul Bogaards, Knopf’s Director of Publicity and Media Relations, who planned this book’s tour, as well as the previous book’s tour, and will go on to do the next one, and the two after that. They come to know each other well enough that Ellis would feature him in an autofictional novel six years later: “Paul Bogaards would respond,” to news of the author’s debauchery, “with his own e-mails, such as: ‘I don’t care if you have to stick a broom up the writer’s ass to get him upright and onstage — Just Do It.” Twenty-five years later, having jumped from Knopf to create his own company (Bogaards Public Relations), Bogaards will be sitting at home, watching a 2024 documentary about the Brat Pack on Hulu, and he’ll see Bret Easton Ellis suddenly appear onscreen, a talking head, opining about what it was like to be young and famous in the 1980s and Bogaards will say to himself, “Oh Bret,” distraught, “you’re slouching!”

Bret Easton Ellis is still “young,” the papers are surprised to find, but he is manly and he is dressed well. He is smiling under lamps on Charlie Rose and on Book Talk. Good natured. An LA Times reporter will note that Bret Easton Ellis “often makes fun of himself,” and his PR laugh on a camera or a microphone pops out “a-HA-haaa,” like a jolly pistol in a long hallway. The author poses for Rolling Stone and New York Magazine and the Guardian. Lensflare obscures the screen and dissolves on a Barnes & Noble in Toronto, “standing room only,” he’s reading aloud to hundreds of adults for an hour at a time and then sitting at a table for several more hours while they line up to get their books signed, snap photos, and almost every night he’s leaning forward to hear some bashful young reader bend down and whisper (men and women alike) that American Psycho taught them to masturbate, or that The Rules of Attraction made them comfortable with their sexuality, or look: someone’s got his name tattooed on their forearm. (“Not ‘Bret Ellis,’” he clarifies to one reporter, “which is the name on all my cheque stubs.”) Readers want to know if he cares at all that Michiko Kakutani called Glamorama “interminable” (“There are differences between fashion-obsessed hipsters,” Kakutani seethed, “and Hitler”). The answer’s no, babe. He doesn’t care.

Bret Easton Ellis is wearing a baseball cap and loose-fitting leisurewear when he tells a reporter, in Dublin, that he was recently addicted to heroin but only for a month and that his father didn’t speak to him between the end of high school and the publication of Less Than Zero. “[I]t pissed me off,” he says, “but I was frightened of him.” When she asks about how he’s responded to literary fame he says, “I kind of fantasized that I was going to be a lot better-liked,” and a reporter from the Longview News-Journal in Texas notes that Bret Easton Ellis is “particularly well-mannered” and he happens to be in Toronto while the American Psycho adaptation is being filmed and people are saying that a Canadian serial killer was recently caught and among his possessions was a copy of American Psycho and everyone wants to know, Bret, what are you watching these days (“HBO, The Simpsons, Judge Judy, South Park, and lots of MTV and CNN”) and they want to know how he dealt with the American Psycho controversy and so he tells them about the bodyguards and the death threats and.

But his relationship to that novel has changed.

“It’s only recently,” he tells the Toronto Star, that he could speak about the novel’s “autobiographical elements,” the fact that it was “a very harsh criticism of the way I was living at the time,” that the book is filled with “self-loathing” and how “I also thought a lot about my father and when he made a lot of money how he changed.” The Vancouver Sun says Bret Easton Ellis is not only way friendlier than his books would suggest but also he is “pudgy and balding.” A reporter from the Chicago Tribune begins their conversation, “You’ve said this is your first book with a plot. . . .”

Bret Easton Ellis keeps his poise. He plays his role.

He’s gotten very good at it.

But he’s never had to play it this long.

When the tour is over he’s back in New York and he’s either single or he’s in an open relationship with Michael Wade Kaplan, who might or might not be the unnamed lover in a personal essay he’ll publish 20 years later (after Kaplan’s family has asked him to stop mischaracterizing the circumstances of his death) who’s described as being “a decade younger than me, an artist who had addiction issues that we both assumed were under control until they weren’t.” This young lover was away in Berlin for the summer, leaving Ellis to his devices.

Socializing.

Sleeping around.

Drinking, too — which he’d begin to describe, on the Glamorama tour, as something he maybe inherited from his father (same as a wallet-burning penchant for Manhattan haircuts), “but it really isn’t the same as him,” he clarifies to Patricia Deevy, in Dublin. “I’m not the sort of man who drinks a bottle of vodka at night. I have sometimes a few glasses of wine and then it’s like, ‘I’ve got to go to bed now.’”

Glamorama was a couple years behind him now and Ellis was trying to get this new novel going. He said in a chatroom Q&A from 1999 (hosted by Barnes & Noble) that the novel was “still in the planning stages,” and that he couldn’t say much about it except “I think it takes place in Georgetown. And it will be tangentially about politics and the supernatural and be much more autobiographical than my previous books.”

It would also be an homage to Stephen King, whose novel Salem’s Lot he remembers reading a dozen or so times as an adolescent, keeping tabs on his career ever since. An early hero. It would have meant a lot to him if Stephen King had liked American Psycho, but he didn’t. In fact he didn’t much acknowledge it until he had something nice to say about one of Ellis’ books, in 2005, at which point he said American Psycho felt like “bad fiction by a good writer.”

He had all the time and attention to spare for this new novel but it wasn’t working and (therefore?) he’s socializing with a heavy-drinking crowd, which is sorta fun, he’s getting laid, meeting people — although there is this one issue, a sort of “low humming dread” that pervades his day. But he can’t quite name it. So he’s taking more than his prescribed amount of Klonopin. He’ll concede “a mild addiction to benzodiazepine,” which in conjunction with alcohol and cocaine (he keeps it stashed inside his Juno-60 synthesizer — shhh!) can apparently cause insomnia(?). Plus he’s getting love notes from a stalker. Then packages. Which is basically fine except the normal avenue for fan mail is you send it to the publisher, and the publisher forwards it, in a bundle, to the author’s home address. These parcels are showing up straight at his door. And now on top of all that there’s this heatwave in late July with temperatures in New York City tipping over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. The stalker thing is reminiscent of those weeks leading up to American Psycho’s publication when someone from the publishing house had to sit him down with a manilla envelope and let him go page by page through all of the death threats he was receiving because if one of these people was actually serious, and murdered him, “Your parents could sue us.”

All this going on at once and that’s when he collapses at the gym and has a seizure — “a pretty severe one,” as he describes it in White. An ambulance comes and takes him to the hospital and he’s saying he’s dehydrated and paramedics are telling him people don’t have seizures cuz they’re thirsty and soon as he’s at the hospital, compos mentis, they start prodding him to change his clothes, get situated, because they want to run some tests.

They’re worried something might be wrong.

It could be neurological.

A brain tumor.

It was nearly 10 years since his father’s death and something about the seizure made him realize it wasn’t the drugs or the heatwave or the stubborn novel or the stalker that was ruining his life; it was him.

He cut back on partying, on drugs. He went to the doctor and decided that if he did in fact have a brain tumor, well, he should probably know about it and, also, if somebody was staking out his apartment, at one point even sneaking into the lobby and riding the elevator up to his door, well, he should probably address that too.

He was attending his final all-clear checkup at the Zeckendorf when someone popped into the office to say that a “small plane” had hit the World Trade Center.

After the terror attacks he stayed home a lot. Friends came by and one of them told him a story: a guy she knew had escaped the Towers and when he stepped into the street he was

sprayed in the face with warm water. He had no idea where this water had come from and then it rapidly happened again, dousing his face and the suit he was wearing until he realized almost instantly that it wasn’t water at all but had come from a falling body that had hit a nearby lamppost.

There was a dust cloud in the city and buildings huddled in the fog wondering which was next and a stench of melted concrete and steel and rubber and flesh and glass. “The first book I picked up after 9/11 was [Jonathan Franzen’s] The Corrections, and found myself so immersed in it that I was often as grateful it simply existed in this moment as I was moved by the narrative.”

And now his own novel was starting to work. He cut things off with the guys he’d been seeing. Realized the novel wasn’t about some political operative in Georgetown but about himself.

He sealed his balcony door against the stench of burning skyscrapers and began writing the book about his father.

Ellis was with his family in Los Angeles, celebrating the holidays, when Kaplan “was hit by a freak aneurysm at his studio in Williamsburg.”

Describing the situation (fleetingly) in a 2014 monologue, Bret says Kaplan “was found four days later when police broke down the door after Mike failed to answer any of our calls or emails. It had hit him so fast that he was still tightly gripping the handles to the grocery bags he was carrying.”

Kaplan’s clothes were at his New York apartment and it was hard to go there now. He stayed with his mom and stepdad. He couch-surfed. He dreaded New York.

And now he was thinking of just staying in LA. Why go back? He’d been feeling more and more alienated by the literary scene anyway. His friends tended to be the type who did heroin and got fucked up every night. Not too long ago he’d gone to the 10th anniversary of Nell’s, the nightclub he frequented in the ’80s and early ’90s. He sat in a booth with Gary Fisketjon and Morgan Entrekin and Jay McInerney and it was almost like old times again except someone ordered a Diet Coke, and kept checking the time. McInerney with two kids at home, Fisketjon and Entrekin accruing responsibilities alongside clout. Their mornings were getting earlier and the long nights harder to shake off.

There were “too many ghosts,” he said.

And so he stayed at his mom’s house. Bedridden for two weeks. He skipped Mike’s funeral in Michigan. Couldn’t do it. Just stayed here. “A 39-year-old man traipsing up and down the stairs every morning to the room that he grew up in as a child.”

In time he got back to the novel. But then he got distracted with a gig. A screenplay. “I thought I was going to make a million dollars and I didn’t. I barely made enough money to pay my mortgage that month. But it was instructive. But, mainly, I liked LA again. I liked it.”

Robert Birnbaum: Is it different from when you were growing up?

BEE: Much different, a much different place.

RB: How so?

BEE: Because I’m different.

In September of ’04 Ellis was doing a final pass on Lunar Park, still in the old bedroom at his mom’s house, when he reached the last couple pages — and felt his chest expand. “That was a powerful moment for me because it was when — and this sounds sappy as fuck, but I don’t care — I forgave my father.”

But once it was done he needed something new. “I was roaming LA pretending that Mike’s death hadn’t happened. Just focus on the work. Lose yourself in the novel.” He was looking for a new project. Something big. All-consuming.

It arrived in a package from his agent.

The package came from a 24-year-old admirer with a proposition in mind: he wanted to take something from Ellis’ past and make it new.

Nicholas Jarecki was a 24-year-old writer-filmmaker who’d made one documentary, called The Outsider. It was about director James Toback. He’d also written one book. It was called Breaking In: How 20 Film Directors Got Their Start. He got a $50,000 advance.

Jarecki sent his book and his film to Ellis as part of a larger pitch: he wanted to write and direct an adaptation of Ellis’ book The Informers. He had an idea of how to consolidate and connect the stories.

It would be his directorial debut.

Ellis was intrigued by Jarecki’s pitch. They started working together and, as tends to happen with Ellis’ collaborators, they became friends. They worked together in hotels, visited each other’s houses, met each other’s families. The original screenplay ran 180 pages. Of sharing it for the first time, Ellis said, “Our agents, were like, ‘This is a really good script, but what the fuck is this? There’s no way this is ever getting made!’ So we were basically on our own.”

Jarecki takes the ball. Darts all over town, meeting with producers. Endless. Hopeless. They’d say yeah, they were interested, and then back out, ghost him, go bankrupt. He attended one meeting where the prospective financier paid no mind to the eviction notice on his desk.

Eventually they found their major backer: Marco Weber.

Marco takes the reins for a while, gets some other people on board, and then one day he takes Jarecki to lunch. Fancy. The Restaurant at the Hotel Bel-Air. (Just a few floors down from where Bret and Fisketjon edited American Psycho.) It’s a white-cloth place with patio doors hanging open all day. Fresh air. Ritzy. The tables are far apart because people who eat here have secrets.

Jarecki shows up for lunch, greets Marco, he’s got his storyboards and his smile, ready to talk business but first, real quick, he looks at the menu and tells the server, I’ll have a lobster club.

Thirty-dollar sandwich.

Marco Weber with updates: there’s good news and bad news. The good news is this: he managed to raise the budget from roughly $6 million to something like $25 million. Which is great! Except it’s also more pressure on Jarecki, as director, because it means there’s that much more money he’ll be expected to recoup at the box office when they finally release this three-hour movie that (let’s face it) isn’t exactly motivated by plot. But that’s fine! Really. Jarecki’s confident in the script, the cast, confident that, after two years on this project, he knows it well enough that he can find interesting ways to put that $20–25 million on the screen and so he agrees, yes, a roughly $25 million budget is decidedly a very good thing and anyway the bad news, says Marco, is you’re fired.

Jarecki’s just blinking. Fired? Parsing the news, when a voice descends from on high and he looks up.

A server shows him what $30 looks like when you smear it on bread.

“I completely lost my appetite,” said Jarecki, years later, “for this lobster club.”

But Jarecki and Ellis were in a “fortunate position”: Weber hadn’t renewed his option on the material. “He couldn’t make the movie without our permission.”

What he doesn’t mention, in the podcast, is that Weber couldn’t fire Jarecki without Ellis’ permission.

“We were best friends,” Ellis later recalled about his partnership with Jarecki, and when Marco Weber came to him about cutting Jarecki out of the film — his passion project, the one he’d introduced to Ellis — “and I said, ‘Do it, cut him out.’”

Jarecki was, by his own account, “ruthless” in the negotiation for being bought out. He knew how badly Marco Weber wanted to make this movie, how many people were already on board — and eventually he extracted a seven-figure sum for the script.

Still, he was devastated by the loss; not much older, c. 2007, than Ellis had been during that first profile at Woods Gramercy in 1986. Hadn’t seen it coming.

Young enough to think that what they were selling was a script.

“I lost friends on that movie,” Bret would later say of The Informers. “I made them back but it was just non-stop stress, people threatening to sue each other, lawyers got involved. I was in my car every day screaming on my phone and I became depressed.”

Drama after obstacle after drama.

He wants a cigarette.

He doesn’t need this.

A two-hour cut of the movie was assembled.

Ellis thought it was . . . decent.

But it tested poorly.

The new director, Gregor Jordan, asked Ellis to write some new scenes. Ellis didn’t want to.

But it was in his contract, so he had to.

Gregor Jordan shot the new scenes and then shoehorned them into this movie that was, at the same time, being shaved down to 90 minutes.

The final product was more painful for him, he said, than a casual viewer. What he sees on the screen is the negative space. Everything that could have been there.

He told the producer, with apologies, that he wouldn’t be doing any promotion for the movie. “I just cannot support this movie in the shape that it’s in.”

But he had to promote the movie.

It was in his contract.

And so he makes the rounds. Interviews with magazines “of [the producers’] choosing.” Mostly over the phone. Bestowing on the film such flowers as, “It is what it is,” and “I guess I’m the person who has to promote the movie.”

Asked about the American Psycho musical: “I’m fine with that.” Of the Less Than Zero adaptation: “Less Than Zero is obviously bad, and we don’t need to talk about why that didn’t work.” Of the American Psycho film: it’s “an impossible book to adapt. But whatever, it was the greatest hits from the book, more or less.” He mentions people are pushing him to write a memoir: “It just doesn’t work that way. I don’t know how it works. I don’t know why I write what I write. I mean, it’s impossible to talk about. I don’t know.”

That April, getting ready for the Los Angeles premiere, Ellis remembers buttoning his black suit in front of a mirror, and asking himself, Didn’t you always want this?

A new novel had been percolating for a while. He’d observed the 20th anniversary of Less Than Zero by drinking a bottle of wine and reading the whole book in a sitting. Wondered where those young characters would be today, on the cusp of 50.

His experience on The Informers began leaking into the outline. “2006, 2007, 2008 were terrible,” he told an Australian audience in 2010: he was “involved in a film that is becoming a disaster, people are lying to you, you’re becoming super paranoid, you are drinking too much because of this, you’ve gotten involved with some pretty shady people. . . . in the business, the casting couch has announced itself to you, you’ve taken advantage of it, and you’ve been burned by it as well,” sorta dancing over that latter point, but it’s the locus of his heartache. Ellis hooked up with a young actor. He hints at it often without naming names.“You talk about falling in love with someone at 17, and how that can wreck your life,” he said on theWaterstones Podcast in 2023, “try falling in love with someone at 46. Now that can really wreck your life.”

Lunar Park was dedicated to the partner who’d just died; Glamorama, prior to that, was dedicated to the partner from whom he’d just separated; Imperial Bedrooms is dedicated to “R.T.,” the initials of the novel’s young love interest, Rain Turner.

When the fashion magazine Fantastic Man sent a team to interview Ellis in Los Angeles, in 2009, he warned the visiting reporter, before the tape recorder clicked on, “I am not promoting anything.”

All he’s doing at the moment is writing. Ellis was “precipitously close to finishing” a new novel, maybe a few weeks left, and this, according to Ellis, is where he enjoys “bursts of intense writing” and also the “immense amount of relief in working on something that is all your own.”

He’s isolated up here, standing around awkward with a cigarette. His Diet Coke.

There is a certain kind of writer that I cannot stand that is very popular with academics and with critics. [Their books are] carefully written, streamlined . . . very smooth and almost polite . . . very careful . . . [and] craving respect from the critical community. That’s a limitation. . . . You have to write because you are obsessed by this material and because it says something about yourself. Good manners can work for you for a while as an artist. I suppose as much as bad manners can.

The final product is a 40,000-word novel. Or a “novella,” as he sometimes calls it. He’s noncommittal about labels. Same with The Informers (his book) being a collection of “short stories” or a “novel” — he’d rather just call it a book. Later on he’ll resist the label “essays” on his book White, preferring to describe it as one long essay with chapter breaks.

Imperial Bedrooms shows the cast of Less Than Zero as fortysomethings in LA. The protagonist, Clay, has been given the same last name as his creator, same apartment, and the same job: a screenwriter/producer for a movie called The Listeners.

He falls in love with a young actor. It ends disastrously. He betrays his oldest friend.

It ends with a chiseled paragraph that concludes the overarching story of unrequited love between Clay and his high school sweetheart Blair:

There are many things Blair doesn’t get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know. . . . I now want to explain these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I’m afraid of people.

He didn’t like the book when it first came out.

Imperial Bedrooms, he told Three Guys One Book, “became the most autobiographical novel I’ve ever written. When I look at it, it’s almost a memoir of those years compressed into four weeks,” dredged from “the lowest place in my life,” emotionally “shattered.”

But the completed thing felt too short, too surface, too bleak; the language, he said, was pared down “to the point of haiku.” Plus he felt he’d made too many concessions to Fisketjon in the editing. There’s a scene at the end where the narrator tortures two teenagers and Ellis was bothered to’ve made concessions.

That summer he does just a handful of domestic interviews and one of them is conducted by an old friend, Jesse Katz. They went to high school together. Snuck into bars. Ellis loaned him a necktie so they’d look older.

Three decades later they sit in a patio booth at the Polo Lounge and order drinks. Bret gets a Don Julio Blanco margarita with a shot on the side and a glass of water.

The rain becomes a downpour. They’re isolated on the patio. Bret fidgets, drums the tablecloth, lights a cigarette.

He’s on his fourth margarita when Katz observes how publishing has changed in the age of Twitter. Every author “responsible for [them]selves.” It’s “terrifying and yet ultimately, maybe, liberating.”

Bret drinks and agrees and says, “Like love.”

Katz snorts with laughter.

Bret just “pull[s] on his cigarette and says it again. ‘Like love, Jesse.’”

He agrees to another book tour. International again. “I have to do book tours,” he explained to Richard Birnbaum. “I do have to promote myself.”

I don’t sell [so] many copies where I can sit back and let royalties pour in. It really is, the financial aspect of my life is in one way, it’s pretty good. I’m able to make a living off the books I write, but on another level, yeah, I am moderately stressed about money. Not to the point where it distracts me from writing. There is always a worry — maybe I don’t need another nine months on this book.

But he adopted a new uniform for this one. Zip-up hoodies and sneakers and black-rim glasses and a baseball cap and a slouch. During interviews (especially on stage) he would become irreverent, digressive, evading questions with performative distraction or boredom.

Shtick.

Harmless. Maybe it embarrasses the interviewer in public. Fine. He hates this. He’s dragging himself through it.

The shtick hits a snag during his first event in Australia. He’s onstage with journalist Ramona Koval before an audience of roughly 300 people.

Koval opens with a 49-word question that’s asking, in essence, what drew him back to sequelizing his debut novel. It’s eloquent. Thoughtful.

Ellis listens. Stares out over the audience. After a few beats, he says: “Delta Goodrem.” The name of an Australian popstar. He just discovered her last night at the hotel. He was flipping channels and caught one of her music videos. Thought she was hot.

Ramona Koval listens til his monologue trails off. “And this has got to do with what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “it’s just been on my mind.” Koval asks if he didn’t like that question.

“No I did like that question,” said Ellis, “I just need to hear it again.”

The audience chuckled.

“I didn’t like your answer,” says Koval, “so I’m going to ask you another one.” And so she embarks on another one. Longer this time. More thoughtful. He answers the same way. Later says he was about halfway through his second monologue when he noticed that Koval “had put down her pad and crossed her arms and was kinda glaring at me.”

Koval asks if he no longer takes himself seriously as a novelist.

“It’s hard to [take myself seriously] in this kind of venue,” said Ellis, “because you want to be authentic, you want to be real, but the real me really wants to talk about Delta Goodrem.”

A moment of tension. Koval says, “I think she’s too young for you.”

The audience makes wincing low-blow noises. Uncomfortable. Not liking this.

“I mean,” Bret rebounding, “guys like Clay [the novel’s narrator] are very attractive to these girls.”

Kovel says yeah, but they’re interested in something transactional.

Bret makes noises to the effect that “New York is worse,” meaning the literary scene.

Koval asks, if the New York literary scene is so toxic and punishing, why was he a star of it for so long?

“I was a poser,” sounding stressed suddenly, “I posed during that whole thing, I didn’t know how else to act, I was supposed to be, like, this whatever, this serious young American novelist, and I was groomed for this position that I was not in any way, shape, or form —”

Koval chirps, “Who groomed you?”

“The press!”

“I had a bit of a breakdown in January of 2013.”

He told the story to Vice and as a prologue to his interview with Rob Zombie. “I did more writing in 2012 than I’d ever done in my life — a series of movies, two of which got made, and countless television pilots.” It trickled through the holidays into January thanks to a gig he took against his agent’s advice, allegedly, to work on a CW show by Gossip Girl co-creator Josh Schwartz: a supernatural high school drama called Copeland Prep. He’d never worked for network television before and wanted to see what it was like.

It sucked.

In his final weeks on the show, as he described them in a 2022 podcast, Ellis would submit a script in the afternoon, and then receive notes, with rewrites expected at 4 p.m.

He’d get those done, turn them in, and get notes right back — with rewrites expected by 7.

“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it!”

What he really wanted to do was write prose. And so he started making notes on a novel. Something he’d been wanting to write since high school. About a murder that’s mistaken for a suicide.

The notes took off . . . and then sputtered.

The novel wouldn’t come together.

Later that year he would launch the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast from the PodcastOne studio.

He started to write monologues in prose.

Amanda Urban suggested he assemble some of his podcast monologues into a collection. Bret, noncommittal, brought it up “at dinner one night,” c. 2016, “between the first martini and the second martini,” with Jay McInerney and the novelist, screenwriter, and essayist Matthew Specktor.

Specktor remembers Bret saying (he’s paraphrasing), “Binky wants me to write this book based on the monologues and I don’t know how to do that.” Both McInerney and Specktor are encouraging but it’s Matthew who sees right away how to do it, methodologically, and so he volunteers himself.

Signs a contract with Knopf to join the project in an editorial/curatorial capacity. Tells Bret, Send me everything you’ve got, and a few days later he receives, via email, a Word document. “400 or 500 pages.” He’s sitting there in Palm Springs, poised over his laptop, he opens the email and sees the file’s called “White.doc.”

“I saw the document,” Specktor tells me over the phone, “and thought, ‘Oh man, he’s gonna call this book White?’”

This, he points out, was 2016 or 2017; “that word was very loaded.”

“Then I opened the document and saw the actual title.”

White Privileged Male.

“I thought, [pausing] ‘White . . . is a much better title.’”

He said as much to Bret, who conceded the point.

Specktor read through the monologues and selected the ones he thought were best, with a “chronological-ish structure that worked,” and sent them back to Ellis one by one — “he re-wrote them from scratch and sent them back” — and then Specktor would edit them, thought “not super aggressively” because, for one thing, Ellis was trying on a new style. Something he’d picked up from reading the monologues aloud. “He was very certain about wanting the repetitions, he wanted it to sound a certain way. He wanted a certain kind of rhythm. I think that’s what fed him into White more than anything.”

It was his point of entry for every book to date: finding the voice.

Gary with his pencils.

“The whole page,” says Specktor, “is covered in green pencil.”

Specktor and Fisketjon worked together in a “tag team” approach to the material. In the earlier sections, where Ellis writes a memoir-like essay about the American Psycho controversy, or how he fell in love with Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, Specktor remembers feeling “this stuff was fantastic,” but requesting, as a caveat, “We can kinda ease up on the fulminating about liberal hysteria,” not because it was bad, necessarily, just that “there was so much of it,” and Ellis, for the most part agreed. “Kept taking the edits and taking the edits,” until they reached the final chapters. That’s when Bret “started piling that stuff back in.”

Specifically in a final essay about Kanye West and the changing nature of celebrity.

Fisketjon was lost in this, according to Ellis, kept webbing the page with ink: “‘Who is this Khin-yee,’” Ellis’s chortling impersonation on the podcast, “‘Khen-yay?’”).

“Bret and Gary were certainly friendly,” Specktor says, “but there was a little more friction in that relationship than I understood.”

Ellis told him, It’s always been like this: Gary wants to cut, cut, cut and I hate it.

But Specktor saw it as something more admirable than that, a throwback, and resisted the simplification. “I was like, ‘That’s not fuckin’ true,’” that he knows firsthand, from talking to Gary socially, that the guy’s a fan — but this friction, he says, is what makes their relationship so fruitful and, in a way, antiquated. Two people who admire and respect each other, they have different sensibilities, and they sit down like professionals and hash those differences out.

As for Bret’s certainty that Gary hates his work: “That might just be Bret,” said Specktor. “Especially with this book.”

Shortly before White’s publication, Ellis received a call from the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner for a brief interview.

“Bret should’ve known that that was not gonna go well,” Specktor remembers with a wince. “That was calamitous.”

Chotiner — described as “the Interview Assassin” in a Q&A with the Columbia Journalism Review — starts his interview by addressing Ellis’ frustration, in the book, with liberals’ constant complaint that Donald Trump described Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” He asks why Ellis is so bothered by that.

Ellis (who, in 2009–10, dodged questions about newly elected President Barack Obama, and who in a 40-year career seems to have never been pressed to opine about a president) argues that Trump only said Mexicans are rapists once, “in his very first speech, and didn’t say it again. . . .”

Chotiner: “OK, but Trump says lots of racist things. We can all agree on that, right?”

Ellis: [Pauses.] “Sure.”

Chotiner: Why does people being upset about [Trump’s racist remarks] bother you?

Ellis: No, no, no, no, no. That just twisted up what I meant.

Chotiner: Tell me what you meant.

Ellis: You think I am defending a racist.

It gets worse from there.

But somehow the disastrous New Yorker interview did not hurt the book’s performance; in fact, it helped.

This was a more starkly polarized media landscape than the one in which he’d been raised. What might look, to some readers, like a relatively apolitical novelist blundering through an interview, revealing his political naivete, might look, to viewers on the opposite side of the political aisle, like the exact thing Ellis is bitching about in his book: a pillar of liberal media, the New Yorker, becoming so frothingly radical that it lured this gay, Gen X, coastal intellectual elite into a “gotcha” interview. Why? Because they couldn’t tolerate a moment’s dissent.

Ellis, in his brief panic afterward (he walked gaping into the next room and told his boyfriend, “I just got punk’d!”), might not have seen the opportunity right away.

But Tucker Carlson did.

“My publisher didn’t want me to do it.”

Years later, promoting his next novel, Ellis would explain to The Drift that the “reams of bad press” generated against White did nothing to diminish the interest of readers.

“If you’re invited, believe me, go on Fox,” he said. “Fucking sell 5,000 books.”

Without revealing exact numbers, Ellis has said that his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show sold out two printings of White’s hardcover.

“The Tucker thing,” Bogaards says over the phone, with a measured pause, “it is what it is. If you watch the interview there’s nothing transgressive about it, there are no pyrotechnics really, he’s very measured in his cadence, he makes his points eloquently.”

Ellis remembers Bogaards being less cavalier. Looking at the sales and telling him, matter of fact: You’re going back on Fox.

Says Bogaards over the phone: “I remember a lot of people saying, ‘What the fuck is Bret thinking,’ and I thought, ‘He’s writing about the moment, writing about what he sees in the world.’”

Then he’s overseas, all over Europe, where his complaints about Millennials (“Generation Wuss”) find more sympathy. “Our interview comes at the midpoint of an international tour,” writes Dougie Gerrard for City AM in London, “one that he forlornly tells me ‘will never stop.’”

Ellis had discovered a lucrative new talent: enraging young people. “Millennial hysteria!”

In encountering so many Millennials, and living with his Millennial boyfriend for almost a decade, Ellis says he found one of their most distinct qualities to be “a love of rules,” a belief “that rules offered a kind of pathway, a narrative that wasn’t . . . otherwise [there], and that all of these rules about what you can say, what you can’t say, how you can express yourself” were a way for these panicked young people to keep a grip on that “narrative pathway.”

Narrative, he could tell them, is not what they should cling to; it’s voice.

Ellis told Vanity Fair that the Covid pandemic changed his career; “the Hollywood dream I had chased for 14 years — of directing the scripts that I had written — died with lockdown.” He doesn’t explain how he reached that conclusion. Only that “I found myself . . . thinking about [high school] classmates,” going through Buckley yearbooks, listening to playlists from 1981. Started thinking about that book he’d been tinkering with for 40 decades, that nearly happened in 2013 after he visited his friend in Palm Springs. “I started looking [online] for [photos of] all the places where we hung out,” he told Barry Pierce in a 2023 interview, “[and] they’re all gone. I had a profound wave of nostalgia for that time. I started writing the book that night, and the next day I had 14 pages. It happened very quickly.”

The voice on the page was familiar — sprawling, indulgent, like a podcast monologue where time wasn’t a factor — but the tone was more nostalgic. Kinda campy. Victorian. Second paragraph starts like this:

When I first sat down to write this novel, a year after the events had taken place, it turned out that I couldn’t deal with revisiting this period, or any of those people I knew and the terrible things that befell us, including, most crucially, what had actually happened to me.

Mary Shelley over here. He’d found a way into the material: it’s not a story about youth itself, but the remembrance of youth.

He and his producer, Adam Thompson, were meanwhile hosting the podcast out of his apartment on Doheny, and after several weeks of the pandemic, when there hardly seemed to be a topic that didn’t bring them back to talking about Covid, Bret suggested they take a stab at serializing the novel. Or the opening chapter, at least. See how it goes.

Once the serialization started, the listener response was effusive, and they carried straight ahead to the end of the novel, occupying a whole episode with narration, at first, and later consigning it to the first half of the show, with an interview tacked on at the end. Ellis sustained a (roughly) 40-page lead on the week’s material, recording the text with a limited set of punctuating sound effects (car doors opening, closing) and fielding listener feedback through the comments (without engaging with it).

Amanda Urban, he claimed, was annoyed. Exasperated. Felt he’d “wasted” his novel (coming now at a rate of roughly two per decade) by giving it away like this (although, as Ellis would point out on the Waterstones Podcast, the basic $6 access for new listeners is more than he’d get for each book sale).

Over and over, for months, Ellis said there was “no deal” in place to publish The Shards, and that he wasn’t eager to seek one out.

He might have been feeling burned out, with respect to publishing, and given his burgeoning success with independent ventures, he might have been flirting with distributing through a smaller press, for less money up front and larger residuals.

But there were financial realities to consider. In 2022, breteastonellis.com began auctioning white cardboard Gift Boxes, with his signature across the top in metallic Sharpie, and a copy of one of his novels inside, for $125. In 2022 a “Signed American Psycho Gift Box” was available for $15,000. Probably a joke, or a symbolic purchase for some top-tier patron who wants to support the show. “I’ve been able to make a living as a writer,” he told Numero in 2020, “but always with stress about money, scraping by from pay cheque to pay cheque.” He called it a point of friction with his “millennial and a democratic socialist” boyfriend, who hates to hear Ellis worry about paying his mortgage every month. “He doesn’t know my tax situation and doesn’t realize it’s all a big mess.” In 2021, Ellis, like many others, took a stab at selling NFTs; at first he was auctioning off ownership of his most provocative tweets (“come over at do bring coke now”), but later in the year his name came up in a bigger enterprise, “Bitcoin Psycho,” in which buyers got NFTs pertaining to American Psycho along with a signed hard copy of the novel. The terms and technicalities are inscrutable, which suggests someone made a proposition and he said sure, loaned them his namesake.

In 2023 he and the podcast’s producer, Adam Thompson, spent almost an entire episode (S7E19) talking about his career, money, his malaise after a meeting with his estate attorney. “The fact that I have an estate attorney, in Century City, suggests a kind of privilege,” as does, he says, “the fact that I have things to leave to people,” though he also “realiz[ed], during this meeting: not that much.”

He said that his boyfriend, Todd Michael Schultz, had just found an article in a French magazine describing Ellis as “the Shakespeare of Generation X.” Bret, at the mic, echoes the label with relish before countering with his boyfriend’s observation: “Yeah. You’re the Shakespeare of Gen X. We’re living in a 1,400-square-foot condo.”

When the negotiations finally moved forward with Knopf, Ellis was struck by how much the experience had changed since his last novel, Imperial Bedrooms, was submitted (more than a decade prior).

Sonny Mehta had died.

Gary Fisketjon had been fired.

Paul Bogaards had retired (and was now going solo).

As his editor/translator told him, when he visited Denmark a year later for the Shards tour, “You are not going to see royalties for this book while you’re alive. We will sell a fair number of them. . . . But [considering] the nature of the business, the expense of books, what it costs to make a book, the advance we have to pay out . . .” Ellis, sounding mellow at the mic as he recounts his editor’s remarks, gets side-tracked by an observation: “Twenty percent [of that advance] goes to the [literary] agent, and then [the author gets] double-taxed: you’re taxed in Denmark, and you’re taxed here in the US. So really, making a living being a writer . . . it’s over. It really is.”

When The Shards was finally submitted to Knopf, for editors’ consideration, Ellis felt more poignantly the change of the guard. If he turned in a new novel, under Sonny Mehta’s tenure, the book would — as he recalled on his podcast — be accepted almost immediately. A couple days at most.

This time the feedback took two weeks . . . then three . . . four weeks . . . five weeks . . . six.

He seemed openly proud of The Shards, when it was done, in a way he might not have displayed in the 1980s or ’90s (“I believe in, more or less, humbleness”) — but in Ellis’ interviews for the book, and podcast monologues, there seemed to be a gap between his pride for the novel and his enthusiasm about publication.

“The patience required to write a novel,” he said in an interview with Brian Pierce, “[and] wait for it to be published, and then to get [it out to] readers, is just an antiquated system[.]” When Knopf finally accepted the book — which was handed to them, he felt, as “a final cut,” carefully edited and already available, in full, through the podcast — the publisher told him it would take more than a year to be published. “I was like, well, fuck, okay, why even bother?!”

At that time, the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast seemed to have around 3,000 subscribers, each paying a few dollars per month, and in 2023 its host was a full decade into the medium. He was comfortable enough to privatize it, breaking away from the PodcastOne studio and rigging a setup in his home office; better still, Ellis and Thompson, his producer, had cultivated such a rapport, on-air, that Thompson became a co-host, basically, a comedic foil with similar obsessions (pop music, Los Angeles lore). The show has a simple and elegant format and, for the past few years, has been almost unfailingly punctual in its weekly appearance (season nine ended in the last week of 2025; season 10 began the first week of 2026). Here, for an unlimited audience, he could write and talk about the topics he liked, with whomever he liked, for as long as he liked — and the audience was already invested.

Maybe that was the way to do a book now.

It’d be lonelier, sure, it wouldn’t have that collaborative thrill he’d had in the ’90s — but where were the people he’d worked with anyhow? Where was that business model?

By going indie, however, he was forsaking an unignorable amount of up-front money: the initial sale, the foreign rights, the audiobook (Ellis re-recorded the entire novel, to publisher specs, later complaining about how often they asked him to slow down, Bret, enunciate. . . .).

Finally he did sell The Shards to Knopf and, working with a new editor, shaved “70,000 words” between the podcast version and the hardcover.

And the hardcover’s a handsome product. It’s got a neon red jacket, designed by Chip Kidd, with a laterally slatted motif, like George Corsillo did for Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction. Reviews were largely positive. For an epigraph he chose a quote from George Orwell that says, “If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself,” and the dedication is just three words long: “For no one.” A change of pace in which Bret the very good soldier, the team player, the Brat Packer, the amenable collaborator with his 4 p.m. rewrites, and 7 p.m. follow-ups, dedicates his seventh novel not to a boyfriend, as he had with the last three, or to his father; no editor, friend, collaborator. A small triumph. “Thank you” for Ellis seems to always mean “sorry” and like he told his producer, “I’m too old to be grateful.”

Alexander Sorondo, a contributing writer to The Metropolitan Review, lives in Miami. He’s the author of the Substack newsletter, big reader bad grades, and his debut novel, Cubafruit, was released last year.

William, or “Mr. Able” as his students and colleagues know him, is having a crisis of faith. An English teacher in the far western flatness of Kansas, he too is being flattened — worn down by his fourth year of teaching at the high school from which he graduated, a job he fell into through haphazard idealism and his father’s school board connections. “It’s not the kids . . . and not their parents,” he explains in the opening pages of Why Teach?, Peter Shull’s earnest new novel. “It’s the admins . . . and the legislators.” Chief among the indignities the latter have visited upon him is their insistence on “test prep” as the overarching goal of education, along with the extirpation of literature from the secondary school curriculum. As the communication of his love for the classics of the American high school canon is his main source of pleasure in teaching, Mr. Able is becoming increasingly depressed.

Of course, there is also the respect and admiration of his high-spirited students to keep him going. He has developed a following among the jocks and more raucous elements of the school, whom the administration is only too happy to keep dumping on him as long as he keeps getting them through their standardized tests. He likes to think that his novelistic approach to lesson planning — setting context, drawing telling analogies, establishing a vocabulary before plunging into the full Sturm und Drang of the works — equips them with textual insights and a way of looking at the world that will carry them through life. But even this pleasure is fading. Bryce, one of his first students, a football playing golden boy and younger brother of a high school friend, has died in a car crash, speeding around a dangerous curve, most likely drunk. William mourns him, questioning the power of the lessons he imparted to Bryce and his other students to truly affect the course of their lives.

Nevertheless, he persists, playing a cat-and-mouse game with Mrs. Hirsche, the school’s head of literacy, whose job it is to observe teachers’ performance and make sure they are not deviating from the “new curriculum”: the training of students in the art of passing standardized multiple-choice reading comprehension tests. William cleverly mixes elements of the “old curriculum” — novels and poetry taught for literary value — with the rote literacy of the new standards, managing to get away with this approach through several of Mrs. Hirsche’s frowning classroom “walkthroughs.” Eventually, however, she calls him on the carpet, hands him a book entitled Stories Don’t Matter in the Real World, which, she claims, argues that there is “no clear relationship between reading these long works by the likes of Shakespeare and Arthur Miller and any sort of real-world preparedness.”

The receipt of this book has the same kind of world-shattering effect on Mr. Able that Lord Henry’s gift of the “poisonous book” had on Dorian Gay, sending him not into a life of debauchery but into a state of listlessness and despair. He becomes increasingly dissociated, going through the motions of teaching “like a high-functioning alcoholic,” coming home to fall asleep immediately, awakening in the middle of the night to watch television, then sleeping a few more hours before zombie-ing into work. Throughout the rest of the novel, we witness his herculean effort to cope with the idea that the literature he has grown up with, which constitutes the core of his education, is not sacrosanct, not a collectively recognized given, but a cultural object that must supply its own justification. He loses his motivation and connection to the blandishments of high school life. He skips out on the school’s big football game against its Dodge City rivals, choosing instead to drive to Wichita and party with his college buddy and his girlfriend, a fellow English teacher. He has a short, ill-fated fling over Christmas vacation with Kelsey, a law student and daughter of his parents’ country club chums, who will be clerking for his father’s law firm in the summer. He half-heartedly submits applications to law and grad schools, convincing himself that they will provide the escape he is seeking from the torments of his cognitive dissonance. Finally, he succumbs and spends the winter semester resentfully leading his students through skill-building exercises and sample multiple choice practice for their upcoming tests.

It’s hard to understand how a young and intelligent college graduate like William could be so floored by a challenge to his assumptions. It’s one thing to be affronted by an effort to remove the classics from the English curriculum, but for William the simple questioning of literature’s value opens up a black hole that sucks in all the certainties of his world. If The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible don’t matter, what does? If the Bard is dead, then everything is permitted. He has gone from high school to college and back to high school in his provincial hometown without ever questioning his life or values. That his conformity includes beliefs shared by the cultural cognoscenti doesn’t mean those beliefs stem from understanding and commitment so much as just going with the flow. Now that the flow has been interrupted, he must begin to think for himself . . . and not just about teaching. William becomes a kind of autodidact of everyday life, inductively reasoning from what he takes to be original observations to conclusions everyone already knows. “Good people behave in ways that are out of character all the time,” he tells us. The members of the country club his family belongs to, it turns out, prize wealth and status and might now view him as “a poor teacher and not someone who belonged here.” Highly attractive women, he incellishly opines, judge their suitors by “how much money we make.” Children, it seems, grow into replicas of their parents: “Despite her soon to be earned JD, ‘club wife’ might be [Kelsey’s] destined role in life and ‘club husband’ mine.”

Such ignorance about the world and his place in it, about social class, cultural conditioning, and the complexity of human motivations would seem to call into question just how much all his reading has contributed to William’s understanding and ability to navigate life. Perhaps the education that he and his students are so desperately in need of lies outside of books seen as fetish objects and instead in the cultivation of a critical self and social awareness. Socrates, after all, managed to bring his pupils to a new level of understanding without any homework or reading assignments, just the art of dialectic. Thinking outside the box might be the solution, but as the powers that be upend his expectations, William just wants his box back.

Luckily rescue arrives in the form of a phone call from Wichita. His college buddy’s girlfriend has actually read the evil book that William oddly has yet to crack. Stories Don’t Matter, it turns out, does not in fact argue for that position but instead examines the many pros and cons of teaching literature in the era of standardized testing, the internet, the changing job market and comes down on the side of literature. Shakespeare doth matter after all. Apparently, Mrs. Hirsche, the Head of Literacy, had not bothered to read the poisonous book either, or was insufficiently literate to understand it. Armed with this revelation, his students’ success in their pre-spring break testing, and acceptance letters from several of the law schools to which he had applied, Mr. Able is able to make it through the spring semester. He is back in his somewhat battered box. But does he want to stay there? The question remains, why teach?

William’s moment of truth comes while hot-tubbing with Jim Jr., the loutish junior partner in his father’s law firm, and three local hotties who Jim knows and tells William “would love to get down with you.” Jim toasts William’s last days of teaching and the big bucks he’ll be making when he graduates from law school, causing the ever-ambivalent William to blurt out that he’s not yet sure he’s going to go to law school, causing Dani, one of their female companions, to withdraw the hand she has been rubbing his thigh with and move away, causing William to experience another of his shocking epiphanies about human frailty: “her attraction to me was based on an untruth . . . that I would someday be a lawyer, presumably a rich one.” And there it is! William’s aristeia, the climactic moment, the pivot of his narrative arc, or to put it in terms of his beloved high school classics, his Huck Finn “all right, then, I’ll go to hell” moment, only substitutes continue teaching for hell. Infuriated, William leaps up from the bubbling cauldron, throws on his clothes and stalks off into the night. A few pages later, as school is closing for the summer, we learn that he will be returning to his job in the fall.

I didn’t like this book when I started reading it. The questions it addresses seemed like the kind of issues discussed on the PBS NewsHour or one of the topics that Mike Myers’ Linda Richman alter ego would announce before sending everyone off to “talk amongst yourselves.” A sober subject for the sober-minded bien pensant in a forum suffocated by too many shuttered Overton windows, that is to say, within the categorial framework of society’s managers not its liberators. Yet as I read on, I came to dislike myself for not liking it at first. The guileless sincerity of the protagonist’s, if not the author’s, voice, its squareness, is cringey, but spares the narrative the Blackboard Jungle / Stand and Deliver / Dangerous Minds clichés of the dedicated, noblesse oblige teacher “trying to reach these kids” who aren’t really bad, just misunderstood. By the same token it misses the rich resonance of pop cultural high school snark. No Spicoli classroom pizza delivery; no Dazed and Confused “awright, awright, awright”; no Wayne and Garth. Just William and his brooding, unironic experience of the High Plains plainness of everyday high school life. But why do I need irony and referentiality in the art I relate to? Isn’t it just an evasion of the stark reality Why Teach places before us? For I, too, think that stories matter.

So, mea culpa to this book and to myself. Narrative constitutes the world, even now when it is fragmented into short-form video, memes, tweets and Substack monstrosities. We need to know how to “read” them all, to comprehend how they make their meaning and determine whether that meaning coincides with our own. Stories give wings to our imaginations, and imagination — which takes us out of ourselves, connects us with others and other realities — is what is left of our humanity now that our reason has been fed to the machines. Someone has to transmit the semiotic gene to our future generations and mutations, show them how to take meaning from whatever form the dissemination of narrative knowledge assumes. That is why we must teach. It’s just not clear who’s up to the job.

David Polonoff is a satirist and novelist living in New York City. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, East Village Eye, and on his Substack, Tropelessness. His novel WannaBeat, detailing a misspent youth in San Francisco’s literary North Beach neighborhood, is available from Trouser Press Books and Amazon.

An interviewer once asked Patti Smith whether she’d always planned on becoming a rock musician, and she responded with a characteristically impassioned rant against labels. “Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that?” she said. “I’ve always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then they called me a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art.” This was in 2008, by which point Smith had produced 10 records, almost as many poetry collections, a play, and a few books of photography and visual art. Two years later, she released the National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids, and for a while it was tempting to think of her as a rock poet who dabbled in autobiography. But more books have since followed — there are about five prose memoirs in total now, depending on whether you include the 90-odd page Devotion — signaling something less like a side project than a complete creative rebirth.

Patti Smith has always been an oddly protean artist, so enigmatic and passionate and willing to follow her own creative whims. As a young poet in the early ’70s, she came to see rock music as a more potent vehicle for her writing and recast herself as a singer-songwriter, emerging from the early New York City punk scene as both an avatar of the movement and a singular force that stood outside of it. Beginning with the earth-shattering debut Horses, her first records stripped rock ’n’ roll down to its constituent parts and blended them with impressionistic spoken word delivered with operatic intensity — a sound that she once called “three chords combined with the power of the word.” In the mid-’90s, after nearly 15 years in semi-retirement, she stepped back into the public eye with a string of poetry collections and plaintive albums that traded in the street-punk vigor of her early work for a gossamer sincerity befitting Smith’s status as a recently widowed mother of two. The decades since have seen her become a peculiar kind of renaissance woman, shedding records, books, and artwork at an astonishing rate, all while continuing to tour and blogging/vlogging prolifically on her Substack.

The foregoing arc might have fit snuggly into a single ghostwritten volume, the kind that we’ve seen far too many of in recent years, but Smith has instead spun her story into an eclectic batch of books written in her own inimitable style. Unlike the autobiographies of, say, Maya Angelou, which chart a life sequentially, Smith’s overlap and intertwine in a patchwork of narrative and rumination. One has to read them together for a complete portrait of her life. Just Kids, for instance, focuses on her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and their time together in New York City. The more lyrical and elliptical M Train presents a series of vignettes that oscillate between the recent present and Smith’s life with her husband, former MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. The Year of the Monkey gives us a play-by-play of her 2016. Smith’s latest book, Bread of Angels, ties all of the disparate threads of her previous works together in a linear narrative, painted in broad strokes, that takes us from her birth to the present day. As a unit, the books add up to a volatile but thorough portrait of the artist, candid and guarded by turns, occasionally listless and girlish, but always shot through with Smith’s peculiar charm.

Her childhood was an unsheltered one in every way. Smith’s family relocated 11 times before she turned five, shuttling from one rooming house to another in Pennsylvania and South Jersey. Her father was a machinist in a factory, her mother a waitress who occasionally took on ironing work. Patti, the eldest of four, was always sick. She was born with bronchial pneumonia in the middle of the winter, and when she returned from the hospital, her father had to hold her over a steaming washtub to keep her alive. “Mine was a Proustian childhood, one of intermittent quarantine and convalescence,” she writes in Bread of Angels. “During the first six years, I weathered one communicable disease after another, bronchial pneumonia, tuberculosis, German measles, mumps, and chicken pox.”

An artistic and anarchistic streak revealed itself at an early age. When she wasn’t bedridden, she read poetry and fairy tales and played make-believe in the trash-strewn lots around her house. On her first visit to an art museum, she was entranced by Picasso’s paintings and defended them against her father, who was partial to Dalí. She later stole a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, setting in motion a lifelong infatuation with the poet rivaled only by her parallel obsession with Bob Dylan. As a card-carrying Jehovah’s Witness, she attended bible studies and knocked on doors with her mother (“buckets of urine and excrement were thrown on us when hostile people opened their doors”), but she left the church as an early teen when an elder told her she had to choose between God and art. By then, she was already dreaming of escaping and becoming a jazz singer, a poet, a famous painter. “Only my devotion to my siblings kept me from running away,” she writes. Trapped in South Jersey, she got a job in a factory inspecting tricycle handlebars and then attended a teacher’s college for a few years before dropping out. At 19, she became pregnant and gave the child up for adoption.

Such was the life that Smith fled in 1967 for a transient existence in New York City. Almost immediately, she met Mapplethorpe, and the two set about making a life for themselves as bohemian artists, first as a couple and later, after the photographer threw himself headlong into the city’s gay BDSM scene, as close friends. Supporting herself by working in a bookstore, Smith drew furiously and wrote poems that she would later cannibalize for lyrics. In 1971, she was invited to read alongside the poet Gerard Malanga at St. Mark’s Church, and on a whim, she asked her friend Lenny Kaye to accompany her on the electric guitar. “It was the first time an electric guitar had been played in St. Mark’s Church, provoking cheers and jeers,” she writes in Just Kids.

Things moved quickly from there. There were invitations to publish poems in small magazines and give readings in London and Philadelphia. Cowboy Mouth, a play that Smith had co-written with her then-paramour Sam Shepard, hit the stage a few months after the St. Mark’s gig. Blue Sky Records offered her a record deal, which she turned down, wary of losing creative control. She published chapbooks of poetry and wrote lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult. Smith and Kaye meanwhile continued giving hybrid performances that fused music and spoken word, billing themselves at one point as “Rock ’n’ Rimbaud.” By 1975, they had added a keyboardist, a drummer, and another guitarist to their troop. Smith now found herself at the helm of a rock band, which was invited to play a two-month residency at CBGB, where they were spotted by Clive Davis and promptly given a seven-album deal with Arista Records.

Smith had released four of those albums and was playing to stadiums packed with tens of thousands of fans when she abruptly stepped out of the public eye in 1979 to settle down with Fred “Sonic” Smith. Given their previous lives as boho punks, their time together, in Patti’s telling, seems almost confoundingly quaint. After a private wedding ceremony attended only by their parents, the couple bought an ivy-covered cottage near Lake Saint Clair in Michigan and spent the next 15 years raising a family out of the public eye. Together, they refurbished an old boat and listened to jazz records and traveled to far-flung corners of the world together on artistic fact-finding missions. Fred listened to baseball games and got into classical music. Patti wrote and communed with the natural world. “With the arrival of dawn,” she writes in a typically lyrical passage:

I would step outside as the flowers opened, the doves cooed, and the long-haired willows swayed slightly over the dark canal. I was enthralled by small things, the wonder that our tree grew pears that fell by my feet, that wild roses climbed up the trellis, entwining our balcony, that the same doves returned every spring to nest upon it, and that the morning glory seeds I planted covered the cyclone fence at the edge of our property, boomed an impossible blue.

William S. Burroughs once described Smith as “a shaman . . . someone in touch with other levels of reality,” and there are intimations throughout the memoirs of this higher order of perception. The most ordinary objects can begin to shimmer when they come into her orbit. As a child, she covets a friend’s Communion dress, believing that “it had special properties, like an invisible cloak, and that it would keep one safe from harm.” She pockets a stone while hiking in Mexico because it seems to call out to her “as if waiting for another commandment to be etched on its polished surface” — although airport security later confiscates it, occasioning a mini spiritual crisis (“I took the stone from the mountain and it was taken from me”). We’re likewise alerted at every turn to the totemic significance of a particular café chair, a bathrobe, a billboard outside of a hotel.

It’s the same with books, which Smith writes about with an almost religious sense of devotion. Her favorite works of fiction and poetry — Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Bolaño’s 2666, Genet’s The Thief’s Journal — become holy books, sacred texts to return to and explicate again and again. As soon as she finished Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, she immediately started over with the first of many re-readings because, she writes in M Train, “the ghost of a phrase was eating me.” Then, too, she’s unapologetically mawkish in her reverence towards the authors. Over the course of her memoirs, we accompany her on trips to the gravesites of at least a dozen writers and are treated to many a grainy polaroid of their possessions (Herman Hesse’s typewriter, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick).

But Smith’s literary hero worship tracks with her own hard pivot toward the written word over the last few decades. For all of her resistance to labels, her memoirs are littered with starkly candid statements of artistic purpose: “I knew then with all my being that to be a writer was what I wanted more than anything”; “I’m going to remember everything, and then I’m going to write it all down”; “I grew lighter, healthier, and sure of the vocation I had chosen above all others. That of a writer.” Fred’s early death from heart failure in 1994 led Smith to return to the stage and begin making music again. By that point, however, she’d begun to think of herself primarily as a prose writer, although it took her 15 years to release her first full-length book. In the intervening years, there have been new records, constant tours, and exhibitions of her artwork — all of which appears, now, like mere dabbling for Smith. “I could imagine life not performing, not singing, not drawing, not doing many, many things,” she said in an interview recently. “But I could not imagine not writing.” We can only hope she stays the course.

Habib Sabet is a writer based in Vermont. His writing has appeared in County Highway, Pitchfork, and Aquarium Drunkard, among other publications.