[{"id":276980,"date":"2026-09-16T05:09:53","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T09:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276980"},"modified":"2026-09-13T06:57:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T10:57:39","slug":"who-are-mfa-workshops-really-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/who-are-mfa-workshops-really-for\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Are MFA Workshops *Really* For?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>How many writers does it take to fix a short story? The premise of the creative writing workshop is that it takes a room full of writers, reading and offering feedback and working through the kinks of the story together. This approach has three obvious benefits: One, the writer learns how to improve the story in question. Two, the class develops their skills as readers and editors, building a technical vocabulary that will serve them in their future writing careers. And three, the writer walks away from the workshop feeling inspired, encouraged, and motivated to continue writing.<\/p>\n<p>A good day in workshop succeeds on all three counts. But inevitably, there are times when these worthy aims come into conflict. Take the following anecdote, from an MFA-level workshop: A student brought in a short story that was written in the second person. At the start of the workshop, the student announced that, while he was generally open to feedback, he did not want to hear any criticism of the story\u2019s point of view. The second person was working for him, and he had no intention of changing it.<\/p>\n<p>An awkward silence followed his announcement. If the goal of this workshop was to improve the story in question, some discussion of the point of view was essential. Trying to fix the story without addressing the unconventional narration would be like, as a mentor of mine once put it, \u201ctrying to make the bed while the house is on fire.\u201d If the goal of this workshop was to educate the class and build up their editorial skillset, a candid discussion of the story\u2019s narration was likewise essential. If, however, the goal of workshop was to support and encourage the writer, the way forward seemed clear: the class should honor the writer\u2019s request and limit their feedback to other, secondary aspects of the story.<\/p>\n<p>How an effective workshop should handle such cases depends on what you think workshop is really for.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>Nate Dern is a graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where he received an MFA in Fiction. He had applied to MFA programs because he wanted to develop a collection of polished short stories, which he could place in literary magazines and eventually publish as a book. The time he spent in workshop, however, did not seem directly in service of that goal. \u201cIf there happens to be someone in your workshop with good taste, and maybe some experience publishing, you might hear some feedback that pushes the piece in that direction,\u201d Dern said. \u201cAt other times, I left workshop even more confused than I was at the start.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">When I was an MFA student, I wanted very much to know whether my stories were publishable, and what I needed to do to close the gap.<\/p>\n<p>He described one illustrative workshop in which the story under discussion had a glaring craft issue: \u201cWe spent the first fifteen minutes speaking in these vague generalities, because no one wanted to get into the obvious number-one thing on everyone\u2019s mind.\u201d This approach certainly honored the goal of encouraging the writer in question, but it was not likely to give the writer an accurate sense of their story\u2019s strengths and weaknesses, nor to educate the class in how to address the craft issue at hand.<\/p>\n<p>Had the instructor of that workshop firmly believed that the collective goal was to improve the story, they might have steered the conversation toward the offending craft issue, and suggestions for revision. Instead, the instructor allowed the students to direct the discussion\u2014and therefore ceded to the students the decision of what workshop is actually for.<\/p>\n<p>Rebecca Makkai, who teaches at several graduate creative writing programs, is a proponent of this approach. \u201cI let students, in most circumstances, choose how they\u2019re going to be workshopped,\u201d she said. \u201cThat allows the class to say: This is brand-new, we\u2019re just giving ideas and support. Versus: This is reaching a final draft, let\u2019s find every nitpicky thing.\u201d Makkai presents students with a <a href=\"https:\/\/open.substack.com\/pub\/rebeccamakkai\/p\/the-a-la-carte-workshop?r=15oc7m&amp;utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&amp;utm_medium=web\">workshop menu<\/a>, from which they can select different activities according to their desired workshop experience: \u201cthe author asks a question of the group,\u201d or \u201cworkshoppers talk about what is working well,\u201d or \u201cworkshoppers ask permission to offer suggestions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Most of Makkai\u2019s students follow her suggested \u201cdefault model\u201d for workshop, which includes a discussion of the story\u2019s strengths and weaknesses. But some students lay down more restrictive guidelines. \u201cIt\u2019s rare,\u201d she said, \u201cbut once in a while they ask for something and I\u2019m like: that\u2019s not what I would choose for you. I\u2019ll be honest, it\u2019s often someone who doesn\u2019t want to hear a genuine response anyway. They\u2019ll say: I just want to ask these five questions\u2014and the five questions are not actually that helpful. Or they\u2019ll say: I only want to hear what people are curious about. They\u2019re protecting themselves from something. But they\u2019re allowed to! I\u2019m not going to force people to hear things they\u2019re not ready to hear yet. When they\u2019re ready to hear the other stuff, they\u2019ll ask for it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Makkai is not alone in handing the reins of workshop over to the writer. Many of the fiction professors I interviewed have dispensed with the traditional \u201ccone of silence\u201d model, in which the writer remains silent until the end of the discussion. Instead, these professors invite the writer to open the conversation, presenting their story in context: how many drafts the story has passed through, which areas of the story particularly need work, which categories of feedback the writer is not interested in hearing. This way, students can get exactly the education they wish for\u2014and if they don\u2019t want to hear criticism of their work, they don\u2019t have to.<\/p>\n<p>One motivating factor for this shift\u2014from the writer as passive listener to the writer as active participant\u2014is the historic flaw of the \u201ccone of silence\u201d model: workshop can be vicious. Every professor I interviewed had some horror story to share about a workshop in which they were forced to sit in silence as their work was ripped to shreds. Susan Choi, who teaches at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, related an anecdote in which her work was \u201csavaged and insulted and demeaned\u201d by a particular classmate. \u201cMy professor just sat and listened in the way that I was supposed to just sit and listen,\u201d Choi said. \u201cAnd after workshop ended, the professor invited me into their office and handed me a cigarette, as if I had just been fucked. You\u2019d never believe it, it\u2019s too ridiculous, I\u2019ve never used the detail in a short story\u2014but it did happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>These no-holds-barred workshops seem to have left their mark on a generation of writers, who as teachers have reacted strongly against the cone of silence model. And yet, when I interviewed current students, none of them cited viciousness as a problem in workshop. Shanley Jane Kearney, an MFA candidate at Columbia, told me that she likes the cone of silence model. \u201cThat\u2019s one of my favorite things about workshop,\u201d she said. \u201cIt trains you to sit on your hands a little bit. When your book is out, and a person is reading it, you\u2019re not on their shoulder, being like: Oh this is actually what I meant by that! You have to sit there and listen to everyone misunderstand your writing\u2014exactly as a reader will.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Kearney suggested that workshop is in fact a uniquely supportive environment, because everyone in workshop has to read each story closely. \u201cIf someone in your workshop is confused about something, then that\u2019s an even bigger red flag, because they are paying infinitely more attention to the work,\u201d she said. \u201cThey might have even read the story two or three times and they still can\u2019t figure it out. If I bring in a story and the class struggled to get the conclusion but they got it in the end\u2014well, they still struggled. My reader\u2019s going to struggle even more. If it was lost in workshop, then it was really lost.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Kearney\u2019s point hinges on an imagined future reader, who will come across the story in its published form and read without the benefit of the writer\u2019s guidance. If the point of workshop is to revise for that future reader, then the writer\u2019s interference in the discussion is unnecessary, even counterproductive. If, however, the purpose of workshop is to help the writer revise toward their own ideal vision of the piece\u2014separate from any goal of publication or recognition\u2014then the writer\u2019s involvement in the discussion is perfectly logical.<\/p>\n<p>The debate around the cone of silence model therefore reveals itself to be downstream of a more significant debate: is workshop about the pursuit of publication, or is it about craft improvement for its own sake?<\/p>\n<p>Almost every professor I spoke with told me that the publication question ought not hang over workshop. Susan Choi said that publication is the \u201cimplicit long-term goal\u201d of her graduate workshops, and that it therefore rarely comes up in discussion. Lorrie Moore, who teaches at the Vanderbilt MFA program, told me that publication is \u201cseldom\u201d the focus of a workshop discussion. Rebecca Makkai told me, \u201cA lot of students are just not ready to publish yet. If publication becomes too much a topic of discussion, you\u2019re going to end up needing to tell them that at some point, and that\u2019s actually not helpful. You want to kind of say: The story is what it is, and let\u2019s make it better.\u201d Anelise Chen, who teaches at Columbia\u2019s MFA program, compared a workshopped story to \u201ca tender shoot, just coming up from the ground. The last thing you want to do is stomp on it. Sometimes you do need to hear the harsh news\u2014but life will do that to you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The suggestion here is that, since students will inevitably hear the \u201charsh news\u201d of criticism and rejection upon graduation, MFA workshops need not be the bearer of bad news. But when I was an MFA student, I wanted very much to know whether my stories were publishable, and what I needed to do to close the gap. I had enrolled in a graduate creative writing program because I wanted to hear \u201cthe bad news\u201d in an environment where I could safely process it and learn from it. Had I believed that my faculty advisors were protecting me from knowledge of my own shortcomings, so that I might discover them after graduation rather than under their care, I would have been quite frustrated.<\/p>\n<p>This lack of consensus among students and faculty about the end goal of workshop can lead to chaotic and inconclusive discussions. Some students may feel their job is to praise, others to criticize; some writers may feel their job is to listen, others to offer context; and all instructors feel that their job is to support the students, but they disagree about the best ways of doing that.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">In the case of MFA programs, which explicitly prepare their students for entry into the professional writing world, I think a greater clarity of purpose is needed.<\/p>\n<p>Robert Boswell has been teaching writing workshops for forty years, and called his approach to workshop \u201cold school.\u201d He leads a discussion of the story\u2019s intentions and how well those intentions are met, inviting the writer to speak only at the end of workshop. \u201cI think the writer\u2019s job in workshop is to listen and to take notes,\u201d Boswell said. \u201cThe whole idea of giving students more autonomy is something I agree with in a lot of university things. But in workshop, I think the idea is: Here\u2019s my story; I\u2019ve pushed it as far as I can; tell me what you see.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Boswell acknowledged that some students would rather hear praise than criticism. But he argued that praise isn\u2019t always what students need to hear. \u201cIt\u2019s college,\u201d Boswell said. \u201cI don\u2019t agree with the idea that you should coddle the students. There\u2019s a difference between harsh feedback and honest feedback. If everyone in the room is on the side of the story, feedback is never harsh.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What does it mean to be on the side of the story? To my mind, it means treating the story as an entity separate from the writer, and recognizing the story\u2019s needs as distinct from the writer\u2019s needs. When those needs diverge\u2014when a writer is asking for praise, and yet their story needs a complete overhaul\u2014the workshop\u2019s first loyalty should remain to the story. After all, out of everyone in workshop, the writer is often the least likely to know what their own story needs.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>In the workshop with the second-person story, the students commented on the setting, the characters, the plot. They steered clear of any mention of the second-person narration, despite private misgivings that the story would never work in its current form.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople want to be respectful,\u201d Nate Dern told me, \u201cso no one in workshop will ever say: \u2018I thought this was boring,\u2019 or, \u2018If this was in a journal I would have stopped reading after page one.\u2019 Sometimes I think it leads to everyone beating around the bush, trying not to call out the elephant in the room.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Who benefits from this accommodating approach to workshop? It is not the students, who graduate into a professional landscape without any true sense of their readiness to publish. It is not the instructors, who must calibrate their feedback according to the students\u2019 willingness to hear it. The clearest beneficiary is the MFA programs themselves, which can continue to attract students with wildly diverging goals. Whether students seek rigorous craft improvement or unconditional encouragement, they will be funneled toward MFA programs, where they may or may not hear the honest feedback they need to improve.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t believe that all writing workshops should be one type or the other\u2014that we should always prioritize the story\u2019s needs over the writer\u2019s needs, or the class\u2019s learning over the writer\u2019s learning. But in the case of MFA programs, which explicitly prepare their students for entry into the professional writing world, I think a greater clarity of purpose is needed. If workshop is not a space where students learn to handle criticism, how can we expect them to thrive as professional writers? And if students can graduate from a two-year MFA program without once hearing an honest evaluation of their work, what is the point of their degrees?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How many writers does it take to fix a short story? The premise of the creative writing workshop is that it takes a room full of writers, reading and offering feedback and working through the kinks of the story together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32183,"featured_media":277001,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6],"tags":[21912,112267,43683,31704,89356,3120],"class_list":["post-276980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","tag-anelise-chen","tag-devon-halliday","tag-mfa-programs","tag-rebecca-makkai","tag-robert-boswell","tag-workshops"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a3q","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/mfa-workshop.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276677,"date":"2026-09-16T05:09:50","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T09:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276677"},"modified":"2026-09-19T06:55:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T10:55:42","slug":"anna-holmes-on-why-no-is-the-most-powerful-word-a-woman-can-say-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/anna-holmes-on-why-no-is-the-most-powerful-word-a-woman-can-say-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Holmes on Why \u201cNo\u201d Is the Most Powerful Word a Woman Can Say Today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;No.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Two little letters with enormous impact. One might contextualize them with punctuation\u2014a comma here, an exclamation point there, a period over there\u2014but the meaning remains about the same: a rejection of the affirmative; a refusal; an expression of resistance, even defiance. \u201cNo.\u201d One syllable with which to order and define the world&#8230;wants and needs, likes and dislikes. One of the first words that many babies utter, one that will punctuate that constant conversation between parent and child: a test, a tug of war, a battle of wills as to what is wanted, what is needed, and what is granted. \u201cNo.\u201d As uttered by women, a provocation. Has there ever been a more fraught relationship between woman and word? For women who terminate pregnancies, decline to get married, or reject the performance of gender itself, \u201cno\u201d can <i><\/i>be a declaration of war, a call to arms, a rejection of the very traits that society deems most valuable.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNo.\u201d For all, an essential tool for self-preservation, autonomy, and emotional health. For asserting who we are&#8230;and who we want to be.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>In 2015, I was asked to give the commencement speech for the graduating class of seniors at Emma Willard School in upstate New York.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">\u201cNo.\u201d For all, an essential tool for self-preservation, autonomy, and emotional health. For asserting who we are&#8230;and who we want to be.<\/p>\n<p>I hesitated at first, only because I\u2019d never given a commencement speech before, and because, unlike many of those who were in attendance, I didn\u2019t actually go to Emma Willard. (I went to a public high school in northern California.) But I did know something\u2014well, a lot, really\u2014about what it means to be a woman, and to be ambitious, and young, and to try to find my way in the world.<\/p>\n<p>The night before the graduation, I had dinner with an Emma Willard senior named Lily and her family. At one point, Lily\u2019s mom, Susan, turned to me with a question: \u201cIf you could go back to your younger self, say, six years after you\u2019d graduated from high school, what would you ask?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I smiled and then said, \u201cI\u2019m not so sure I\u2019d ask my younger self anything, but I sure would tell her something: that she needs to remember to listen more carefully to the voice inside her head, and that she needs to learn how to say \u2018no.\u2019&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>What Lily\u2019s mom didn\u2019t yet know was that my address the next day was about that very subject.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s nothing wrong with saying \u201cyes.\u201d In fact, knowing how to say \u201cyes\u201d to the world\u2014to our friends, to our family, to our education, to our dreams\u2014is an important part of what it means to embrace life to the fullest, to stretch our arms wide, to open ourselves up to experiences and opportunities and potential, even if we don\u2019t yet recognize them as such. I\u2019m pretty confident that no one would be reading this book were it not for their ability to say \u201cyes\u201d to life, in both large and small ways.<\/p>\n<p>The fact is, however, that for many of us, saying \u201cyes\u201d is the easy part\u2014a skill that we\u2019ve been forced to develop from a young age, when we learn that, to be considered successes as girls and women, we should appear both competent and kind; effortless and accommodating; graceful, not gregarious. And though expectations of women are evolving, we will still run up against certain societal conventions and assumptions about what it means to be women, and what sort of women we should be.<\/p>\n<p>As I told the Emma Willard students that morning, I wouldn\u2019t want to change anything\u2014or at least, not much\u2014of what I went through in my younger years. But I do wish that, in addition to the usual exhortations from adults that I could do or be anything I wanted, someone had emphasized the legitimacy of owning who I did <i>not <\/i>want to be, even if\u2014especially if!\u2014those expectations were at odds with what felt right.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNo\u201d was hard for me to learn. I felt like I had experienced \u201cno\u201d all the time\u2014from the principal in elementary school who insisted a boy do a job I had been tasked with to the crush in high school who didn\u2019t like me the way I liked him. But I never demanded \u201cno\u201d of myself, which is to say that, in my teens and twenties, I had no idea if the things I was supposed to want were things I really and truly did want.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">What are we to make of \u201cno\u201d not as a word to be avoided but one to be embraced? To celebrate its <i>power, <\/i>rather than shrink from a fear of it?<\/p>\n<p>Furthermore, the idea of saying \u201cno\u201d filled me with terror, a fear that what little I then had, and what little I might have in the future, would wither up and die if I did not make room for all of it. For a long time during my youth, I believed that by saying \u201cyes\u201d to things, I would increase my odds of success in life. But what I didn\u2019t know then is that, rather than ensuring my future success, I was increasing the odds that I would become spread so thin that I\u2019d forget who I was and what I wanted; that I would continue privileging others\u2019 needs and desires above my own to the point where I didn\u2019t even recognize that there was a difference between them.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>My biggest \u201cNO,\u201d my strongest rejection of convention and what was expected of me as a woman, came in 2007 when I founded the website Jezebel. I was in my mid-thirties, working as a writer and editor at women\u2019s and celebrity magazines because I needed to pay my rent. But something inside me was brewing, and when I was offered the chance to start a new women\u2019s website, I went for it.<\/p>\n<p>With Jezebel, I decided that \u201cno\u201d would be our mantra of sorts. \u201cNo\u201d to diet tips, \u201cno\u201d to sexist gossip, \u201cno\u201d to the promotion of overpriced fashion and conspicuous consumption. Furthermore, we\u2019d talk about lots of other things: race, gender, politics, books. Jezebel was not necessarily explicit in its mission to politicize pop culture, but we drove the point home again and again, pushing back against what was expected of us as women and girls, and creating new definitions and examples of what it means to be female.<\/p>\n<p>When I think of \u201cno\u201d I often think of \u201cOn Self-Respect,\u201d Joan Didion\u2019s famous essay originally published in a 1961 issue of <i>Vogue. <\/i>I first read Didion\u2019s 1,800-word piece when I was in high school, but it has had a long-lasting impact on me. Indeed, it may be in part what inspired this book, with its skillful explication of the ways in which expectations of women deny those same women their very existences, and its admonishment of a society that values women for their \u201cgenius for accommodation\u201d regarding their opinions and ambitions.<\/p>\n<p>As Didion puts it:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.\u00a0 To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves\u2014there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.<\/p>\n<p>What are we to make of \u201cno\u201d not as a word to be avoided but one to be embraced? To celebrate its <i>power, <\/i>rather than shrink from a fear of it? To assert a reclamation? What if we dispense, once and for all, with our trepidation and add the word \u201cno\u201d to our rhetorical repertoire and try to fully inhabit a posture of <i>No Thanks, <\/i>or <i>No, I Don\u2019t Think So, <\/i>or even <i>Absolutely Fucking Not<\/i>? Can we recalibrate and redefine how we think of it? Take it from a negative to a positive? How can we deploy it to decline something or deny someone? To simply <i>walk away and never look back<\/i>?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">_______________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"276678\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/anna-holmes-on-why-no-is-the-most-powerful-word-a-woman-can-say-today\/the-power-of-no-book-jacket\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/The-Power-of-No-Book-Jacket.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"1688,2475\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"The Power of No Book Jacket\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/The-Power-of-No-Book-Jacket-698x1024.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-276678\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/The-Power-of-No-Book-Jacket-205x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"205\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/The-Power-of-No-Book-Jacket-205x300.jpg 205w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/The-Power-of-No-Book-Jacket-698x1024.jpg 698w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/The-Power-of-No-Book-Jacket-768x1126.jpg 768w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/The-Power-of-No-Book-Jacket-41x60.jpg 41w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/The-Power-of-No-Book-Jacket-1048x1536.jpg 1048w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/The-Power-of-No-Book-Jacket-1397x2048.jpg 1397w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/The-Power-of-No-Book-Jacket-34x50.jpg 34w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/The-Power-of-No-Book-Jacket.jpg 1688w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 205px) 100vw, 205px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>Excerpted from <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593444573\">The Power of No: A Celebration<\/a> <em>by Anna Holmes. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Anna Holmes. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;No.&#8221; Two little letters with enormous impact. One might contextualize them with punctuation\u2014a comma here, an exclamation point there, a period over there\u2014but the meaning remains about the same: a rejection of the affirmative; a refusal; an expression of resistance,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32017,"featured_media":276999,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43092,43095],"tags":[45738,590,65498,1044,16228,5671,112174],"class_list":["post-276677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-anna-holmes","tag-crown","tag-crown-publishing-group","tag-feminism","tag-penguin-random-house","tag-self-help","tag-the-power-of-no-a-celebration"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Yx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/No-means-no.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32017"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276817,"date":"2026-09-16T05:09:24","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T09:09:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276817"},"modified":"2026-09-13T21:30:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T01:30:53","slug":"in-prison-white-supremacist-literature-is-required-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/in-prison-white-supremacist-literature-is-required-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"In Prison, White Supremacist Literature Is Required Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To survive the box, you learn to fish. People on the outside call it solitary confinement, but it isn\u2019t really, not even at a place like Upstate Correctional Facility, the supermax prison in Malone, New York, ten minutes from the Canadian border. It\u2019s true at Upstate you\u2019re locked down twenty-four hours a day. It\u2019s true you spend twenty-three of those hours in a small concrete and steel cage, and that the twenty-fourth hour is spent in another concrete and steel cage that\u2019s connected to, but even smaller than, the first. It\u2019s true that for the whole time you\u2019re at Upstate, you might not touch another human being, and it\u2019s true you won\u2019t see another person except through a tight mesh of steel wire and reinforced glass. And it\u2019s true you might be locked down for years.<\/p>\n<p>But man is a social animal, and even in a place like Upstate, people will find a way to communicate. They will always buy, sell, and barter stuff, they will always shout to be heard, they will always exchange ideas and create community, and most of all, they will always frustrate the facility\u2019s insistence that they be alone. The New York Department of Corrections calls it \u201csecure housing,\u201d the outside world calls it solitary, but to the people inside it\u2019s just the box. Social and economic life goes on in every box in every New York prison, and the string that holds it all together is fishing.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo, there\u2019s a space underneath the door about yea big.\u201d Lucas Whaley held his index finger and thumb about an inch apart. \u201cAnd you\u2019ll take a toothpaste tube and squish it flat. You know, like half used ones but flat, and you\u2019ll poke a hole through the back of it and unwind some string from your blanket and tie it through that hole and then attach whatever you\u2019re gonna attach to it, and you. . . . Like, guys are really good at it. They can like, bank it off the wall across the cell to get it down. And then, you\u2019ll call down if it doesn\u2019t reach the guy. \u2018Hey, anybody see that line? Can you send that down to whatever cell?\u2019 And this is how things move back and forth. That is fishing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">He explained that for a lot of guys, the worst times come when they\u2019re alone with their thoughts. When you\u2019re out of your cell, there\u2019s always something that keeps your attention.<\/p>\n<p>Anything you can attach to a string, you can fish. Food. Tobacco. Rolling paper. Porn. It all gets slid under, passed through, or tossed between the bars of New York State\u2019s prisons. But you can also fish an ideology. You can send the banned books that have been surreptitiously passed for decades. The administration seizes these books when they find them, but another copy will soon arrive, smuggled in by inmates or carried in by correctional officers. You can find them in every prison in the country. They\u2019re the sacred texts of prison gangs, studied and debated with a reverence that would be familiar to any religious scholar.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEvery organization has like a list of books that they would push and like, it was required reading,\u201d Lucas said. Everything was laid out, \u201calmost like a syllabus. They\u2019re like, \u2018you have to read this here. Read this next. Read that next.\u2019 It was your education, and really, it just radicalized the fuck out of everybody because it was radical stuff.\u201d Radical, but also deadly serious. \u201cPeople would be pissed if you got given this book and you still haven\u2019t read it,\u201d he said. \u201cPeople would get upset like really, really angry with you. You become a conversation in the group, like, \u2018Listen, man, you need to start like studying. Like, be more serious about it.\u2019 It was serious shit.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If there\u2019s one place where gangs don\u2019t have to worry about their literature getting read, it\u2019s in the box. In New York prisons, the first week in the box is a special kind of torment. No reading material of any kind. No radio. No music. No pictures of family. No personal property. No paper. No pen. Nothing but a cell about the size of a parking space. Concrete floor and ceiling. Steel bed, steel toilet, steel chair, and steel sink, all of which are bolted to the wall. One blanket, one sheet, and a two-inch thick mattress. When you\u2019re locked down, especially in the beginning, you\u2019ll read anything. If somebody fishes you something to read, you don\u2019t just read it. You devour it.<\/p>\n<p>And it\u2019s not just the boredom, which is hell. A lot of people inside have told me that the most dangerous place in any prison is their cell. The first time someone who had spent decades in prison told me that, I didn\u2019t understand. I thought he was talking about being attacked by his cellmate, and I muttered something about a single cell being safer. \u201cNo!\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s even worse.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He explained that for a lot of guys, the worst times come when they\u2019re alone with their thoughts. When you\u2019re out of your cell, there\u2019s always something that keeps your attention. A correctional officer is hollering at you or somebody else. A fight is about to break out. \u201cThere\u2019s always drama,\u201d Lucas told me. You have to be hyper-attuned to the infinite number of rules and risks that come with living in prison, which means there\u2019s always something to occupy your mind, and anything is better than being locked inside your head.<\/p>\n<p>Lucas said when he first got to prison, he went looking for trouble. And why not? He was seventeen when he was arrested and eighteen when a judge sentenced him to twenty-five years to life. If he was lucky, he\u2019d be out after a quarter century, but that might as well be life for an eighteen-year-old. \u201cThe only thing that helps you escape from something that\u2019s that big is something that\u2019s more immediate. And so, you know, I did things to put myself in dangerous situations to avoid thinking about doing twenty-five to life.\u201d He got into a lot of fights, smoked a ton of weed, and drank as much alcohol as he could get his hands on, which is pretty much what he had been doing in the years before he got locked up. \u201cThe action gives you something else more immediate to focus on. You never have to think about what\u2019s going on with you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He was also scared shitless. \u201cI was like 160 pounds soaking wet. I was so young. I have pictures still from those years and I was a little guy. I was from a town that nobody had ever heard of. I didn\u2019t belong to any gang. It was tough, and it was scary.\u201d So, he could either cower in the corner, which is the surest way in prison to become a victim, or he could punch somebody in the face.<\/p>\n<p>Before he was shipped to Upstate, Lucas had been at Coxsackie Correctional Facility, an especially violent prison in Central New York. (\u201cFive kids died in my first summer there,\u201d Lucas said. \u201cThey used to keep an ambulance on standby in the truck trap when we would go to the yard.\u201d) Because Lucas had strangled a man to death, the administrators at Upstate put him in a cell by himself.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">The literature gave him a new language for an old anger.<\/p>\n<p>So, there he was, alone with his thoughts and nobody to punch. By this time, he was nineteen. When they first put him in the box, he was relieved to discover it was freezing and filthy, which meant he could get pissed at the guards for putting him in a hell hole, and that he could spend a couple hours cleaning it, using part of his tiny allotment of toilet paper. Anything to keep his mind occupied. But you can only clean a prison cell with toilet paper for so long, and when he was finally done, his head was waiting for him\u2014the people he beat up, the relationships he destroyed, the opportunities he wasted, the life he took. When his mind finally came to rest, the voice in his head resumed its familiar refrain. \u201cWhaley, you\u2019re a colossal fuck-up. Your step-dad was right. You\u2019re such a fucking waste. You\u2019re gonna die here and that\u2019s exactly what you deserve.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And then the skinheads fished him an escape.<\/p>\n<p>Nearly all the recruitment literature of white supremacy slid to a stop in front of Lucas\u2019s cell. <i>Deceived, Damned, and Defiant<\/i>, the collected writings of white supremacist David Lane, who coined the infamous 14 words, one of the most important sentences in white supremacist ideology: \u201cWe must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.\u201d Lane was convicted and sentenced to 190 years in connection with the murder of Alan Berg, a Jewish radio host in Colorado. In prison, he drafted his <i>White Genocide Manifesto<\/i>, proclaiming that \u201call Western nations are ruled by a Zionist conspiracy to mix, overrun and exterminate the White race,\u201d and calling on all true Aryans to rise up and resist \u201cthe Zionist destroyer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><i>The Creed of Iron<\/i>, by Lane\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Ron McVan, included apocalyptic exhortations to defend WOTAN, the Will of the Aryan Nation. As McVan saw the world, Aryans are responsible for all the greatest achievements in Western civilization, yet \u201cAryan man must now face the very real prospect of total race extinction. Every second of every day the future for our children dwindles before our eyes in the stepped up, relentless onslaught of forced integration, immigration and miscegenation. Whether we like it or not, we are living under the dictates of a tyrannical, anti-White \u2018One World Government\u2019 whose interests are in complete opposition to the welfare of our kind.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><i>The White Man\u2019s Bible,<\/i> by Ben Klassen, revealed \u201cthe awesome power of Jewish money and how it has enabled this perfidious race to capture the government, the news media and every other nerve center of power.\u201d As Klassen wrote, Jews use their \u201ctreacherous deceptions . . . to mongrelize us, the White Race, in order to force-feed and pump the black blood into the veins of White America.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The literature arrived at a moment when Lucas was \u201cjust really susceptible to this kind of thinking.\u201d He thought back on his time at Coxsackie. \u201cThere were a lot of fights that I had that were started simply because I was white or somebody thought they could take advantage of me because I was white or they didn\u2019t like me because I was white.\u201d The literature gave him a new language for an old anger. Yet even then, Lucas knew the fights and racial conflict he\u2019d had were not the most important thing in his turn to white supremacy.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">White supremacy welcomed his rage, and that made it irresistible.<\/p>\n<p>Slightly more important was the message that has seduced countless young men since time immemorial: Become part of something bigger than himself, something noble and pure. Be welcomed into a band of courageous warriors, all of them steeling themselves for the battles to come. \u201cWe were so against drugs. Like, \u2018you have to quit smoking, no drug use. Nobody drinks.\u2019 Everybody was like, you know, \u2018you got to have a clear head.\u2019 Strong mind, strong body, that was what we used to say. Strong mind, strong body.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The literature of white supremacy promises what so many young men have always sought: the chance to become the hero. Different causes appeal to different people, but it is no coincidence that, if you swap out the proper nouns, the recruitment pitch to join ISIS sounds a lot like the recruitment pitch to join the Aryan Brotherhood. The imagined nobility of it all has lured countless people into extremism, especially young men, and while it appealed to Lucas as well, this too only took him so far. \u201cI had already read <i>Mein Kampf<\/i> by this time and pretty much concluded that Hitler was a clown.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Even more important than being a noble race warrior was the sense of absolution that white supremacy supplied. As Lucas said, \u201cBeing racist is like having a superpower in a way. It feels empowering, because you don\u2019t have to like, take the blame for any of your problems. All of your problems are because of someone else. You were born absolutely awesome. You were born superior to everybody else. Everything that\u2019s wrong is somebody else\u2019s fault. I\u2019m awesome. Fuck these guys.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Yeah, you\u2019re fucking right. God damn, this is everybody else\u2019s fault. Fuck these guys.\u2019 That\u2019s how it felt. It felt like absolution. Like, \u2018oh, I\u2019m not to blame for any of this.\u2019\u201d For Lucas, white supremacy had the glorious ability to make the voice in his head shut the fuck up. Yet there was still one thing that had an even more potent effect than absolution. White supremacy welcomed his rage, and that made it irresistible.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: center;\">__________________________________<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"276820\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/in-prison-white-supremacist-literature-is-required-reading\/cast-out\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/cast-out.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"300,464\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"cast out\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/cast-out.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-276820 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/cast-out-194x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/cast-out-194x300.jpg 194w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/cast-out-39x60.jpg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/cast-out-32x50.jpg 32w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/cast-out.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 194px) 100vw, 194px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>Excerpted from <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/3319\/9780807021705\">Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration <\/a><em>by Joseph Margulies. Copyright 2026. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To survive the box, you learn to fish. People on the outside call it solitary confinement, but it isn\u2019t really, not even at a place like Upstate Correctional Facility, the supermax prison in Malone, New York, ten minutes from the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32162,"featured_media":276829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43070,43092,43095],"tags":[17789,112236,10687,112237,3368,51779,25500,10384],"class_list":["post-276817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-beacon-press","tag-cast-out-a-call-for-a-forgiving-society-in-an-age-of-incarceration","tag-incarceration","tag-joseph-margulies","tag-prison","tag-prison-industrial-complex","tag-prison-reform","tag-white-supremacy"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a0N","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/longform-banner-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32162"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276682,"date":"2026-09-16T05:09:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T09:09:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276682"},"modified":"2026-09-13T21:32:05","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T01:32:05","slug":"what-fascination-with-ufos-reveals-about-conspiratorial-thinking-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/what-fascination-with-ufos-reveals-about-conspiratorial-thinking-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"What Fascination With UFOs Reveals About Conspiratorial Thinking in America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A detective story is supposed to end with the mystery being solved: Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot is always able to follow the clues and figure out what really happened. This is impossible with a UFO mystery, because there are no actual clues to follow. Instead, catharsis is achieved when the rip in the fabric of reality caused by the UFO sighting is repaired, allowing the world to make sense again.<\/p>\n<p>To rescue an experience from the \u201cfar and alien world\u201d of the inexplicable, it is necessary to find a place for it in the story of our life and our picture of the world. And meaning, like language, is a social creation. The meaning of an experience comes into being when a community of people agrees that it has that meaning, just as sounds become words only when a community of speakers agrees on the meaning of those words. Thus it is crucial for a UFO experiencer to find a place where their experiences aren\u2019t dismissed but respected and valued.<\/p>\n<p>When Captain Ray Bowyer was piloting an airliner over the English Channel in 2007 and spotted a \u201cbrilliant yellow light,\u201d he first thought it was a reflection from greenhouses on the island of Guernsey. But when he saw it through binoculars, he saw it had a shape like \u201ca thin cigar, or a CD viewed on edge with a slight incline.\u201d Then \u201ca second identical shape appeared beyond the first.\u201d The two shapes had \u201csparkling blues, greens, and other hues strobing up and down about once every second or so.\u201d To estimate their size, he compared it to the apparent size of cities he was used to seeing from the air, and concluded that they must be \u201cup to a mile long.\u201d The idea that two mile-long spaceships could appear in one of the most densely populated parts of the globe and only be noticed by a single pilot is, of course, hard to believe. The only category in which such a machine could belong is UFOs, so that is what Bowyer deduced he saw.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">An insane person is terrifyingly alone with his hallucinations; an alien abductee belongs to a supportive, if marginal, community that regards his experiences as real and important.<\/p>\n<p>For Bowyer, the story of his 2007 UFO sighting reached a happy ending when he learned about \u201ca new world to me that I didn\u2019t know existed,\u201d he writes in Leslie Kean\u2019s book <i>UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record<\/i>, a collection of first-person accounts of UFO encounters. \u201cI\u2019ve come to know a very unusual group of people who are fascinated with the subject of UFOs\u2014an eclectic bunch of dedicated believers and dreamers, writers, skeptics, filmmakers, witnesses, psychotherapists, former military officials, and all hues in between.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s possible to enter such an \u201cunusual group\u201d without meeting its members in person. D. W. Pasulka, a professor of religious studies who writes sympathetically about UFO belief, observes in her 2019 book, <i>American Cosmic<\/i>, that every UFO witness she interviewed had a \u201cbook encounter,\u201d when they serendipitously read a book that taught them to interpret what they had seen as an alien craft or being. What the book actually says about UFOs isn\u2019t that important: For one of Pasulka\u2019s interviewees, it was Carl Sagan\u2019s <i>Cosmos<\/i>; for another, John Mack\u2019s <i>Abduction<\/i>. What mattered was simply that \u201cat some point after their experiences, which sometimes persisted over half a lifetime, they were given, came upon, or in some perceived miraculous way were directed to read a book that put their experiences into perspective and seemed to explain them,\u201d Pasulka writes.<\/p>\n<p>For many people over the last forty years, that book has been Whitley Strieber\u2019s <i>Communion<\/i>. A bestseller in 1987, it was largely responsible for popularizing the idea of alien abduction, and for creating our standard image of extraterrestrials with \u201cgray, humanoid faces and glittering, deep-set eyes\u201d\u2014the image now used as the alien emoji. What makes <em>Communion<\/em> so powerful for readers troubled by their own experiences is Strieber\u2019s description of the saving power of interpretation. After a lifetime of being tormented by memories he could not explain, he found a way to turn them into a meaningful narrative by retroactively interpreting them as alien abductions.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne of the central struggles of my own life involves trying to determine which of my stories reflect real events and which are too distorted to trust,\u201d he writes in the introduction. \u201cI have spent my life trying to sort through what I feel sure happened to me, what may have happened, and what in my narrative I feel is suspect.\u201d Over the course of the book, Strieber concludes with the help of a hypnotist that he has encountered aliens five times in his life, beginning in childhood, and that he was repeatedly taken aboard an alien spaceship where he was subjected to brutal experiments. On one occasion, he writes, he was anally probed with an \u201cenormous and extremely ugly object, gray and scaly, with a sort of network of wires on the end. It was at least a foot long, narrow, and triangular in structure.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Strieber knows that most people will not believe his story, but he argues that this is merely a defensive reaction: \u201cThe possibility that strange beings are coming out of the unknown to rape us and steal our sexual material and our embryos is simply too horrifying to face.\u201d He himself was tortured by doubts about the reality of his memories, until he was given the key to interpreting them by an artist and UFO believer named Budd Hopkins.<\/p>\n<p>Strieber recalls being so desperate that when someone happened to mention Hopkins\u2019s interest in abduction stories, he looked Hopkins up in the phone book and went to his apartment, where he proceeded to pour out his memories for the first time. \u201cAs I sat there in that man\u2019s living room, listening to him tell me that I wasn\u2019t alone, that others had gone through very much the same thing, the tears rolled down my cheeks, and I went from wanting to hide it all to wanting to understand it,\u201d Strieber writes.<\/p>\n<p>Being convinced that hostile aliens can snatch up human beings and torture them at will might not sound very comforting. But for Strieber, it is easier to cope with such a threat than with the suspicion that he is insane. An insane person is terrifyingly alone with his hallucinations; an alien abductee belongs to a supportive, if marginal, community that regards his experiences as real and important.<\/p>\n<p>By the same token, nothing is more insulting and infuriating than being told you are mistaken about your own experiences. Children are used to having their misunderstandings pointed out, but the essence of adulthood is the ability to make independent judgments about what is true and right. When those judgments are rejected by authority figures on the basis of superior expertise, it\u2019s not just our knowledge that is challenged; it\u2019s our autonomy, our right to our own interpretation of reality.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">In arguing about aliens, people are not fighting for survival, profit, or power. Rather, they are posing the kind of fundamental questions that philosophy addresses.<\/p>\n<p>Contests between official expertise and popular intuition are particularly fraught in a democracy, where we are used to the idea that authority is derived from the consent of the public. When government officials tell ordinary citizens that their interpretation of reality is wrong\u2014that there are no mystery drones, that the Pentagon is not hiding alien spaceships\u2014this basic democratic principle is challenged. This was a constant subtext in the House UFO hearing, where elected officials of both parties agreed that the main question wasn\u2019t whether or not UFOs exist, but whether the government and military have the right to tell the public that they don\u2019t. \u201cWe need to tell the folks at the Pentagon they work for us, daggum it,\u201d said Representative Burchett, accusing the Defense Department of concealing evidence that the Department says does not exist. \u201cWe do not work for them and that is exactly the point. We cannot trust a government that does not trust its people.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As this language suggests, it\u2019s no coincidence that UFOs went mainstream in an era of populist revolt across the Western world. The media and government about-face on UFOs began in late 2017, a year after the election of Donald Trump and the British vote to leave the European Union. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence\u2019s \u201cpreliminary assessment\u201d report on UAP sightings was released in the summer of 2021, just as COVID vaccines were being rolled out across the US. Each of those historic events constituted a struggle over the power to interpret reality and set the limits of legitimate discourse. And in politics and medicine, as with UFOs, much of the public chose to reject the judgment of experts.<\/p>\n<p>For example, on June 21, 2016, two days before the Brexit vote, <em>The Daily Telegraph<\/em> published an open letter titled \u201cBritain More Prosperous IN,\u201d warning that leaving the EU would lead to higher inflation, lower economic growth, job losses, and cuts in public spending. The letter was signed by twelve Nobel Laureates in Economics and more than a hundred other economists, reflecting the overwhelming consensus in the profession; one survey found that 88 percent of economists opposed Brexit, while only 4 percent thought it might bring benefits. Yet when Britons went to the polls two days later, almost 52 percent voted Leave.<\/p>\n<p>A similar populist backlash drove the American response to COVID-19. In 2020, as the pandemic paralyzed everyday life in the US, the share of Americans who said they would get a vaccine once it became available dropped sharply over the course of the year, from 72 percent in April to 48 percent in October. The decline reflected growing mistrust of public health experts who had fought the pandemic with unpopular measures like lockdowns, school closures, and mask mandates. President Trump fueled suspicion of vaccines whose development his own administration had funded through Operation Warp Speed, publicly musing that the COVID virus could be fought by disinfectants or by taking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine.<\/p>\n<p>On social media, people encouraged one another to turn to ivermectin, an anti-parasite medicine mainly used for deworming horses, as a cure for COVID. Doctors were baffled by the craze: \u201cIt\u2019s hard to understand why people would turn down an FDA-approved COVID preventative in favor of a treatment that\u2019s not only unapproved but has a large body of evidence showing it doesn\u2019t work,\u201d one pediatrician told NBC News in 2021.<\/p>\n<p>It becomes easier to understand once we recognize a major driver of vaccine resistance is expertise resistance\u2014refusal to listen to experts simply because they claim to be experts. In part this is a reaction to the way expert guidance sometimes turns out to be wrong or exaggerated. In the end, Brexit wasn\u2019t as damaging for Britain as many economists warned in 2016. Long-term school closures did little to reduce the spread of COVID, while doing significant damage to student learning and mental health.<\/p>\n<p>When it comes to vaccines, it\u2019s a different story. There is no doubt that COVID vaccines were safe and effective, saving lives while helping to bring the pandemic to an end. Yet in May 2023, when they had been available for about two years, a Pew Research Center survey found that only 62 percent of the public believed that the benefits of COVID vaccines outweighed the risks. Such mistrust of medical authorities has become a potent political force, and anti-vaxxers who want to \u201cMake America Healthy Again\u201d were a key part of President Trump\u2019s 2024 coalition. They were rewarded when Trump appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the country\u2019s most prominent vaccine skeptics, as secretary of health and human services.<\/p>\n<p>The COVID vaccine debate recapitulated themes that have been familiar to UFO believers for decades. There is the suspicion that the government is hiding evidence, whether about the origin of the coronavirus or \u201cnonhuman biologics\u201d; the conviction that mainstream science is obstinately narrow-minded, if not actively corrupt; the belief that official lies are omnipresent, yet can be penetrated by anyone willing to do some online research.<\/p>\n<p>So it makes perfect sense that these forms of expertise resistance tend to go together. A study published in 2022 by psychologists at Ohio State University found that COVID skepticism functioned as a \u201cgateway drug\u201d for other kinds of conspiracy theories. People who agreed in June 2020 with the statement \u201cCOVID-19 is intentionally presented as dangerous in order to mislead the public\u201d were more likely to agree in later surveys that \u201csome UFO sightings and rumors are planned or staged in order to distract the public from real alien contact.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the stakes in these two issues are highly unequal. A parent\u2019s refusal to vaccinate could lead to a child getting COVID or measles; a parent\u2019s belief that UFOs exist does not heighten a child\u2019s chances of being abducted by aliens. It is this purely theoretical quality that makes the debate over UFOs so instructive. In arguing about aliens, people are not fighting for survival, profit, or power. Rather, they are posing the kind of fundamental questions that philosophy addresses: What is real? How do we know? And who gets to decide?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">_______________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"276683\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/what-fascination-with-ufos-reveals-about-conspiratorial-thinking-in-america\/we-want-to-believe\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/we-want-to-believe.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,900\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"we want to believe\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/we-want-to-believe.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-276683\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/we-want-to-believe-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/we-want-to-believe-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/we-want-to-believe-40x60.jpg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/we-want-to-believe-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/we-want-to-believe.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>From<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781967190164\">We Want to Believe: How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters<\/a> <em>by Adam Kirsch. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Published by Columbia Global Reports.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A detective story is supposed to end with the mystery being solved: Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot is always able to follow the clues and figure out what really happened. This is impossible with a UFO mystery, because there are<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1560,"featured_media":276701,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43092,43095,43444,43445],"tags":[6857,105662,16852,25761,13527,29027,112175],"class_list":["post-276682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-newsandculture","category-politics","category-science","category-technology","tag-adam-kirsch","tag-alien-abduction","tag-aliens","tag-columbia-global-reports","tag-conspiracy-theories","tag-ufos","tag-we-want-to-believe-how-aliens-went-mainstream-and-why-it-matters","story-type-conspiracy-theories"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19YC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ufo-1502376302Ykd-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1560"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276872,"date":"2026-09-16T05:06:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T09:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276872"},"modified":"2026-09-13T06:43:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T10:43:38","slug":"embodied-unbodied-and-the-body-destroyed-five-books-about-the-body","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/embodied-unbodied-and-the-body-destroyed-five-books-about-the-body\/","title":{"rendered":"Embodied, Unbodied, and the Body Destroyed: Five Books About the Body"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In undergrad, I took a few creative writing classes, and as I was trying to figure out the stories I wanted to write, the things I wanted to focus on, I kept coming back to the body. As I read and as I wrote, I kept thinking, \u201cwhere is the body in all of this?\u201d What was the body doing, how was it moving, where and when did it excrete and vomit and laze and bleed, move minutely, stay still impossibly? So, I took up the mantel to tell the body\u2019s story. I placed myself in the bodies that I created. The body became my everything. It became my whole thing. And even after leaving those classes, I couldn\u2019t stop the fascination. There was no turning it off and no going back. And now, when I come upon books that are preoccupied with the body, I am entranced. Tormented bodies, changed bodies, possessed bodies, vacated bodies, manufactured bodies. All bodies in their myriad forms. They\u2019re my quiet obsession. Here are some books that have an entrancing focus on the body.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"276873\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/embodied-unbodied-and-the-body-destroyed-five-books-about-the-body\/blackouts\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/blackouts.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"600,926\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"blackouts\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/blackouts.jpeg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-276873 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/blackouts-194x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/blackouts-194x300.jpeg 194w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/blackouts-39x60.jpeg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/blackouts-32x50.jpeg 32w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/blackouts.jpeg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 194px) 100vw, 194px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Justin Torres, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/blackouts-a-novel-justin-torres\/c801427e59725682?ean=9781250338068&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i>Blackouts<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The joy of <i>Blackouts <\/i>by Justin Torres is that you get actual bodies on the page. Images populate the book, and because <i>Blackouts <\/i>is a book that features a book inside its pages \u2013 those images have layered meanings. The book within <i>Blackouts <\/i>is called <i>Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns<\/i>, a real book by George W. Henry who, along with other straight scientists, essentially stole the groundbreaking work of queer journalist and researcher Jan Gay. That book is given to our protagonist by his dying mentor of sorts. The book itself has been heavily redacted. So, we have the images of researched queer bodies that have been stolen by straight scientists, and then we have the body of work, changed and manipulated. I am intrigued by the idea of how much reproductions of ourselves <i>are<\/i> ourselves, and what does it mean for those reproductions to be taken, misrepresented?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"276874\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/embodied-unbodied-and-the-body-destroyed-five-books-about-the-body\/sing-unburied-sing-5\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sing-unburied-sing.jpeg\" data-orig-size=\"600,914\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"sing unburied sing\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sing-unburied-sing.jpeg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-276874 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sing-unburied-sing-197x300.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"197\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sing-unburied-sing-197x300.jpeg 197w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sing-unburied-sing-39x60.jpeg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sing-unburied-sing-33x50.jpeg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/sing-unburied-sing.jpeg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 197px) 100vw, 197px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Jesmyn Ward, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/sing-unburied-sing-a-novel-jesmyn-ward\/3c3637f88ea3939b?ean=9781501126079&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i>Sing, Unburied, Sing<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Bodies are tormented throughout <i>Sing, Unburied, Sing<\/i>. Set in Mississippi, Ward chronicles a family dealing with loss, much of it caused by racism and its child: brutal violence. It is the unbodied, the ghosts, in particular that really make the novel sing. They are history that is not to be refused, that lingers because the unjustness done to them demands it. A world that allows \u2013 that causes \u2013 such atrocities deserves its haunting and the agonized psyche that comes with it: \u201cI washed my hands every day, Jojo. But that damn blood ain\u2019t never come out. Hold my hands up to my face, I can smell it under my skin.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"276875\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/embodied-unbodied-and-the-body-destroyed-five-books-about-the-body\/helpmeet\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/helpmeet.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,928\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"helpmeet\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/helpmeet.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-276875 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/helpmeet-194x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/helpmeet-194x300.jpg 194w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/helpmeet-39x60.jpg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/helpmeet-32x50.jpg 32w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/helpmeet.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 194px) 100vw, 194px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Naben Ruthnum, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/helpmeet-naben-ruthnum\/24656bfbbadfafc1?ean=9781988964386&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i>Helpmeet<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not one to typically read horror, as I\u2019m a baby and prone to nightmares, but I read this with a friend and <i>lived <\/i>for the descriptions of a decaying body. The horror here is understated, observational. Emotions are near entirely removed, and we get to watch as if this is a kind of Cronenberg directed nature documentary. Besides the beauty and preciseness of language describing a deteriorating body, there\u2019s also the quiet contemplation of the characters affected. There\u2019s the crumbling husband, who makes you consider what you\u2019d do if your body so viciously revolted against you. And then there\u2019s the wife, who takes care of her husband. How do you bear watching a live decomposition? What must you do to survive that?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"276876\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/embodied-unbodied-and-the-body-destroyed-five-books-about-the-body\/the-echo-wife\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-echo-wife.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,912\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"the echo wife\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-echo-wife.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-276876 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-echo-wife-197x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"197\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-echo-wife-197x300.jpg 197w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-echo-wife-39x60.jpg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-echo-wife-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-echo-wife.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 197px) 100vw, 197px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Sarah Gailey, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/the-echo-wife-sarah-gailey\/697e370009a696ac?ean=9781250174673&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i>The Echo Wife<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>What makes a person themselves? Is it their experiences, is it their memories, is it their body, their make up? What if all that is replicated, in as much as it can be replicated? What if the scars on your body were copied along with the memories attached to them? Is that new person, thing, or entity \u2013 are they you? <i>The Echo Wife <\/i>explores what make us <i>us<\/i> as we follow Evelyn Caldwell whose award-winning research has nefariously resulted in a clone of herself named Martine. Martine was created by Evelyn\u2019s ex-husband in order to get the family that he couldn\u2019t get from Evelyn. When he gets Martine pregnant, which should be impossible and is most definitely illegal, more questions surrounding personhood arise. Books that explore the autonomy of clones and similarly created beings always invite fascinating philosophical questions and debate. Self-determination, bodily autonomy, consent, government control over bodies, misogyny, etc. What grips me with this book is the question it poses about responsibility. Would you feel responsible for something made of yourself, even if it was made without your knowledge or consent. Does that thing created from a part of you belong to you in some way? When does it become not yours? <i>Can it <\/i>become not yours?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"276877\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/embodied-unbodied-and-the-body-destroyed-five-books-about-the-body\/frankenstein-in-baghdad-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/frankenstein-in-baghdad.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"600,920\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;1&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"frankenstein in baghdad\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/frankenstein-in-baghdad.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-276877 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/frankenstein-in-baghdad-196x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"196\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/frankenstein-in-baghdad-196x300.jpg 196w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/frankenstein-in-baghdad-39x60.jpg 39w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/frankenstein-in-baghdad-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/frankenstein-in-baghdad.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 196px) 100vw, 196px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Ahmed Saadawi, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/frankenstein-in-baghdad-a-novel-ahmed-saadawi\/89b49d6a62455bb5?ean=9780143128793&amp;bkshp-astro=t\"><i>Frankenstein in Baghdad<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><i>Frankenstein in Baghdad<\/i> takes the classic, <i>Frankenstein <\/i>by Mary Shelley, to the U.S. occupied city of Baghdad, and presents us with Hadi, a scavenger, a liar, and the man who creates the Whatitsname, the stitched together body of people who died in bomb attacks. Hadi\u2019s reasoning for his creation of the Whatitsname is for the victims to get a proper burial. By combining the pieces of bodies he finds, and turning them into a complete body, he concludes that the government will have to recognize the parts as people. Maybe even more than Shelley\u2019s <i>Frankenstein<\/i>, <i>Frankenstein in Baghdad<\/i>, truly makes one consider what makes a person a person. If my arm is by itself, the rest of my body lost to it, is it still me? Does some essential element of myself reside in it when it\u2019s left alone? Each body part that makes up the Whatitsname seem to have some element of the person it was once apart of still in it. The Whatitsname becomes a sort of vigilante, getting revenge on those that harmed the parts of itself. But the Whatitsname takes on goals of its own, as it needs more flesh in order to survive. And all of this is wrapped in a story that feels like an epic, with epithets for the wide cast of characters, and a fluid and spiraling movement through time and in and out of points of views.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: center;\">__________________________________<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"276878\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/embodied-unbodied-and-the-body-destroyed-five-books-about-the-body\/desperate-bodies\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/desperate-bodies.jpg\" data-orig-size=\"997,1493\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"desperate bodies\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/desperate-bodies-684x1024.jpg\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-276878 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/desperate-bodies-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/desperate-bodies-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/desperate-bodies-684x1024.jpg 684w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/desperate-bodies-768x1150.jpg 768w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/desperate-bodies-40x60.jpg 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/desperate-bodies-33x50.jpg 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/desperate-bodies.jpg 997w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/desperate-bodies\/17c9f6fd011e1756?ean=9780802166708&amp;next=t\">Desperate Bodies<\/a>\u00a0<em>by Lydia Mathis is available from Roxane Gay Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In undergrad, I took a few creative writing classes, and as I was trying to figure out the stories I wanted to write, the things I wanted to focus on, I kept coming back to the body. As I read<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32171,"featured_media":276879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6,43287,43092,43135],"tags":[32535,85420,112244,32536,112243,11870,22319,112214,32919,77065,45543,31204,66742],"class_list":["post-276872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-health","category-newsandculture","category-readinglists","tag-ahmed-saadawi","tag-blackouts","tag-desperate-bodies","tag-frankenstein-in-baghdad","tag-helpmeet","tag-jesmyn-ward","tag-justin-torres","tag-lydia-mathis","tag-naben-ruthnum","tag-roxane-gay-books","tag-sarah-gailey","tag-sing-unburied-sing","tag-the-echo-wife"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a1G","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/right-sidebar-banner-images-3.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32171"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277051,"date":"2026-09-15T14:00:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T18:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277051"},"modified":"2026-09-14T15:41:44","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T19:41:44","slug":"heres-the-longlist-for-the-2026-national-book-award-for-translated-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/heres-the-longlist-for-the-2026-national-book-award-for-translated-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Literature."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today, the <a class=\"external\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalbook.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Book Foundation<\/a> announced the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Literature. These ten titles were selected from a pool of 159 books submitted for consideration by their publishers. This year\u2019s judges for Translated Literature are Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Javier Garc\u00eda del Moral, John Keene, Christopher Merrill (Chair), and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.<\/p>\n<p>The finalists in all categories will be announced on Tuesday, October 6, and the winners revealed at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 18.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, here\u2019s the 2026 Translated Literature longlist:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Egana Djabbarova, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781954404410\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">My Dreadful Body<\/a><\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nTranslated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden<br \/>\nNew Vessel Press<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>\u00c1lvaro Enrigue, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593084076\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Now I Surrender<\/a><\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nTranslated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer<br \/>\nRiverhead Books \/ Penguin Random House<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Karim Kattan, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781632064332\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Eden at Dawn<\/a><\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nTranslated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman<br \/>\nRestless Books<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Karl Ove Knausgaard, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593832806\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The School of Night<\/a><\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nTranslated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken<br \/>\nPenguin Press \/ Penguin Random House<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Ping Lu, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781642861679\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">To the East of the East<\/a><\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nTranslated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang<br \/>\nWorld Editions<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Vicente Luis Mora, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781954276529\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Centroeuropa<\/a><\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nTranslated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery<br \/>\nBellevue Literary Press<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Intan Paramaditha, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9798889662129\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Night of a Thousand Hells<\/a><\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nTranslated from the Indonesian by Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Tsao<br \/>\nEuropa Editions<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781635424706\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Pure Men<\/a><\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nTranslated from the French by Lara Vergnaud<br \/>\nOther Press<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Maria Stepanova, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780811239400\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Disappearing Act<\/a><\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nTranslated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale<br \/>\nNew Directions Publishing<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Samar Yazbek, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781635426120\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza<\/a><\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nTranslated from the Arabic by Leri Price<br \/>\nOther Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today, the National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Literature. These ten titles were selected from a pool of 159 books submitted for consideration by their publishers. This year\u2019s judges for Translated Literature<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":277053,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43201,43092,43646],"tags":[112283,4503,90320,21825],"class_list":["post-277051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-newsandculture","category-the-hub","tag-2026-national-book-awards","tag-national-book-awards","tag-national-book-awards-longlist","tag-translated-literature"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a4z","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/nba-longlist-TL.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277046,"date":"2026-09-15T10:00:40","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T14:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277046"},"modified":"2026-09-15T10:01:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T14:01:22","slug":"heres-the-longlist-for-the-2026-national-book-award-for-young-peoples-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/heres-the-longlist-for-the-2026-national-book-award-for-young-peoples-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Young People\u2019s Literature."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today, the <a class=\"external\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalbook.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">National Book Foundation<\/a> announced the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Young People\u2019s Literature. These ten titles were selected from a pool of 290 books submitted for consideration by their publishers. This year\u2019s judges for Young People\u2019s Literature are Edith Campbell, Brandy Colbert (Chair), Tricia Ebarvia, Jarrett J. Krosoczka, and Anne Ursu.<\/p>\n<p>The finalists in all categories will be announced on Tuesday, October 6, and the winners revealed at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 18.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, here\u2019s the 2026 Young People\u2019s Literature longlist:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Delali Adjoa, <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781682638408\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em><strong>The Free Verse Society<\/strong><\/em><\/a><br \/>\nPeachtree Teen \/ Peachtree Publishing<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Elana K. Arnold, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780062990884\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Holloway<\/em><\/a><\/strong><br \/>\nClarion Books \/ HarperCollins Publishers<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>T. A. Chan, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593693742\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Celestial Seas<\/em><\/a><\/strong><br \/>\nViking Books for Young Readers \/ Penguin Random House<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Tae Keller, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593485583\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>When Tomorrow Burns<\/em><\/a><\/strong><br \/>\nRandom House Books for Young Readers \/ Penguin Random House<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Keala Kendall, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9798217117963\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic<\/em><\/a><\/strong><br \/>\nRandom House Books for Young Readers \/ Penguin Random House<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593710920\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America<\/em><\/a><\/strong><br \/>\nKnopf Books for Young Readers \/ Penguin Random House<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Chanel Miller, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593624555\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Moon Without Stars<\/em><\/a><\/strong><br \/>\nPhilomel Books \/ Penguin Random House<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Eric Darnell Pritchard and Shannon Wright, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781419768866\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Clothes to Make You Smile: Patrick Kelly Designs His Dreams<\/em><\/a><\/strong><br \/>\nAbrams Books for Young Readers \/ Abrams<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Julian Randall, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781250882059\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Shook<\/em><\/a><\/strong><br \/>\nHenry Holt and Company (BYR) \/ Macmillan Publishers<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593704721\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Life on the Moon<\/em><\/a><\/strong><br \/>\nKnopf Books for Young Readers \/ Penguin Random House<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today, the National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Young People\u2019s Literature. These ten titles were selected from a pool of 290 books submitted for consideration by their publishers. This year\u2019s judges for Young<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":277049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43201,43092,43646],"tags":[112283,4503,90320,33150],"class_list":["post-277046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-newsandculture","category-the-hub","tag-2026-national-book-awards","tag-national-book-awards","tag-national-book-awards-longlist","tag-young-peoples-literature"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a4u","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/nba-longlist-YPL.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277036,"date":"2026-09-15T06:30:48","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T10:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277036"},"modified":"2026-09-15T09:10:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T13:10:01","slug":"lit-hub-daily-september-15-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-september-15-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: September 15, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"caption\"> TODAY: In 1889, Claude McKay is born. <\/span>\n<ul>\n<li>Don&#8217;t have time to read all those fall reading lists? That&#8217;s okay. We read them for you. Here&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-ultimate-fall-2026-reading-list\/\">the Ultimate Fall Reading List.<\/a> | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/readinglists\/\">Reading Lists<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Gabe Bullard explores <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-conveniences-i-used-to-write-a-book-about-inconvenience-definitely-not-ai\/\">the detrimental nature of convenience<\/a> (after writing a book about inconvenience). | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/craft-and-advice\/\">Craft<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/emily-st-john-mandel-on-writing-a-novel-of-dystopian-counterlives\/\">Emily St. John Mandel talks to Jane Ciabattari<\/a> about dystopia and <em>Exit Party<\/em>: &#8220;To me, the doppelgangers are an embodiment of that counterlife: what if another of those versions of you were to suddenly appear before you?&#8221; | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/in-conversation\/\">In Conversation<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Youssef Rakha considers <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-the-orientalism-and-imperial-gaze-of-western-horror-films\/\">the Orientalism of Lee Cronin\u2019s <em>The Mummy<\/em><\/a> after watching it in Cairo. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/film-and-tv\/\">Film<\/a><\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I love New York; it\u2019s my home now. But Moscow was the city I loved first. I may never be able to go there again.&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-falling-out-of-love-with-moscow\/\">On coming to terms with modern Russia.<\/a> | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/politics\/\">Politics<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Titles by Emily St. John Mandel, Leigh Bardugo, Kate Atkinson and more are among <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/emily-st-john-mandel-leigh-bardugo-kate-atkinson-and-more-20-new-books-out-today\/\">the 20 new books out today<\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/readinglists\/\">Reading Lists<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/how-madeleine-thien-organizes-her-bookshelves-among-other-things\/\">How does Madeleine Thien organize her bookshelves?<\/a> The author answers this and other questions. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/craft-and-advice\/\">Craft<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Sun Yung Shin reflects on family, identity, and <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/trying-to-look-into-the-mirror-of-my-past-as-a-korean-adoptee-in-the-united-states\/\">being a Korean adoptee in the United States<\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/newsandculture\/memoir\/\">Memoir<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Jim Shepard, Paisley Rekdal, Emily Ogden and more authors with new books <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-asks-5-authors-7-questions-no-wrong-answers-september-2026\/\">answer our questions about literary life<\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/craftandcriticism\/in-conversation\/\">In Conversation<\/a><\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Flynn and Miss Ogilvie had been given no part to play in the blind judging of the Festival Cake.&#8221; Read from <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/our-noble-selves\/\">Kate Atkinson&#8217;s new novel, <em>Our Noble Selves<\/em><\/a>. | Lit Hub <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/category\/fictionandpoetry\/from-the-novel\/\">Fiction<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\u201cIf we ever reached a point of total automation, Weil argued, humans would destroy themselves out of boredom and restlessness.\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2026\/09\/24\/wishing-it-so-meghan-ogieblyn\/\">Meghan O\u2019Gieblyn on what Simone Weil and Arthur Schopenhauer understood about the individual<\/a>. | New York Review of Books<\/li>\n<li>Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor <a href=\"https:\/\/www.culturedmag.com\/article\/2026\/09\/10\/literature-naomi-klein-astra-taylor-end-times-fascism\/\">go deep on Trump\u2019s AI obsession<\/a>. | Cultured<\/li>\n<li>Wouter Kusters explores <a href=\"https:\/\/thereader.mitpress.mit.edu\/is-madness-philosophy-in-practice\/\">the relationship between philosophy and psychosis<\/a>. | The MIT Press Reader<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/chatbot-generated-fiction-i-like-my-big-rat-wife\/\">Making chatbots generate fiction about your \u201chyper-specific personal fantasies\u201d instead of just writing it yourself<\/a> is loser behavior, actually. | Wired<\/li>\n<li>Dennis M. Hogan wants to know <a href=\"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/salvos\/no-but-hogan\">what\u2019s going on with improv.<\/a> | The Baffler<\/li>\n<li>If you\u2019re using ChatGPT, maybe this will change your mind: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.404media.co\/inside-project-lily-the-humans-reading-your-chatgpt-chats\/\">Open AI has a team of real people reading users\u2019 prompts.<\/a> | 404 Media<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Don&#8217;t have time to read all those fall reading lists? That&#8217;s okay. We read them for you. Here&#8217;s the Ultimate Fall Reading List. | Lit Hub Reading Lists Gabe Bullard explores the detrimental nature of convenience (after writing a book<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":277067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[45236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lit-hub-daily"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a4k","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ClaudeMcKay.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276994,"date":"2026-09-15T05:10:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276994"},"modified":"2026-09-18T13:01:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T17:01:28","slug":"the-ultimate-fall-2026-reading-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-ultimate-fall-2026-reading-list\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ultimate Fall 2026 Reading List"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The leaves are changing, and so is the footwear. The names on the books are getting bigger. There is, some might say, a crispness. Yes, it\u2019s time for Literary Hub\u2019s annual Ultimate Fall Reading List, in which I read all of the seasonal literary recommendation\/anticipation\/best of lists I can find, and then collate them for you in a handy list-of-lists. After all, there&#8217;s no season like fall for a popularity contest.<\/p>\n<p>This season, I processed 41 total lists from 26 outlets (including this one), which collectively recommended a total of 470 individual titles. 84 of these were included 3 times or more, and these I present to you in descending order of popularity. The list of lists surveyed is, as ever, at the bottom. Enjoy:<\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>21 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Min Jin Lee, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781538752036\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>American Hagwon<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>19 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Barbara Kingsolver, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063577541\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Partita<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>17 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Hernan Diaz, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593719541\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Ply<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nEmily St. John Mandel, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593321461\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Exit Party<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>16 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Emma Cline, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593595244\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Switzy<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nBonnie Garmus, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781668251065\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Peck &amp; Peck<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nMarlon James, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593717202\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Disappearers<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>12 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Yiyun Li, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780374613051\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Music Against the Night<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>11 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Deesha Philyaw, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063383074\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>9 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Chloe Benjamin, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593545218\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Under Story<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nChad Harbach, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780316455695\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Brightness<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nLouise Kennedy, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593714607\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Stations<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nR.F. Kuang, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063473744\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Taipei Story<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nNathaniel Philbrick, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780525562238\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Rush<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>8 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781668031575\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>American Scoundrel<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nJohn Green, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780525426073\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Hollywood, Ending<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>7 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Leigh Bardugo, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781250884312\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Dead Beat<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nPatrick deWitt, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063438118\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Dodge City<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nTananarive Due, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781668075142\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Mazywood<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nAriel Lawhon, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780385550345\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Pirate Queen<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nSarah J. Maas, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781639739134\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>A Court of Splintered Harmony<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nAudrey Niffenegger, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781335003232\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Life Out of Order<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nSylvester Stallone, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063443914\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Steps<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nGloria Steinem, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593978177\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>An Unexpected Life<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>6 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Lucy Foley, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063376694\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nJames Gleick, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780374618940\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Telephone: A New History<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nAlice Hoffman, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781668074640\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Witches of Cambridge<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nT. Geronimo Johnson, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063330542\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Occidental Book of the Dead<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nNaomi Klein &amp; Astra Taylor, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780374621384\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>End Times Fascism<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nRobert Kolker, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780385551038\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Vanishing Family<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nMichael Lewis, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781324131656\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Blockers<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nImbolo Mbue, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9798217154777\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Every Story is a Love Story<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nRichard Osman, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9798217060399\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>We Chase Shadows<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nJodi Picoult, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593726259\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Hollow Bones<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nRioghnach Robinson, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781250431295\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Bad Words<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nJon Ronson, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781594634208\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Castle<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nJane Schoenbrun, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593978382\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Public Access Afterworld<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>5 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Ayad Akhtar, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781668078631\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Radiance<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nJoe Biden, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780316598484\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Promise Me, America<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nMichael Douglas, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781538782224\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>One Helluva Ride<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nDustin Hoffman, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781668200698\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Look at Me<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nStephen King and Peter Straub, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781668233092\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Other Worlds Than These<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nJulie Orringer, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9798217207886\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Luna, Phoenix, Queen<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nNafissa Thompson-Spires, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781501168048\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nEmily Wilson, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781324099406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nBob Woodward, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781668008232\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Secrets: A Reporter&#8217;s Memoir<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>4 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Kate Atkinson, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780385551168\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Our Noble Selves<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nNadia Bowers, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781668037898\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Dear Dealer: A Memoir<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nJared Diamond, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063517660\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nAri Emanuel, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9798217209347\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Roll the Calls<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nEvan Gershkovich, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9798217087266\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>This Cursed Beautiful Land<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nMalcolm Gladwell, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780316603782\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The American Way of Killing<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nJohn Grisham, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780385550543\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The French Illusion<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nLydia Millet, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781324123675\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Fair Ones<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nDoireann N\u00ed Ghr\u00edofa, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780374618247\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Said the Dead<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nSarah Perry, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063480568\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Death of an Ordinary Man<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nRose Tremain, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063509474\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Housekeeper<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nDavid Treuer, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780316599436\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Savage Mind<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nRebecca Yarros, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781662545634\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Peculiar Stars<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h5 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>3 lists:<\/strong><\/h5>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Solvej Balle, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780811240383\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>On the Calculation of Volume, Book V<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nNatalie Baszile, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593492161\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Friends and Family<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nMarcia Chatelain, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780553387254\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>How Bright the Path Grows<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nTracy Daugherty, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781250348722\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nJudi Dench, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781250438928\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nNicole R. Fleetwood, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780316564304\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Between the River and the Railroad Tracks<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nKim Ghattas, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781250896803\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Best Kind of American<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nAnand Giridharadas, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593802014\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Man in the Mirror<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nRachel Gillig, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780316601849\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Knave and the Moon<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nScott Hawkins, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9798217089963\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Blacktail<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nStephen Graham Jones, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781668225127\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Off the Reservation<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nColin Kaepernick with Nick Chiles, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781538777879\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Perilous Fight<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nMahmoud Khalil, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781250462008\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nBen Macintyre, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593728123\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Redwood<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nKyle MacLachlan, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9798217086320\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Fictional Selves<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nWill Maclean, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780802168689\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Solace House<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nChina Mi\u00e9ville, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780399181092\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Rouse<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nLiane Moriarty, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593798638\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Big Little Truths<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nRebecca Perry, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9798893380620\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>May We Feed the King<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nAmanda Peters, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781646223695\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Birthing Tree<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nKe Huy Quan, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781538776995\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Never Say Die: A Memoir<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nVeronica Roth, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780063462595\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Sixth Faction<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nAnthony Scaramucci, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781250437563\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>All the Wrong Moves<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nV.E. Schwab, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781250192233\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Victorious<\/em><\/a><br \/>\nKawai Strong Washburn, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780374619701\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Names of the New World<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>*<br \/>\nList of Lists Surveyed:<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Kirkus&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kirkusreviews.com\/book-lists\/60-most-anticipated-books-fall-2026\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">60 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2026<\/a> \u2022 <em>Los Angeles Times&#8217;s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/entertainment-arts\/books\/story\/2026-08-31\/best-books-fall-preview-2026\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">29 new books to keep on your radar this fall<\/a> \u2022 <em>The New York Times&#8217;s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/08\/books\/review\/new-novels-coming-this-fall.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">35 Novels Coming This Fall<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/08\/books\/review\/new-nonfiction-books-this-fall.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">29 Nonfiction Books Coming This Fall<\/a> \u2022 <em>The New York Times<\/em> Book Review podcast&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/04\/podcasts\/fall-books.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">It&#8217;s Time for a Big Ol&#8217; Fall Book Preview<\/a> \u2022 <em>The Boston Globe&#8217;s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bostonglobe.com\/2026\/08\/20\/arts\/best-fall-books\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">40 of the best new books to read this fall<\/a> \u2022\u00a0<em>The Guardian&#8217;s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/ng-interactive\/2026\/aug\/22\/new-autumn-fiction-nonfiction-marlon-james-emma-cline-michael-douglas-dustin-hoffman-judi-dench-yiyun-li\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The biggest books this autumn<\/a> \u2022 <em>The Times&#8217;<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thetimes.com\/culture\/books\/article\/40-best-new-books-read-fiction-nonfiction-reading-autumn-2026-9svkdldr8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The 40 books not to miss this autumn<\/a> \u2022 <em>Harper&#8217;s Bazaar&#8217;s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.harpersbazaar.com\/culture\/art-books-music\/a73543332\/fall-2026-books\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Bazaar Guide to Fall 2026 Books<\/a> \u2022 Cultured&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.culturedmag.com\/article\/2026\/08\/07\/literature-most-anticipated-books-2026\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">19 Books Our Editors Can\u2019t Wait to Read This Fall<\/a> \u2022 BookPage&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bookpage.com\/most-anticipated-books\/most-anticipated-fall-books\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Our most anticipated books of fall 2026<\/a> \u2022 Oprah Daily&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oprahdaily.com\/entertainment\/books\/a73512741\/best-books-of-fall-2026\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Best Books of Fall 2026<\/a> \u2022 <em>People\u2019s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/people.com\/people-s-must-read-books-of-fall-2026-12075902\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Must-Read Books of Fall 2026<\/a> \u2022 <em>Town &amp; Country&#8217;s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.townandcountrymag.com\/leisure\/arts-and-culture\/a73359762\/best-books-fall-2026\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The 67 Must Read Books of Fall 2026<\/a> \u2022 Goodreads&#8217; Readers\u2019 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/blog\/show\/3152-readers-60-most-anticipated-fall-books\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">60 Most Anticipated Fall Books <\/a> \u2022 AARP&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aarp.org\/entertainment\/books\/fall-books-preview-2026\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Fall 2026 Books Preview<\/a> \u2022 AP&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/fall-books-2026-to-read-f9eb2443cbb68e664bee4487e3973df0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">5 books to read this fall<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/fall-books-2026-4ff0310275a7dad2f826fe96cc8f8f6c\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Fall Books<\/a> \u2022\u00a0Five Books&#8217; <a href=\"https:\/\/fivebooks.com\/best-books\/notable-novels-of-fall-2026-cal-flyn\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Notable Novels of Fall 2026<\/a> \u2022 E!News&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eonline.com\/news\/1435773\/new-books-out-in-fall-2026-barbara-kingsolver-alice-hoffman-more\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dare We Say You\u2019ll Fall Hard for These New Autumn Books<\/a> \u2022 <em>The Minnesota Star Tribune&#8217;s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.startribune.com\/your-fall-reading-list-just-got-24-books-better\/601870959\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Fall Books<\/a> \u2022 <em>Country Living&#8217;s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.countryliving.com\/life\/entertainment\/a73274837\/fall-2026-book-releases\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Most Anticipated New Books of Fall 2026 to Preorder Right Now<\/a> \u2022 Shereads&#8217; <a href=\"https:\/\/shereads.com\/most-anticipated-books-of-fall-2026\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2026<\/a> \u2022 B&amp;N Reads&#8217; The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.barnesandnoble.com\/blog\/the-biggest-books-of-fall-2026-fiction-edition\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Biggest Books of Fall 2026: Fiction Edition<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.barnesandnoble.com\/blog\/the-biggest-books-of-fall-2026-nonfiction-edition\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Biggest Books of Fall 2026: Nonfiction Edition<\/a> \u2022 <em>Publishers Weekly&#8217;s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.publishersweekly.com\/pw\/by-topic\/new-titles\/adult-announcements\/article\/100714-adult-books-for-fall-2026.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Adult Books for Fall 2026 <\/a> (top 10s in all 13 categories) \u2022 Vulture&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vulture.com\/article\/new-books-releases-what-to-read-fall-2026.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">11 Books We Can&#8217;t Wait to Read This Fall<\/a> \u2022 <em>The Seattle Times&#8217;s<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.seattletimes.com\/entertainment\/books\/15-anticipated-fall-book-releases\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">15 anticipated fall book releases<\/a> \u2022 and of course, Literary Hub&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/34-books-you-need-to-read-this-fall\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">34 Books You Need to Read This Fall<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The leaves are changing, and so is the footwear. The names on the books are getting bigger. There is, some might say, a crispness. Yes, it\u2019s time for Literary Hub\u2019s annual Ultimate Fall Reading List, in which I read all<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1210,"featured_media":276995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,11,43070,43135],"tags":[30879,107378,112272,41602],"class_list":["post-276994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-fullwidth-slider","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-fall-books","tag-math-and-counting","tag-ultimate-fall-reading-list","tag-ultimate-reading-list","story-type-reading-list"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a3E","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ultimatefall2026.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276702,"date":"2026-09-15T05:10:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276702"},"modified":"2026-09-08T20:57:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T00:57:20","slug":"emily-st-john-mandel-on-writing-a-novel-of-dystopian-counterlives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/emily-st-john-mandel-on-writing-a-novel-of-dystopian-counterlives\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily St. John Mandel on Writing a Novel of Dystopian Counterlives"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Post-pandemic dystopias are at the center of Emily St. John Mandel\u2019s most celebrated novels. <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780804172448\"><i>Station Eleven<\/i><\/a> (2014), which won the Prix des Libraires du Qu\u00e9bec, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN\/Faulkner, takes place before, during, and after a fiercely contagious flu wipes out 99 percent of the world\u2019s population. <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593466735\"><i>Sea of Tranquility<\/i><\/a> (2022), which she described to me once as \u201cautofiction through a sci-fi lens combined with time travel,\u201d spans five centuries, beginning in 1912, with a pandemic wiping out Earth\u2019s population (it was written during the COVID pandemic).<\/p>\n<p>In her new novel, <i><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593321461\">Exit Party<\/a>,<\/i> the dystopia is political. The year is 2031.\u201cThe United States had come undone following a coup d\u2019etat,\u201d she writes. \u201cSeveral states had seceded within a week of the coup, either alone or in alliances with neighbors.\u201d Another United States appears over time, a surveillance state with powerful controls.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/emily-st-john-mandel-on-the-narrative-possibilities-of-time-travel\/\">In our last conversation<\/a>, Mandel mentioned that she was working on \u201ca new novel that has characters from two of my previous books.\u201d And here it is; what motivated you to write <i>Exit Party<\/i>? I asked.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYes, here it is! There were a couple of starting points for this novel. One is that years after publishing my second novel, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781101911976\"><i>The Singer\u2019s Gun<\/i><\/a>, I remained fascinated by a character from that book, Ari. I found myself wondering what she\u2019d be like after a very long prison sentence, and I wanted to write about her again.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe other starting point was just the increasingly dire political situation in which we find ourselves in the United States. I started writing this novel in the spring of 2022, not long before I spoke with you, and the country was only slightly less fractured then than it is now. We were already seeing the effects on our politics of years of successful disinformation campaigns. It unfortunately doesn\u2019t take a wild leap of speculative imagination to imagine the country breaking apart, and I was interested in what the aftermath of a national collapse could look like. I\u2019ve never been particularly interested in disaster, but I am interested in its aftermath. There\u2019s hope in thinking about the world that follows catastrophic events.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jane Ciabattari:<\/strong> <i>Exit Party\u2019s<\/i> cast of characters includes Ari Waker, the villain who blackmails her cousin and partner in crime Anton Waker, the central character in <i>The Singer\u2019s Gun<\/i> (2015). Elsewhere in the novel, we meet Lucas Alkaitis, the painter from <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780525562948\"><i>The Glass Hotel<\/i><\/a>. What drew you back to Ari and Anton, and to Lucas?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emily St. John Mandel:<\/strong> This isn\u2019t a spoiler, because it\u2019s literally the plot of a novel I published in 2010, but one of the defining events of Ari\u2019s life is her decision to take out a contract on her cousin Anton. So as I mentioned, I\u2019d wanted to write about Ari again, and I felt like there was some emotional calculus where bringing Ari into this book required bringing Anton into the book too.<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">To me, the doppelgangers are an embodiment of that counterlife: what if another of those versions of you were to suddenly appear before you?<\/p>\n<p>Lucas is there largely because of the painting, <i>Swan Dive<\/i>, which moves through the narrative. I\u2019m interested in the way art moves through time, the way different people have relationships with a given work of art over decades or sometimes centuries. So I wanted to write about that, and I thought, \u201cwell, I already have this character from <i>The Glass Hotel<\/i> who\u2019s a painter, maybe it would be interesting to bring him into this.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> What do you find captivating about criminality?<\/p>\n<p><strong>EM:<\/strong> In real life, it isn\u2019t captivating at all. Real-life criminality looks sad and sordid. It looks like all the locked-up people I\u2019ve met when I do events at prisons. But in fiction, it can drive a plot in an interesting way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> And quantum entanglement theory, which involves particles linked in time instead of in space, which shows up several of your novels?<\/p>\n<p><strong>EM:<\/strong> It\u2019s just so weird. Einstein called it \u201cspooky action at a distance.\u201d I like the spookiness.<\/p>\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> How did you settle on the title, <i>Exit Party<\/i>?<\/p>\n<p><strong>EM:<\/strong> I am terrible at titles! My original title for this novel was James Exits the Party, which sounds like a stage direction, also that\u2019s a little glimpse into a previous iteration of the plot. I liked that title, but literally no one else did. My wife and I talked about it endlessly, and she actually came up with <i>Exit Party<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> Your opening scene sets up the puzzle. Ari Waker, 48, released from prison in Spring 2031 after served eighteen years for taking out a contract on her cousin Anton\u2019s life (\u201cIt was a mistake and I\u2019m not that person anymore\u201d), is exalted at her freedom as she walks around Los Angeles: \u201cthe blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace.\u201d While she was in jail, the United States had disintegrated into civil war, separate nation states, opponents and alliances; the second part of the novel is set in a parallel authoritarian United States. On this spring day, international peacekeeping forces have just departed the city and Ari\u2019s roommate Gloria takes her to Kareem\u2019s party to celebrate the end of the citywide curfew.<\/p>\n<p>There, Ari meets a stranger named Saraya in a silvery dress who recognizes her and calls her \u201cIbari,\u201d her legal name. Later she spots a woman who looks identical to Saraya, but is wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt and keeps saying \u201cI don\u2019t know where I am.\u201d By the end of the night Kareem disappears, as does a painting on his wall. Identical characters at the same party. Identical countries, with different political systems and freedoms. Doppelgangers, doubles, anchor this novel. How did you develop that plotline?<\/p>\n<p><strong>EM:<\/strong> Slowly and with great difficulty. I\u2019ve been interested for a long time in the idea of the counterlife, which is the life you didn\u2019t live: the life where you married a different person, or went to a different school, or emigrated instead of staying or vice versa, and the way any of those decisions would have pushed you toward becoming a slightly different version of yourself.<\/p>\n<p>But that frames the counterlife idea in terms of agency. There\u2019s another possibility, which is that if you\u2019d grown up in a different country, or a different family, that would also make you a slightly different version of your present self. To me, the doppelgangers are an embodiment of that counterlife: what if another of those versions of you were to suddenly appear before you? It\u2019s interesting to think about the counterlife of the individual, but it\u2019s also interesting to think about the counterlife of the state. It\u2019s easy for me to imagine a version of the United States that collapses into chaos, but it\u2019s also not hard to imagine a version that drifts further and further down an authoritarian path, especially when we encounter horrors like the ICE raids in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> Ari had been beset all her life by premonitions. She feels pulled toward the party at Kareem\u2019s by \u201can invisible thread.\u201d Later she senses when it will be her last day in a motel in Ohio, or knows when it\u2019s dangerous to be in a parking lot in Texas. In many cases, her premonitions save her from danger. Why did you choose this as a character trait?<\/p>\n<p><strong>EM:<\/strong> I\u2019m always interested in characters who have some special quality\u2014foresight in this case, or intelligence, or inside knowledge\u2014that should save them from their fates but doesn\u2019t. I think it\u2019s interesting from a narrative perspective.<\/p>\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> Part of the intrigue of the puzzle of <i>Exit Party<\/i> is the structure. The novel is divided into three sections: A-Side, which describes one universe, B-Side, which is set in a parallel universe, and Swan Dive, which deals with a central recurring image, a painting created by Lucas Alkaitis, Sebastian\u2019s father, in 1968, which was hanging on the wall of Kareem\u2019s apartment in the opening scene. How did this structure evolve?<\/p>\n<p class=\"pullquote\">It\u2019s interesting to think about the counterlife of the individual, but it\u2019s also interesting to think about the counterlife of the state.<\/p>\n<p><strong>EM:<\/strong> I began with the world in the A-Side, this version of the world where the United States has come undone and countless new small nations are forming. I knew early on that doppelgangers of two characters were going to come into that world, and I realized after a while that I was going to have to account for where they came from, so that led me to develop the B-Side universe, which took on a life of its own; it was interesting to consider the psychological implications of life in an authoritarian surveillance state.<\/p>\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> You are a master world-builder, having created a multiverse in your novels, sometimes multiple worlds, intersecting worlds, in one book, as in <i>Exit Party<\/i>. How do you manage the details and keep everything in synch? Do you have computer programs? Walls of imagery or words? What does your writing space look like? Do you play music?<\/p>\n<p><strong>EM:<\/strong> The details of a given book are always in my head while I\u2019m writing a novel, but I lose track of the multiverse all the time. I sometimes have to be reminded about the connections between books. I\u2019d forgotten that the architect of the Ponzi scheme in <i>The Glass Hotel<\/i> makes a cameo appearance in <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9781101911990\"><i>The Lola Quartet<\/i><\/a> until someone mentioned it on Instagram the other day.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve always liked the idea of a wall of words, and I tried that once with a previous book\u2014I think it was <i>The Glass Hotel<\/i>\u2014but I just don\u2019t really have the wall space for that kind of thing, and it became more cumbersome than useful. I\u2019ve dabbled with computer programs, but I always run into the same problem, where the solution starts to feel more elaborate and complicated than the problem.<\/p>\n<p>I sometimes listen to ambient music while I\u2019m writing\u2014I like the album <i>Sleep<\/i>, by Max Richter\u2014but more often these days I just listen to white noise, either rain or the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n<p>For years now I\u2019ve been dividing my time between New York City and Los Angeles. In LA the entire apartment is a single room. I love being there, because most of my friends are there at this point, but I have more space in New York City. In NYC, where I\u2019ve mostly been these past few months, I share an office with my wife. I work at a standing desk beside a window with a view of the East River. I love watching the movement of boats.<\/p>\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> How do you describe your work? Speculative fiction? Literary fiction? Sci-fi?<\/p>\n<p><strong>EM:<\/strong> All of the above. I like the idea that a book can be more than one genre.<\/p>\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> Which authors do you read?<\/p>\n<p><strong>EM:<\/strong> I\u2019m more interested in contemporary fiction than in any other category of books. There are a handful of authors whose latest book I\u2019ll buy immediately as soon as I come across it in a bookstore: Charles Yu, Olivia Laing, Jesmyn Ward, Zadie Smith, Dan Chaon, Han Kang. Probably others I\u2019m not thinking of.<\/p>\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> What are you working on now\/next?<\/p>\n<p><strong>EM:<\/strong> I just started a new novel. I\u2019ve also been working on the pilot script for a TV adaptation of <i>Exit Party<\/i>, and I have a couple of other screen projects in development. I\u2019m trying to get a film adaptation of <i>Last Night in Montreal <\/i>and a TV adaptation of <i>The Lola Quartet<\/i> off the ground.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">_______________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"276703\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/emily-st-john-mandel-on-writing-a-novel-of-dystopian-counterlives\/exit-party\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/exit-party.png\" data-orig-size=\"600,906\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"exit party\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/exit-party.png\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-276703\" src=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/exit-party-199x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"199\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/exit-party-199x300.png 199w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/exit-party-40x60.png 40w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/exit-party-33x50.png 33w, https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/exit-party.png 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/132\/9780593321461\">Exit Party<\/a> <em>by Emily St. John Mandel is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Post-pandemic dystopias are at the center of Emily St. John Mandel\u2019s most celebrated novels. Station Eleven (2014), which won the Prix des Libraires du Qu\u00e9bec, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award and was a finalist for the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":188,"featured_media":276704,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43072],"tags":[4740,71419,1780,107462,3512,2955,60655,16228],"class_list":["post-276702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-in-conversation","tag-alfred-a-knopf","tag-author-interview","tag-emily-st-john-mandel","tag-exit-party","tag-interview","tag-jane-ciabattari","tag-knopf-doubleday-publishing-group","tag-penguin-random-house","story-type-in-conversation"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19YW","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Emily_SJM_Portraits3132finalflatsquarecroppreview-1.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/188"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]