[{"id":275762,"date":"2026-08-18T05:10:48","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T09:10:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275762"},"modified":"2026-08-17T22:20:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T02:20:06","slug":"on-that-disgraceful-disreputable-wonderful-form-of-punctuation-the-parenthesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-that-disgraceful-disreputable-wonderful-form-of-punctuation-the-parenthesis\/","title":{"rendered":"On That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shakespeare and friends would call punctuation \u201cdistinctions,\u201d according to the Latin tradition, or \u201cpointing,\u201d because of the medieval practice of placing dots or points at different levels of the line.\u00a0The first occurrence of the word \u201cpunctuation\u201d happens in the\u00a0French dialogue book Orthoepia Gallica <\/i>from 1593 by translator and language teacher John Eliot, whose funny and colloquial conversations in facing columns on the page influenced Shakespeare\u2019s\u00a0witty repartee. Eliot challenges London French teachers to \u201cfind fault\u201d with his \u201cpricks, nicks, and tricks,\u201d referring to his punctuation and rhetoric.<\/p>\n

He was certainly a flamboyantly creative writer\u00a0and inspired teacher; yet one can take him seriously here: \u201cPricks\u201d performed \u201ctricks\u201d as punctuation became a vehicle to think about the technological revolutions of the time, gender relationships, and literary genres reflecting social and historical concerns like kingship or geographical exploration.<\/p>\n

Punctuation was also a channel for exploring interior worlds: the mind, memory, emotions. Particularly when something wasn\u2019t working quite right: In a society that prized eloquence above all else, writers became more interested in depicting the delay, interruption, or even failure of speech rather than its glorious fullfilment. Perhaps the sons (and some daughters) of the humanists hesitated to put their faith in language quite as much as previous generations had.<\/p>\n

Yet, considering how his own life was cut short so tragically at the height of his social and literary success, it\u2019s hard not to entertain interpretations of the interrupted sentence as an eerie omen. <\/p>\n

And perhaps it was precisely the opposite: Writing had become so powerful at expression that it could now subvert itself without losing any of its magic. One such master of consciously suspended speech was the uncontested king of brackets: Sir Philip Sidney.<\/p>\n

On October 16, 1586, a young man writes a desperate letter to his friend: \u201cMy dear Weyer: Come. Come. My life is in danger and I long to see you.\u201d Weak from the festering wound in his thigh, he scribbles those few lines in a shaky, hardly legible hand. Will the famous doctor be able to save him? When Weyer arrives the next day, the letter writer is already dead. Sir Philip Sidney, courtier, poet, and fervent Protestant soldier under Queen Elizabeth I, had been fighting Catholic Spain in the Netherlands when a bullet struck him, burying itself deep in the flesh of his thigh. The life of the dazzling superstar of Tudor high society was cut short, at the age of thirty-one, in a way eerily mirrored by his own writing: Just before leaving for his holy war, Sidney interrupted the epic story about erring knights, which he had been working on for years, in the middle of an exciting battle, leaving the action hanging mid-sentence. On a parenthesis.<\/p>\n

Anaxius lept away. Whereat ashamed (as having never done\u00a0so much before in his life)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Readers, like the sentence and the plot, are on tenterhooks about\u00a0what comes next. The work, of course, remains unfinished, although the parenthesis\u2019s open-endedness functioned like a magnet for countless later writers, inviting them to graft their versions of how the book should continue. Sidney was merely following a common composition practice of pausing mid-sentence or mid-matter, only to use the parenthesis as memory springboard when it was time to pick up the pen again (or quill rather).<\/p>\n

Yet, considering how his own life was cut short so tragically at the height of his social and literary success, it\u2019s hard not to entertain interpretations of the interrupted sentence as an eerie omen.<\/p>\n

Irrespective of his death in parentheses, Philip Sidney wielded the two typographical boomerangs with aplomb in his brilliantly stylish and dizzyingly chaotic Arcadia<\/i>. Two princes meet two princesses, and much drama ensues, including multiple disguises, poetry competitions, shipwrecks, abductions, a climactic court case, war, and, much, much more dangerous than all of those adventures combined: love and lust. There are shepherds, pirates, kings, queens, and love triangles (polygons?) en masse, including amorous escapades involving men dressed up as Amazons (don\u2019t ask, just read it). What\u2019s not to like?!<\/p>\n

To make matters messier for the Arcadia<\/i>\u2019s characters, readers, and future editors, Sidney produced two substantially different versions of the story, one between 1577 and 1581 and a revised (some would say completely new) work between 1581 and 1584, shortly before setting off across the channel to his untimely end. In 1590, four years after Sidney\u2019s death, his best friend, Fulke Greville, published the \u201cnew\u201d Arcadia <\/i>with its abrupt cutoff.<\/p>\n

In 1593, Sidney\u2019s beloved sister Mary brought out a rival work in a bigger and more luxurious format, starting with the \u201cnew\u201d version and attaching a heavily edited finale drawn from the old version, resulting in a clumsy, incongruent centaur nobody liked. Crucially, though, in the parts of the new and old Arcadia<\/i>s that correspond, nearly all 2,400 brackets are identical. We don\u2019t have a definitive Sidney autograph (a manuscript written by himself) of one fused final version, so this is as good as it gets concerning his own punctuation. Sidney was clearly an enthusiastic bracketeer.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, the parenthesis is disposable. It\u2019s useless. Stuff. Waste. <\/p>\n

While there were contemporary writers who also heavily implemented parentheses, none did so as much or as well as Sidney did. The popularity of his Arcadia <\/i>helped spread both the use of brackets and the perception of their sophistication. After all, the Renaissance loved intricate structures of all kinds, from architecture to fabric patterns to language. The more complicated the better! Philip Sidney\u2019s brackets provided a blueprint for elevated expression, and writers loved imitating him.<\/p>\n

Some, in fact, felt so inspired by the provocative unfinished sentence that they picked up the narrative thread of the new Arcadia <\/i>from where Sidney had left off! Gervase Markham published an ending in 1607, and Sidney\u2019s niece Lady Mary Wroth (the Sidney family was amazingly literary) wrote a long, two-part prose novel called Uranian <\/i>in the 1620s, which also employed her uncle\u2019s trademark parentheses as a sneaky claim to his legacy.<\/p>\n

When Coluccio Salutati invented the parenthesis nearly 200 years before Sidney\u2019s consummate bracket art, he rendered visible an age-old rhetorical practice of inserting a particle of a sentence into a greater whole. Remember, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian called it interpositio<\/i>, drawing attention to putting something in the middle of something else. The question is how long the mini-digression can become without hijacking the main sentence (or story). There was no rule on the length of a parenthesis; it was up to the discretion of the writer to adjudicate appropriate delay.<\/p>\n

It makes sense, then, that Sidney\u2019s near-contemporary, the schoolmaster John Hoskins, wrote in his Directions for Speech and Style <\/i>(1600) that a parenthesis \u201cin extremities\u201d can become a (dis)grace: It can go both ways, depending on how masterfully the bracket is wielded. This paradoxical potential created a certain nervousness in style recommendations. In his 1589 Art of English Poetry<\/i>, George Putten ham offers an exaggerated example, commenting, \u201cThis insertion is very long and utterly impertinent to the principal matter, and makes a great gap in the tale, nevertheless is no disgrace but rather a beauty and to very good purpose, but you must not use such insertions often nor too thick, nor those that be very long as this of ours, for it will breed great confusion to have the tale so much interrupted.\u201d On the one hand, the parenthesis is disposable. It\u2019s useless. Stuff. Waste.<\/p>\n

Thrust into the middle for want of wit, somewhere, anywhere. On the other hand, it is \u201cgrafted\u201d onto the host sentence, as Puttenham continues, as if it were a branch of another tree that improves on its new stem precisely because it is foreign. The problem is not so much that a parenthesis intrudes on a sentence\u2014it does; there\u2019s no denying it. The question is rather how.<\/p>\n

In The Garden of Eloquence<\/i>, Puttenham\u2019s fellow rhetorician\u00a0Henry Peacham believes ambling on the syntactic and narrative line is permissible provided that one is \u201cgoing out from order, but yet for profit of some pertinent sense.\u201d He continues, \u201cWe must have a perfect way provided aforehand, that we may go fourth aptly, and making no long tarrying return in again cunningly.\u201d Inserting the insertor requires foreconceit, an inkling of how a sentence or a plot is going to develop. If a writer is going to stray, they should stray strategically, spanning the internal parenthesis like an arch.<\/p>\n

The parenthesis cuts, but it also stitches the before and after together again, unfolding left and right from the typographical boundaries of the punctuation mark.<\/p>\n

Parentheses, turning the inside of a sentence out and the outside in, ask readers to shuttle back and forth, exercising mental agility that nurtures a flexible set of thoughts and feelings.<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the Arcadia<\/i>, one of the princes, Musidorus, courts Pamela, one of the sister-princesses, by communicating to her that his shepherd apparel is just a disguise. Or at least, he\u2019s trying to tell her as much:<\/p>\n

In the country of Thessalia, (alas why name I that accursed country, which brings forth nothing, but matters for trage dies? but name it I must) in Thessalia (I say) there was (well may I say, there was) a Prince (no, no Prince, whom bondage\u00a0wholly possessed; but yet accounted a Prince, and) named Musidorus.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Why all these parentheses? He could have just said, \u201cIn the country of Thessalia there was a prince named Musidorus.\u201d Instead he interrupts himself almost obsessively, trapped in his fake identity, not only in the story but in the sentence too. The bracket interruptions perform the delays he is experiencing in his own life due to his love for Pamela and the disguise he upholds to be able to court her.<\/p>\n

Parentheses, turning the inside of a sentence out and the outside in, ask readers to shuttle back and forth, exercising mental agility that nurtures a flexible set of thoughts and feelings. Sidney\u2019s brackets include qualifications of the thrust of the main sentence, comparisons, doubts, metaphors, and examples, all of which dilate the narrative into a complex, three-dimensional woven tapestry, accommodating innumerable opinions and interpretations. The parenthesis in word and deed is an ethical way of life: We pause for thought.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something mysterious about the \u201clittle moons,\u201d as Erasmus called them. The moon represents creation and destruction, rebirth, eternity, the feminine, time, marking time, mystery, the night, and secrets. And so does the parenthesis. The convex-concave curves of the open and closed parentheses cup something said by the way, whisperings, secrets mouthed into the reader\u2019s ear, mumbled under the author\u2019s breath.<\/p>\n

For Renaissance writers, punctuation belonged to the visual-grammatical and the spoken-rhetorical. Headmaster Richard Mulcaster categorizes parentheses as \u201ccreatures to the pen and distinctions to pronounce by\u201d: They\u2019re amphibian in striking out a precarious existence as belonging to both the water of the spoken and the land of the seen. The (two) visual walls make meaning discrete, even as they remain permeable enough for the eye to slip in and out. You can\u2019t overlook a bracket. Yet you can also read right through it. How does one read a bracket? How does one read it out? Mulcaster suggested that \u201cthe words enclosed by them are to be pronounced with a lower and quicker voice than the words either before or after them.\u201d Both visually and aurally, then, what\u2019s inside nestles safely between parenthetical palms, protecting tender expressions of intimacy.<\/p>\n

Brackets establish a special magic between reader and writer. Perhaps that\u2019s why Sidney used them to dedicate his work to his sister Mary, a gifted translator and accomplished poet in her own right:<\/p>\n

Here now have you (most deare, and most worthy to be most dear Lady) this idle work of mine: which I fear (like the spider\u2019s web) will be thought fitter to be swept away, than worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks, were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my heart, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulnes this child, which I am loath to father.<\/p>\n

Sidney is hedging his words in ever more delaying parentheses. He adds comparisons (\u201clike the spider\u2019s web\u201d and \u201cas the cruel fathers\u201d), classical allusions to Greek myth, and appeals to the reader (\u201cmost dear Lady\u201d). Parentheses encase words, keeping vulnerable admissions safe and visually private. An open bracket is always twinned with a closed bracket\u2014the words inside are never left out in the cold; there is never just the waning crescent without trailing its mirrored waxing crescent. The parenthesis is a gentle kind of interruption, stable and predictable and balanced.<\/p>\n

Punctuation, it turns out, not only assisted writers and printers in making the reading of drama lively but also promised added value precisely because it was a denizen of the book world.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World<\/a> by Florence Hazrat, copyright \u00a92026 by Florence Hazrat. Used with permission of Basic Books, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shakespeare and friends would call punctuation \u201cdistinctions,\u201d according to the Latin tradition, or \u201cpointing,\u201d because of the medieval practice of placing dots or points at different levels of the line.\u00a0The first occurrence of the word \u201cpunctuation\u201d happens in the\u00a0French dialogue<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31668,"featured_media":275767,"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":[6,43101,43070,43092],"tags":[11854,1149,111789,576,111788,67069,111790,1341],"class_list":["post-275762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-newsandculture","tag-basic-books","tag-craft","tag-florence-hazrat","tag-history","tag-on-the-mark","tag-parentheses","tag-punctation","tag-writing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19JM","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/parentheses.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275762","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\/31668"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275483,"date":"2026-08-18T05:10:30","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T09:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275483"},"modified":"2026-08-20T18:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T22:16:08","slug":"on-grief-and-growing-up-in-buffy-the-vampire-slayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-grief-and-growing-up-in-buffy-the-vampire-slayer\/","title":{"rendered":"On Grief and Growing Up in<\/br> Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following essay is adapted from a keynote address given at the Association for the Study of Buffy+’s 11th Biennial Slayage Conference<\/a> on July 10, 2026. <\/em>In case it needs to be said, this essay contains many, many spoilers for, and inside jokes regarding, <\/em>Buffy the Vampire Slayer\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Angel.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

For the record, I am not actually a Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/i> nostalgia case. I didn’t have a television growing up, so I found the show as an adult, when my then-boyfriend (a screenwriter) made me watch it. I was charmed but basically unconvinced until we got to episode six, \u201cThe Pack,\u201d in which the cool kids, possessed by, checks notes, hyena spirits, eat the school principal. They literally eat <\/i>him.<\/p>\n\"Principal RIP Principal Flutie.<\/span>\n

Ok, I thought. I\u2019m in.<\/p>\n

Now, I love what everybody loves about Buffy <\/i>and Angel<\/i>: the language, the metaphors, the characters, the specific pleasure of getting the thing and lampshading the thing in the same gesture, the richness of the world, the way the storytelling begins and ends in emotion, and the way it can be so many things at once: comedy, horror, romance, drama, fantasy. I love how serious it can feel, and how scary, and how silly, all at the same time.<\/p>\n\"buffy Grr. Argh.<\/span>\n

Since I am not an academic, but just a novelist and sometime-critic, I thought I would unpack why novelists in particular seem to love Buffy <\/i>and Angel <\/i>so much. Lots of people like Buffy<\/i>, of course, but anecdotally, everyone I know who really <\/i>loves it also happens to be a writer of some kind.<\/p>\n

I will talk about that a bit, but recently Anthony Stewart Head died, and so now I have to talk about grief.<\/p>\n\"Daddy's Daddy’s home.<\/span>\n

Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/i> is, at its core, a show about grief. To me, it is even more about grief than it is about love, or magic, or witty remarks, or maybe even power, because it is about being a teenager, and being a teenager is about grief.<\/p>\n

Wait a second, all the adults with jobs are saying to themselves. Being a teenager isn\u2019t about grief<\/em>. Teenagers don\u2019t know how good they have it! Which is true. But being a teenager is about grief because being a teenager is about change. You\u2019re mourning your childhood, and you\u2019re mourning your innocence, and you\u2019re mourning the fact that the people who are supposed to love you don\u2019t know you anymore, or at least don\u2019t understand you. Later, of course, the show becomes about trying to become<\/em> an adult\u2014see Buffy’s doomed day job at the Doublemeat Palace\u2014and that is an exercise in grief too. Then there\u2019s Angel<\/i>, which is ultimately a show about the grief of being<\/i> an adult, because Angel <\/i>is essentially a story about futility.<\/p>\n

Life, it turns out, is a show about grief, I am sorry to report.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a hard year for Buffy <\/i>fans. Tony Head died at 72. Nicholas Brendon died at 54, in March. This is not even to mention Michelle Trachtenberg, who died last year\u2014can you believe it was only last year?\u2014at 39. I\u2019m not a fan of this pattern. Maybe it has something to do with the hellmouth so obviously opening under the whole of the United States, if not in fact the world. Maybe we’re just unlucky.<\/p>\n

I was particularly struck by the outpouring of love for Tony Head, and the way that clips of him were passed around online as a way of mourning. Nothing new for the age of the internet. But these were not clips of him in his most recent high profile role, in another beloved show, Ted Lasso<\/em>, where he plays a villain (also named Rupert). No, they were all clips of Giles (apart from a few of the Nescaf\u00e9 Gold Blend ads<\/a>). We mourned him as Giles, as the best father figure that ever refused to judge us, that ever did kill Ben (who might know Glory) for us, that was ever there, until he thought it might save us for him not to be. Of course, we\u2014I\u2014don\u2019t know Tony Head. It helps that by all accounts he was a great person, that he was also the father figure on set, that he seemed to care for others in his regular life and in his work. But we don\u2019t know him. We\u2019ve been mourning Giles.<\/p>\n

But of course, Giles is just as alive as ever.<\/p>\n

Giles exists, whenever we want to look. We have exactly as much of him as we did before. There\u2019s an entire other conversation to be had about parasocial relationships in the modern era, obviously, but since Buffy <\/i>isn\u2019t really from <\/i>the modern era, I do think it speaks to the power of the character, the acting and the writing, and to the universe of the show itself, that the average fan feels they\u2019ve lost something.<\/p>\n\"giles The Magic Box: Your one-stop spot to shop for all your occult needs.<\/span>\n

The novelist Naomi Alderman has argued<\/a> that what makes Buffy<\/i> so good is what she calls “character doubling.” She writes that \u201cevery single character contains their opposite within them. It is a show about having the sense that you have a strange other lurking inside.\u201d That\u2019s definitely true\u2014consider Vampire Willow. Xander literally split into his good and bad qualities, Faith and Buffy, already foils, swapping bodies, the Buffybot, Joan the Vampire Slayer, and so on\u2014and doubling is of course a classic literary trope.<\/p>\n

But now I want to consider a very specific kind of \u201cstrange other\u201d that both Buffy <\/i>and Angel <\/i>return to repeatedly: the person you become when faced with grief. Because in the Buffyverse, as sometimes in life, grief makes you a different person. Often\u00a0literally.<\/p>\n\"anne She’s someone.<\/span>\n

We see it first and maybe most blatantly at the beginning of Season 3, when, in order to deal with her grief over killing her one true love and consigning him to hell (teenagers!), Buffy has run away to Los Angeles. As this episode opens, we find that she has literally become another person: Anne. She\u2019s a waitress at Helen\u2019s Kitchen, which, ha ha. And to Alderman\u2019s point, Anne is Buffy\u2019s secret self, her internal opposite: the normal girl. Powerless even against the most run-of-the-mill villains, the men casually harassing her at the diner.<\/p>\n

But of course Buffy finds she can\u2019t really outrun herself, because she\u2019s recognized by a girl she\u2019d saved before, who then went by Chanterelle, and is now going by Lily. The girl\u2019s boyfriend disappears, and Buffy finds him horribly dead, aged overnight, and though Buffy\u2014reasserting her identity when it counts\u2014kills the demon responsible and saves Lily from the same fate, in the end Lily is left to grieve, and so she too takes on a new identity: Lily becomes Anne, and Anne goes back to being Buffy, though not quite the Buffy she was before, and not just because of the terrible chunky highlights.<\/p>\n

Of course this isn\u2019t actually the first time grief has changed anyone in this show. Consider Angel: After centuries of murderous rampaging, Angelus has his soul returned to him as a punishment\u2014itself a function of the grief of his victims\u2014and is flooded by that grief, and the guilt of having to remember all he\u2019s done. Everything that Angel becomes after that is a response\u2014he is forever trying to atone. But what\u2019s really interesting about Angel in this context is that he represents the other side of the coin, because once he lives in grief, if he experiences a moment of true happiness\u2014grief\u2019s opposite\u2014he will lose his soul again and transform back into his evil self. So the principle cuts both ways. Joy too can be transformative. It just doesn\u2019t come up quite as often.<\/p>\n\"jenny A shocking twist.<\/span>\n

By the way, Angel, or really Angelus, also shows us another use for grief: as a weapon. After he kills Jenny Calendar in Season 2\u2019s \u201cPassion\u201d (a truly shocking episode, and the show\u2019s first really significant death), he stages an elaborate romantic scene with her body to torture and traumatize Giles, with the intention of causing him as much grief as possible. He wants to change Giles\u2014to weaken him, and by extension Buffy\u2014and he does, or at least he goads him into doing two very un-Giles-like things: head off alone on a suicide mission, and allow himself to be tricked by Drusilla\u2019s hypnosis. When she manipulates him into seeing her as Jenny, he is taken in enough to tell his enemies everything they need to know to end the world. (Compare to Wesley\u2019s refusal to let Illyria be Fred, though that’s all he wants: \u201cThe first lesson a Watcher learns is to separate truth from illusion.\u201d But we\u2019ll get to that.)<\/p>\n

Of course Angel did the same thing to Drusilla herself, when she was a pious woman whom he drove insane by telling her she was evil. Both of these uses for grief read as deeply perverse, as indeed they are.<\/p>\n\"faith This one’s for you.<\/span>\n

But let\u2019s go back to Season 3. In \u201cBad Girls,\u201d a pivotal episode despite the fact that they\u2019re fighting the silly bathtub demon, Faith\u2014Buffy\u2019s dark double, the Other Slayer, but here still on side\u2014seduces Buffy into breaking the rules, which seems like it\u2019s working fine until Faith accidentally kills a human, the technically evil but essentially non-threatening Allan, the Mayor\u2019s deputy. The episode ends with Faith clearly upset, and channeling Lady Macbeth, scrubbing at bloodstains in the sink, but when Buffy comes to check on her, Faith tells Buffy starkly \u201cI don\u2019t care\u201d before the show cuts jarringly to black.<\/p>\n

This is the action that starts turning Faith from a \u201cbad girl\u201d into a bad girl. She doesn\u2019t let<\/i> herself grieve, or come to terms with the guilt and horror of what she\u2019s done\u2014but whether she accepts it or not, the grief is there, and her inability to deal with it is what begins her turn to the actual dark side. It\u2019s a subtle echo of what Buffy did at the beginning of the season\u2014Faith is running emotionally from the grief and guilt, but she can\u2019t actually beat it without changing herself entirely. Which of course she does, becoming the Mayor\u2019s best girl. For now.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Cordelia is exempt from this phenomenon, at least in Buffy <\/i>proper. Her romantic grief over Xander does not cause her to become another person, but it does, in \u201cThe Wish,\u201d make everyone else <\/i>into another person.<\/p>\n\"the Leather = evil?<\/span>\n

Fitting, somehow, for the girl who is the only one saying what she\u2019s thinking and thinking what she\u2019s saying at all times. This holds true until we get to the final episode of the first season of Angel<\/i>, in which a demon opens Cordelia\u2019s mind to all of the suffering of humanity at once, and when she comes out of it, she\u2019s making everybody sandwiches. \u201cI know what\u2019s out there now,\u201d she explains, and though she still makes the odd sassy remark, after this moment she\u2019s the heart of the group, and the show, instead of the edge. Not her role before at all. So in Buffy<\/i>, Cordelia\u2019s grief changes the world, but in Angel<\/i>, the world\u2019s grief changes Cordelia. A distinction I think she would like.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, it is this same phenomenon\u2014feeling the pain of all the world\u2014that turns Dark Willow from merely murderous to fully apocalyptic, so did we really just discover that Cordelia has a stronger moral core than Willow? But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself again. Before Dark Willow, we have to talk about Joyce.<\/p>\n\"cordelia A cheerleader, a princess, and a warrior.<\/span>\n

So much has already been said about \u201cThe Body,\u201d which is by any measure an extraordinary episode of television. I\u2019m not sure what I can add to the formal conversation, but I will say this. When I watched it to prepare for this talk, it was the first time I\u2019d seen it since my father died. Similarly to Joyce, really. Sudden, too young. It was difficult to watch, which is of course a testament to how good it is. \u201cThe Body,\u201d more than any other art I\u2019ve encountered, gets at the surreality of sudden death. The big buttons on the phone, the misaligned camera that doesn\u2019t quite capture the paramedic talking. The zoom into Buffy\u2019s face when she realizes that Joyce\u2019s skirt is riding up. The repeated fantasy of everything being all right. It also illustrates how quickly, despite the surreality, you must playact that this death is real to you. If you\u2019re the person who needs to do things, you have to act like it\u2019s real long before you believe it\u2019s real, and that break in perception makes it harder to ever accept it at all.<\/p>\n\"the She’s at the house.<\/span>\n

Of course, this is Buffy\u2019s big source of grief in Season 5, and it\u2019s a turning point in the series. It is as much a reordering of the known world as Dawn was. But it\u2019s not when Buffy becomes an adult. It\u2019s when she is forced into the shape<\/em> of an adult, before she\u2019s ready. First, however, she is obliterated.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody wants to help,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t even know if I\u2019m here.\u201d She tries to be strong and stoic\u2014and again the change is reflected in her hair, that low tight pony she always wears when she\u2019s really white knuckling it\u2014but in \u201cForever,\u201d she finally breaks down with Dawn, who says, \u201cNo one\u2019s asking you to be Mom,\u201d and Buffy responds, \u201cWell who\u2019s gonna be if I\u2019m not?\u201d And in that moment she does<\/i> become mother enough for her sister, who has been secretly trying to resurrect Joyce. Dawn ends the resurrection spell in response, belying her own statement.<\/p>\n

The death of a parent is often the catalyst for the end of childhood, in fiction and in life. But it has special weight here for the forced end of Buffy\u2019s childhood, because Joyce is the only one who is her childhood\u2019s true witness. Nobody else\u2014neither her friends nor Giles\u2014actually knew her as a child. Even Dawn has been manufactured as a result of Buffy\u2019s transformation into the Slayer. The death of Joyce is also the deletion of whatever was left of Buffy\u2019s innocence.<\/p>\n

But of course the death that changes Buffy the most is her own. Well, the second one, anyway.<\/p>\n

I know opinions vary, but I\u2019m someone who loves Season 6. Yes, I will tell you now I am a Spike apologist. I also have to say that the season is chilling to rewatch considering that its Big Bad, much like in the year of our lord 2026, is a group of absolute loser nerds.<\/p>\n\"The We’re your arch nemesis-es.<\/span>\n

Not coincidentally, at least in regards to my thesis here, all of Season 6 is driven by Buffy\u2019s grief. She has now been faced with the worst possible thing. Not her mother\u2019s death, and not even her own. It\u2019s the fact that death is now at last real\u2014and in fact Season 6 makes so much literal that was previously metaphorical\u2014but crucially, not for her<\/em>. She experiences heaven, where she has what she has always wanted, she has finally achieved the mission: she knows everyone she loves is safe. (As a parent, the allure of this is basically indescribable.) And then she is returned to reality. Buffy will not be allowed to rest.<\/p>\n\"after I was torn out of there. By my friends.<\/span>\n

Obviously, she\u2019s depressed. But as the season goes on, Buffy\u2019s unhappiness becomes less about what she\u2019s lost and more about what she\u2019s become. She has been transformed not only by her death and resurrection but by her reaction to it. When she discovers that Spike can hit her again, despite the chip that keeps him from hurting humans, she begs Tara to figure out whether she is in fact still human at all, or whether she \u201ccame back wrong.\u201d When Tara says she\u2019s the same person she always was, Buffy breaks down. She can\u2019t recognize herself. She feels she shouldn\u2019t want what she wants. And it\u2019s worse that there\u2019s no mystical reason for it, because it means there\u2019s no mystical solution for it either.<\/p>\n

By the way, Buffy\u2019s breakdown in this scene\u2014begging Tara not to forgive her, not just for sleeping with Spike (for which Buffy hates herself to a tiresome degree), but also for treating Spike badly\u2014is a direct echo of Faith\u2019s breakdown in the first season of Angel<\/i>, the end of her bad girl arc, where she ruthlessly tortures Wes, and then, when Angel comes to the rescue, fights him, but loses steam when Angel stops fighting back, and dissolves into her grief and guilt over what she<\/i> has become, and winds up begging him to kill her because she’s “bad” and “evil.” This too is a recurring theme in this universe: self-excoriation as the worst possible punishment, and being forced to rely on your friends\u2014on love\u2014to rescue you from becoming truly evil. We will see this again.<\/p>\n\"Hells The return of Anyanka<\/span>\n

Next, because Season 6 is relentless, Xander leaves Anya at the altar, and what happens? That’s right, in her grief, she becomes someone else: returning to the fold as a vengeance demon. Then Spike tries to force himself on Buffy, in maybe the most harrowing scene in the entire show, and becomes so disgusted with himself\u2014really with his inability to be either fully evil or fully good\u2014that he rides off to also<\/i> become another person, by getting his soul back.<\/p>\n

Now I will have a sidebar about how much I love Spike. I know, I know, he\u2019s evil. I know, some of it\u2019s unforgiveable (see above). But he\u2019s so much fun<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\"out<\/p>\n

Everything Spike does is motivated by love. The man\u2019s a poet, after all. The writers can\u2019t decide whether Spike\u2019s a badass or not\u2014he can either fight almost as well as Buffy, and on one memorable occasion better than Angel, or<\/i> he gets immediately knocked down, depending on the narrative requirements of the scene\u2014but the way he loves<\/em> is consistent. He goes all in, no matter how embarrassing it may be. As he tells us in Season 3, \u201cI may be love\u2019s bitch, but at least I\u2019m man enough to admit it.\u201d Kurt Vonnegut famously said, in a list of advice to writers, that every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. And Whedon knows what he\u2019s doing\u2014everyone in both shows always wants something. But no one\u2014no one<\/em>\u2014is thirstier than Spike. You really have to love him for it.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Willow. When Warren kills Tara, Willow\u2019s grief is so immense that it not only transforms her into another person, but it almost destroys the entire world.<\/p>\n\"Dark Was I a good witch or a bad witch?<\/span>\n

What I really love about the Dark Willow arc is how quickly and subtly the show manipulates our sympathies and sense of morality. I\u2019ll just speak for myself and say that in \u201cVillains,\u201d the episode after Tara\u2019s death, I\u2019m on Willow\u2019s side. She wants to hunt and kill Warren? Get him, girl. It\u2019s shocking, because of the show\u2019s internal morality system, to see him flayed like that in the forest, but it\u2019s not not <\/i>satisfying. I know Buffy\u2019s got her code, and we\u2019ve been primed, via Faith, to understand that killing another human is at least the door<\/em> to the path of no return, but the man clearly deserves it, and the show does nothing to convince us otherwise. I still trust Willow in this moment, and no tears will be shed for Warren.<\/p>\n

This is of course despite the fact that right before<\/i> she kills Warren, she says \u201cbored now,\u201d which we have heard her say before, but only as a soulless vampire. Chef’s kiss, writers, and another example of how the show continues to return to these same questions: What causes you to become another person? And then what is the relationship of that person to whoever you were before? Honestly, we could talk for a whole other hour about the relationship between people\u2019s selves and vampire selves\u2014it wasn\u2019t Angel<\/i> who killed Jenny Calendar, we tell ourselves, it was Angelus. But the borders are porous. Buffy says \u201cYou die, and a demon sets up shop in your old house, and it walks, and it talks, and it remembers your life, but it’s not you.\u201d But that\u2019s not entirely true, is it? It\u2019s more complicated than that. Spike was lovesick in life and he is lovesick in unlife. Drusilla was driven insane before she was killed, and she stayed insane. Vampire Willow is \u201ckinda gay\u201d long before Willow knows she is\u2014which doesn\u2019t have great implications, despite the show’s later groundbreaking work in this area, but goes to show that the vampire is more than just a demon wearing the skin of its victim. The demon is inextricably connected to its victim. They may even be one and the same, two sides of the same coin.<\/p>\n\"Doppelgangland\" The sweater<\/em>.<\/span>\n

Anyway, I still trust Willow at the end of \u201cVillains,\u201d until the very next moment, when she says \u201cOne down.\u201d The implication being clear: she\u2019s going to kill the rest of the Trio. Warren is evil, and Andrew is kinda evil, but Jonathan is really not. (Wasn’t he, not so long ago, presenting Buffy with a bejeweled umbrella to thank her for saving everyone’s life so much?) And then, in the next episode, cunningly titled \u201cTwo to Go,\u201d Willow becomes increasingly unpalatable, because she becomes increasingly not herself, despite her friends\u2019 insistence that she is.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is still Willow we\u2019re dealing with, right?\u201d Xander asks at the beginning of the episode. This is the question.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope so,\u201d Buffy tells him.<\/p>\n\"Dark Or a rank, arrogant, amateur?<\/span>\n

When Buffy confronts Willow in Rack\u2019s den, she affirms it, somewhat speculatively: \u201cyou\u2019re still Willow,\u201d she says. But Dark Willow has disavowed her previous self, except for one aspect. It\u2019s right there in the pronouns. \u201cLet me tell you something about Willow,\u201d she says. \u201cShe\u2019s a loser and always has been. She got picked on through junior high, high school, right up until college. With her stupid mousy ways. And now? Willow’s a junkie. The only thing Willow was ever good for…the only thing I ever had going for me were those moments, just moments, where Tara would look at me and I was wonderful. And that will never happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here the grief of losing Tara so unmoors Willow that it almost entirely separates her from herself, to the point where she wants to obliterate the person she was before. As Dark Willow, she is actively trying to kill her own childhood. Compare this to Buffy\u2019s retreat into duty at the loss of her mother, her last true connection to her childhood, and Xander\u2019s desperation to cling to his own, in his parents\u2019 basement, before pushing it away by proposing to Anya, until he realizes that he actually can\u2019t force himself to grow up, and that he\u2019s not ready.<\/p>\n\"Osiris\" You call this natural?<\/span>\n

As with Joyce\u2019s death, there\u2019s nothing that all the Scoobies\u2019 amassed and amassing powers can do about Tara\u2019s death, because it is \u201cnatural.\u201d And again, these sequences carry real emotional weight for the audience, because this is what death and grief really feels like: being faced with our utter powerlessness against the universe, when the rest of our lives are built around the fantasy that we have at least some measure of control. This episode dramatizes the shock of experiencing something truly irreversible.<\/p>\n

The Dark Willow sequence ends, of course, with Xander bringing Willow back by telling her repeatedly that he loves her\u2014plus the \u201cgood\u201d magic Giles brought from Devon\u2014and alas, we repeat the \u201cpowerful woman beating weakly at the chest of a man being kind to her while breaking down\u201d scene we\u2019ve seen before. But even as it\u2019s devastatingly corny, it still makes me tear up. Such is the power, and so on.<\/p>\n\"Yellow Color theory in action.<\/span>\n

\u201cKilling people changes you,\u201d Buffy says in this episode, and she\u2019s right. But clearly so does living while other people are killed.<\/p>\n

Of course none of this exists in a vacuum.<\/p>\n

As the characters experience grief, and are changed by it, so too are the fans. This is not specific to Buffy<\/i>, but can happen in anything with such a strong fandom: the grief of the characters and the grief of the viewers is intertwined. Tara and Willow were groundbreaking characters at the time, and Tara\u2019s death caused real grief in fans who did not expect the Bury Your Gays trope to appear in this show. When Amber Benson, the actress who plays Tara, was asked to reappear as the First Evil, who could impersonate anyone dead, she said no, because she thought that seeing Tara be evil would be too painful for the fans. She wanted to protect the people who saw themselves for the first time on television in Tara and Willow\u2019s relationship from having to feel further grief. Supposedly, Whedon was even going to write Tara back in at the end of Season 7, bring her back to life with basically a wish, and Benson refused even that, because she didn\u2019t trust him with the character. Good on her.<\/p>\n\"Tara I know what they see in me.<\/span>\n

My father was a Buddhist, and he would say that everything is impermanent, and ultimately, all grief comes from the delusion that it isn\u2019t. It is the result of holding on too tightly to the people and things and ideas we love and understand. It comes from the difficulty of change. So again, Buffy <\/i>is all about grief, because Buffy <\/i>is about being a teenager, and being a teenager is, ultimately, about change. But there\u2019s another kind of grief, too, which is not about change at all, but about stasis\u2014or at least about accepting, or failing to accept, the inevitable. This is something I am becoming familiar with as I become middle-aged. And this is what Angel <\/i>is about.<\/p>\n\"Are Are you now, or have you ever been?<\/span>\n

Consider the way Angel<\/i>, the show, deals with Buffy\u2019s death\u2014with the caveat that this moment coincides with the two shows’ debuts on different and competing networks, so there\u2019s some incentive to get past it quickly. At the beginning of Season 3, Angel returns after three months in a monastery, where he went to go \u201cdeal,\u201d offscreen, with the death of the love of his life. (For some reason, even though he\u2019s been there for months, he only realizes the monks are demons on the last day.) Upon his return, he kills a vampire wearing a necklace, realizing too late that he\u2019d known her back in his cutting-a-swath-through-Europe days. She\u2019d been madly in love with another vampire, James, who then of course shows up to take his revenge, having cut out his own heart to become temporarily invincible, before dissolving into dust. Another case of grief being transformative, and another case of love as sacrifice. But the message here is really contrary to what we\u2019ve seen in Buffy<\/i>. James\u2019s obsessive love, his unwillingness to go on without his beloved, is treated as childish, if not a version of sweaty insanity.<\/p>\n

In their confrontation, Cordelia tells James that Angel loved someone too, and that she died, but James can\u2019t believe that Angel truly loved someone, \u201cbecause when she died, or when some bastard killed her, it would have killed everything in you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s your idea of love, James?\u201d Angel asks scornfully. \u201cIt\u2019s not real unless it kills you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, what\u2019s yours?\u201d he replies. \u201cIt\u2019s fun as long as it doesn\u2019t cost me anything?\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of the episode, Cordelia asks Angel what\u2019s wrong; she thinks he\u2019s still feeling grief over Buffy. But Angel tells her that the problem is that he is okay, that losing Buffy didn\u2019t kill him, and it feels like he\u2019s betraying Buffy somehow by continuing to exist. Codelia says that he\u2019s honoring her by continuing to fight and help people. And then . . . they get back to work. Compare that to the way that Buffy dealt with Angel\u2019s death, and the way that Willow dealt with Tara\u2019s death. Angel <\/i>asserts itself then as subscribing to a different code: a more adult mode of acceptance.<\/p>\n\"The Historically accurate.<\/span>\n

Relatedly, Angel <\/i>is much more concerned with the idea of fate and free will than Buffy <\/i>is. Neither show has a particularly coherent relationship to religion, but in Angel <\/i>there are the Powers That Be, with corporeal (or at least killable) Oracles dressed in vaguely Grecian outfits, not to mention senior partners with variously embodied conduits, and most importantly, prophecies. While the first season of Buffy <\/i>does feature one prominent prophecy, the prophecy is a major repeated device in Angel<\/i>. The main one is obviously the Shanshu Prophecy, which declares that the vampire with a soul will play a pivotal role in the apocalypse and then become human; there\u2019s also the one that sends Wesley into his final form, which we’ll get to. The contrast is this: in Buffy <\/i>there\u2019s always the sense that the Scoobies have agency, that things can be changed if they just figure out the key, the plan, the secret weakness. Just look at how the show ends: with no other path forward, the characters literally change the show’s premise<\/em>. They remake their own reality. But in Angel<\/i>, our heroes know that they are always fighting a losing battle. There is no path, forward or back. There is only attrition, if they\u2019re lucky. They\u2019re always betting against the house, sometimes very literally; they\u2019re always fighting City Hall, until, in Season 5, they become it. And then they still<\/em> have to fight it, only from within.<\/p>\n\"Paperwork\" Death and taxes.<\/span>\n

At the end of Season 4 of Angel<\/i>, which is a mess except for the Jasmine arc, an undead Lilah offers the gang Wolfram and Hart, as a reward, sort of, for ending world peace by defeating Jasmine\u2014because in Angel<\/i>, no matter what you do, you do evil too. Angel\u2019s son Connor has his own version of the Willow crisis, wiring a bunch of civilian hostages up to bombs, including a comatose (but still showing up for work) Cordelia. \u201cThere\u2019s only one thing that ever changes anything, and that\u2019s death,\u201d he says. \u201cEverything else is just a lie. You can\u2019t be saved by a lie. You can\u2019t be saved at all.\u201d And lest we suspect that this is only a moody complaint from the teenager from hell (literally), Angel gives ghost-Spike a similar speech at the beginning of Season 5: \u201cYou think any of it matters? The things we did, the lives we destroyed, that\u2019s all that\u2019s ever gonna count. So yeah, surprise: you\u2019re going to hell. We both are.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThen why even bother?\u201d Spike asks. \u201cTry to do the right thing, make a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat else are we gonna do,\u201d says Angel.<\/p>\n\"Destiny All this for a little Mountain Dew.<\/span>\n

Later, when Spike becomes corporeal again, reality starts to unravel, because \u201cthe wheel of destiny\u201d gets, basically, confused about to whom the Shanshu prophecy refers. Of course, when Angel and Spike go to fight to the death over who gets to be the world\u2019s champion, and Spike comes out holding the magical goblet, they find that . . . it\u2019s filled with Mountain Dew. It was all a scam, perpetrated by Lindsey, in his triumphant tattooed return. But this is the question that Angel <\/i>is continually turning over, asking from one direction and the other: do we have free will? Do we have a destiny, or even a purpose? And if we do, so what? And if we don\u2019t, so what? In Angel<\/i>, unlike in Buffy<\/i>, there\u2019s always someone above you, pulling the strings. Buffy accepts no authority other than her own\u2014she fires the Watchers Council when they try to assert it. In Angel<\/i>, everybody has a boss.<\/p>\n

So if Buffy <\/i>is about the grief of being a teenager, Angel <\/i>is about the grief of adulthood: Of having to face reality. Of recognizing the Sisyphean task ahead, the endless, unchanging road diminishing in the distance, and taking another step anyway. Even at the end, when it\u2019s THE apocalypse, not AN apocalypse, Lindsey tells Angel it\u2019s actually been in progress all along. \u201cThe world keeps sliding toward entropy and degradation.\u201d Don\u2019t we know it.<\/p>\n\"Not One last stand.<\/span>\n

This is not to say that there is no change in Angel<\/i>. In fact, it is the primary site of what I\u2019d argue is the greatest, or at least the longest, character arc of the Buffyverse, which is itself driven by grief, and which belongs to Wesley Wyndham-Price.<\/p>\n\"Wes You try not to get anybody killed, you wind up getting everybody killed.<\/span>\n

Wesley first appears in Season 3 of Buffy<\/i> as an ineffectual, pompous dork, sent by the ever confusing (and honestly, poorly conceived) Watcher\u2019s Council, who lusts after a teenage Cordelia and is constantly being knocked down. The last we see of him in Buffy <\/i>is literally crawling around underfoot during the final battle with the Mayor, mewling \u201cget some help here?.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he comes back, midway through the first season of Angel<\/i>, as a ROGUE DEMON HUNTER (\u201cwhat\u2019s a rogue demon?\u201d), having been fired by the Watcher\u2019s Council for incompetence, he seems like he\u2019s there to replace Doyle as the Xander, but he doesn\u2019t. Instead he becomes the Giles, which makes sense, and slowly, particularly after impersonating Angel for a while, he gets braver and more useful, and eventually he even steps in as the leader of the group when Angel is being unbearably emo. But what really happens to Wesley is that, in Season 3 of Angel<\/i>, he falls in love.<\/p>\n

Wes falls in love with Fred, the manic pixie dream physicist they rescue in Pylea, and just as he\u2019s thinking he might tell her about it, he is infected by a demonic congressman\u2019s son who causes any man he comes in contact with to become violently misogynistic. Crucially, Gunn comes to Fred\u2019s rescue. But even more crucially, the experience doesn\u2019t traumatize Fred, who recognizes that Wes was under someone else\u2019s power\u2014instead, the transformation traumatizes Wes himself. He is so deeply shaken by this glimpse at what he fears is something deep within him that he basically gives up on his feelings for a while. When he does decide to try again to declare his feelings for Fred, he\u2019s too late, and he sees her making out with Gunn instead.<\/p>\n\"Wes The father will kill the son (?)<\/span>\n

It is in this mindset\u2014the same episode\u2014that Wes discovers a prophecy that he believes means Angel will kill his child. Because at this point, true to the show being about adulthood, there\u2019s a baby. (My kingdom for the Host as a Nanny.) Increasingly isolated and paranoid\u2014his fears being fueled by Wolfram & Hart\u2019s manipulations\u2014Wes kidnaps the baby Connor, intending to take him to safety.<\/p>\n

Instead Justine shows up to slit his throat and take the baby from him, leaving him for dead; the child winds up disappearing with Holtz into a hell dimension.<\/p>\n

Connor\u2019s kidnapping, by the way, is the moment of Angel\u2019s greatest grief\u2014there is no greater grief than the loss of a child\u2014and this does change him, much more so than Buffy\u2019s death. Like Tara\u2019s death for Willow, Connor\u2019s disappearance rewrites the laws of morality for Angel. It seems at first like it won\u2019t\u2014in \u201cForgiving,\u201d Lorne tells Angel that \u201cmaybe the way to start forgiving yourself is to forgive him,\u201d which is a pretty typical message for both shows. Your friends make it better, and in the process, save you from becoming evil. Angel forgives Faith. Xander forgives Willow. Healing comes from love. The Slayer lives because she has friends. Etc.<\/p>\n\"Forgiving The opposite of Cordelia’s hospital scene.<\/span>\n

But Angel doesn\u2019t<\/i> forgive Wesley. Angel goes to the hospital to see Wes, acting all worried. He goes into his room, where Wes is unable to speak, and tells him he understands why he did it, that he knows about the prophecy, and how hard it must have been for him to do what he did. He acknowledges that Wes thought he was going to turn evil, and then he says, \u201cI didn\u2019t. It\u2019s important you know that. This isn\u2019t Angelus talking, it\u2019s me, Angel. You know that, right?\u201d Wes nods, and then Angel proceeds to try to suffocate him with a pillow, screaming \u201cyou think I forgive you? Never! You\u2019re gonna die, you hear me? You\u2019re gonna pay! You\u2019re a dead man, I\u2019ll kill you!\u201d<\/p>\n

This does not turn Wesley fully evil, though it might have. Men have been red-pilled by less. It does turn him very, very dark. This reflects Angel<\/i>\u2019s stance that adulthood is basically a battle of attrition; the goal of Wolfram & Hart for so long is to turn Angel evil\u2014and then, once they see the opportunity in his grief, they start trying to turn Wesley evil too. In the last episode of Season 3, he starts sleeping with the enemy, Lilah; when he\u2019s cold to her afterward, she says \u201cSo your former boss has a soul, and you\u2019re losing yours. You\u2019re just new all over aren\u2019t you?\u201d Later, he keeps Justine in a cage in his apartment. When he starts gradually coming back to the Hyperion to help, he\u2019s so changed that Gunn asks \u201cWhat happened to you, man?\u201d<\/p>\n

Wes replies, \u201cI had my throat cut and all my friends abandoned me.\u201d Which about sums it up.<\/p>\n\"Wes All those hours locked under the stairs and you still weren’t good enough. Not good enough for daddy, not good enough for the Council.<\/span>\n

Another character transformed by grief, and possibly the worst grief that the internal logic of the show can muster at this point: Wes\u2019s friends give up on him, and this is the hardest thing for him to come back from. And still he refrains from actually turning to the dark side. His final revenge against Faith, perhaps. He really is better than her.<\/p>\n

But in Season 5, after Angel has erased everyone\u2019s memories of his son, and also what Wes did, he\u2019s back with the group, and still in love with Fred, a love so strong he kills his own father to protect her without a second thought. (Even if his father turned out to be a robot, he still did it.) And finally, finally, at the end of \u201cSmile Time,\u201d the 14th episode of Season 5, Wes and Fred get together.<\/p>\n\"Smile Everybody loves puppets.<\/span>\n

\u201cSmile Time\u201d is, if you recall, the one with the puppets, and it\u2019s ridiculous, and great\u2014and also a cruel and unusual trick, perfectly calibrated to lull you into submission, so that when you come to the next episode, \u201cA Hole in the World,\u201d you\u2019ll be even more devastated.<\/p>\n\"A It seems like we ought to have known.<\/span>\n

In \u201cA Hole in the World,\u201d Fred breathes in some mummy dust and dies. But slowly. And ultimately in Wes\u2019s arms. (This is actually very similar in structure to Tara\u2019s death\u2014she died just after getting back together with Willow, so it\u2019s the rug-pull of finally getting the girl only for her to die, literally on you; in fact in both cases the survivor finds themselves suddenly splattered with their lover\u2019s blood during what, just a second ago, was a sweet moment. Also, come to think of it, Jenny is also killed just when she and Giles reconcile\u2014what happened to you, Joss?)<\/p>\n

Like Joyce and Tara\u2019s deaths, Fred\u2019s death is almost unbearably realistic, but it stands alone in another way: this is the slowest on-screen death in the Buffyverse; it takes an entire episode. It upends the unspoken truth of the show: that the gang always solves the problem in the nick of time. Instead, you suffer all episode, and then she dies.<\/p>\n

Fred\u2019s body is taken over by the Old One Illyria, which complicates the grief, both for the viewer and for Wesley. Wes agrees to help Illyria find her way in the world, admitting that it\u2019s because she looks like Fred. Except, you know, she\u2019s blue. Though Wes is tortured by Fred\u2019s death and by Illyria, having the \u201cshell\u201d there somehow mitigates his grief, or he wouldn\u2019t do it\u2014though he repeatedly asks her not to look like Fred. He doesn\u2019t want to forget what\u2019s real. And for the viewer, or at least for me, the pain of losing the character is tempered by not losing the actor. Holding on to the scraps brings comfort, even if we\u2019re only fooling ourselves.<\/p>\n\"Illyria\" I wish to do more violence.<\/span>\n

\u201cIs there anything in this life but grief?\u201d Illyria asks at the end of \u201cShells.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s love,\u201d Wesley says. \u201cThere\u2019s hope, for some. There\u2019s hope that you\u2019ll find something worthy. That your life will lead you to some joy. That after everything, you can still be surprised.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that enough?\u201d she asks. \u201cIs that enough to live on?\u201d<\/p>\n

There is no answer. What answer could there be?<\/p>\n\"angel It was good that you came.<\/span>\n

In Wesley\u2019s final scene, in the last episode of Angel<\/i>, he finally allows Illyria to lie to him and transform into Fred, so he can pretend to be with her in his dying moments. And she does, echoing the real Fred\u2019s own death, with extra resonance, as Illyria too has developed feelings for Wesley. In the end, it\u2019s a transformation not because of grief, but to alleviate it. They each die in the other one\u2019s arms. Or, almost. This kind of orchestral pain\u2014built up over years, mirrored back and forth between the characters, approached slant and head on at once\u2014is where the Buffyverse is at its best.<\/p>\n\"Much Thanks, I needed that.<\/span>\n

By the way, I just have to say, I\u2019ve never had this experience before or since, but despite knowing that Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof are actors, I felt incredible catharsis, years later, when I watched the opening of Whedon\u2019s 2012 adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing<\/i>, in which Acker\u2019s Beatrice and Denisof\u2019s Benedick sleep together. (I\u2019ll say nothing about this interpretation<\/i> of my favorite Shakespeare play.) If anyone hasn\u2019t seen it, I must recommend. It will make you feel better. This is apropos of nothing except the success of the tragedy in Angel<\/i>, and the way grief\u2014even fictional grief\u2014can linger.<\/p>\n\"Kendra Where’s Mr. Pointy??<\/span>\n

It\u2019s worth pointing out who doesn\u2019t get grieved\u2014Kendra\u2019s death seems to affect none of the other characters<\/a>, though you might have imagined it would crush Buffy a little more, and Anya\u2019s, after all that, feels like a throwaway. Cordelia\u2019s long-delayed death is swept under the rug, and her entire third act is badly mishandled, which in retrospect seems to be about Whedon\u2019s toxic behavior towards Charisma Carpenter, and therefore something I don\u2019t really accept as canon, but feels necessary to mention here.<\/p>\n

I also just have to mention that, despite the overt feminism of the show, it\u2019s overwhelmingly women who die for real in Buffy<\/i>. Jonathan does get it at the end there, but setting aside the finale of Angel<\/i>, in which arguably everyone dies, I think every other character that we really care about who we lose for good is a woman. Just food for thought.<\/p>\n\"Vampyr\" I know what you’re after.<\/span>\n

I promised to talk about why writers love Buffy, so I\u2019ll end with that.<\/p>\n

Plenty of high profile writers have talked publicly about their love for the show<\/a>. I already mentioned Women\u2019s Prize for Fiction winner Naomi Alderman. There’s also Kelly Link, recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, who wrote a short story\u2014it\u2019s the title story of her collection Magic for Beginners<\/i><\/a>\u2014about the experience of watching Buffy<\/i>. It reads sort of like a love letter and also like a wish. She\u2019s said that she wondered what the characters of her favorite fantasy shows might themselves like to watch on television and started from there, but the thing that I really appreciate about this story as it relates to Buffy <\/i>is that it\u2019s a literary representation of the kind of slippage you feel when you\u2019re this connected to a cultural artifact. It\u2019s both dream Buffy <\/i>and dream watching-Buffy<\/i>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s bestseller Lev Grossman, who says he couldn\u2019t have written<\/a> The Magicians <\/i>without Buffy<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The Booker Prize-winning novelist\u2014and I\u2019m mostly telling you everyone\u2019s accolades here so we can all feel in good company about our correct opinions\u2014Marlon James has called Buffy<\/i> \u201cthe only show I can remember that often left me breathless and in wonder, or put another way, the only show that without fail had at least one instant each episode that had me saying I wish I wrote that.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s it, on the most basic of levels. I think we all wish we wrote it.<\/p>\n\"Homecoming Competition. Competition is a beautiful thing. Makes us strive. Makes us accomplish. Makes us kill.<\/span>\n

People come to literature for many different things. More things, I’d argue, than they come to television for. As a lifelong Nabokov dork, I come for language, and for play, but the thing I really crave is quality of mind. I\u2019m always looking for a unique consciousness, some other way of seeing the world, that is inaccessible to me otherwise. This might come from language, or narrative voice, or perspective. Quality of mind is something that novels tend to do better than any other medium, because of their natural bent toward interiority. Film and television are mostly shot in the third-person. Setting aside the magical powers of voiceover, we can\u2019t hear what anyone is thinking. We don\u2019t know what the inside of their mind feels like. We watch what is done and said and emoted, but the internal texture of the characters is typically absent. The closest we can get in visual media is some kind of connection to the director<\/i> via their choices. Think Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino, both examples of directors who have punishingly cohesive viewpoints. But this isn\u2019t quite the same as a representation of a fictional consciousness. And anyway, that kind of auteurism is less common in television, particularly pre-Peak TV streaming six-episode season television, because of the format, and the number of writers, and other constraints.<\/p>\n\"ciao\" Ciao.<\/span>\n

But in Buffy <\/i>and Angel,<\/i> because of the density of the storytelling and worldbuilding, it does feel as though there is a kind of larger quality of mind at play. It\u2019s not literal; there isn\u2019t a character narrating this story, unless you count Andrew in his smoking jacket, or Buffy cooking away in the insane asylum\u2014which, there\u2019s an argument. On the whole, though, there is an element of the interior in these shows that is hard to put a finger on. It\u2019s in the language, the self-referential intertextuality, the sense of humor, the overlapping metaphors. It\u2019s in what we\u2019ve been talking about here, the many different approaches to the same concept, the mirroring and repetition, stretched over years, the shows turning over the same concerns, worrying the same images, in the internal overriding logic of the narrative that feels, despite the many writers, like a kind of universal intelligence. It\u2019s a kind of consciousness built on accumulation.<\/p>\n\"Band Call me, Ripper.<\/span>\n

There\u2019s also the fact that Buffy <\/i>and especially Angel <\/i>still feel, after all this, like secrets. Fellow “The Pack” convert and critic Emily Nussbaum has written<\/a> that the show\u2019s low-budget visuals, its inherent campiness, kept it from being widely viewed and appreciated when it aired\u2014as she points out, the flashy, and also brilliant\/groundbreaking The Sopranos<\/i> was on at the same time, and because of its production value, network, and (I\u2019d argue) its maleness, was written about everywhere, treated like literature immediately. Yet the very campiness of Buffy <\/i>is part of its literary appeal. Buffy<\/i> is not slick. It is touchable. It feels, despite the enormity of the themes, like you can hide it under your bed. It is paperback size. Again, I know plenty of writers who love The Sopranos<\/i>, not to mention, say, Love Island<\/i>. But not the way they love Buffy<\/i>. There’s something about\u00a0Buffy\u00a0<\/em>that feels like it belongs to us.<\/p>\n\" My favorite moment of the series.<\/span>\n

One of the first ways I was taught to interpret literature was through a symbolist lens\u2014maybe they still teach this way. When Gregor Samsa wakes up as an enormous insect one morning, what does it really mean<\/i>? What is Hemingway trying to tell us with these hills? And so on. And there is something satisfying in tracking clues and decoding references. But as a writer, I\u2019ve realized that by treating fiction of any kind like a code to be broken ultimately distracts from the point. \u201cStories aren\u2019t about things,\u201d Bret Anthony Johnson has memorably written. \u201cStories are <\/i>things. Stories aren\u2019t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.\u201d Too much intention, too much Trying to Say, too much overarching metaphor, can deaden your work.<\/p>\n\"Fear Bunnies, bunnies, it must be bunnies!<\/span>\n

But Buffy <\/i>is full of those codes and metaphors, sometimes painfully obvious\u2014and vehemently excepting \u201cBeer Bad,\u201d it usually works. Because Buffy <\/i>and Angel <\/i>both manage to do both: they manage to be codes and<\/i> actions. The most obvious general interpretation of Buffy<\/i>\u2019s project is that the show transmutes real teenage anxieties into monsters; every villain is a metaphor. High school is hell. But that would be hollow without the sense that the characters\u2019 emotions, and therefore our emotions, are real<\/i>\u2014that the story, though it might have been born from metaphor, has literal, intrinsic meaning. That\u2019s why we feel something when we watch it. Like all good literature, Buffy <\/i>and Angel <\/i>are more than one thing at once. They are full of mirrors and doubles and layers of meaning and shifting sands. Like all good literature, Buffy <\/i>changes. And like all good literature, Buffy <\/i>changes us.<\/p>\n\"The With the rising music, and the rising…music.<\/span>\n

So this last year, I\u2019ve been feeling grief\u2014for Anthony Stewart Head and Nicholas Brendan and Michelle Trachtenberg, and their families, and for my dad, and for the world\u2014and that\u2019s okay. Because grief is good. It\u2019s what makes us human. It\u2019s how we know we have a soul. Sometimes you can\u2019t find it until it hurts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following essay is adapted from a keynote address given at the Association for the Study of Buffy+’s 11th Biennial Slayage Conference on July 10, 2026. In case it needs to be said, this essay contains many, many spoilers for,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1210,"featured_media":275618,"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":[43069,43093,11,26761,43092],"tags":[37889,111819,23783,42678,745,8238],"class_list":["post-275483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-film-and-tv","category-fullwidth-slider","category-longform","category-newsandculture","tag-angel","tag-anthony-head","tag-buffy-the-vampire-slayer","tag-emily-has-fun-at-work","tag-grief","tag-television","story-type-deep-dive"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Fh","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/buffygrief-copy.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275483","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=275483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275517,"date":"2026-08-18T05:09:58","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T09:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275517"},"modified":"2026-08-17T22:35:56","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T02:35:56","slug":"why-i-hiked-the-appalachian-trail-twice-30-years-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/why-i-hiked-the-appalachian-trail-twice-30-years-apart\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Hiked the Appalachian Trail Twice\u201430 Years Apart"},"content":{"rendered":"

It might be the simplest thing I\u2019ve ever done.<\/p>\n

Which is not to say the easiest, because I was hurting from the first minute, and kept hurting through every minute after. Cramps racked my legs. My shoulders, hips, and feet ached even while I slept. I courted hypothermia and heat exhaustion, usually nursed at least one actively bleeding wound, and passed my days bug-bitten, bruised, chafed, and filthy. My beard clumped and knotted into an itchy, feral nest. I reeked with such paint-peeling ferocity that my body\u2019s immune system seemed, in the name of self-preservation, to dampen my sense of smell\u2014and even so, a whiff sometimes snuck past my defenses to nearly knock me off my feet.<\/p>\n

I spent my waking hours hungry. My body torched the calories I forced down each day and went scrounging for more, so that I dwindled to a rawboned shadow of myself, a scarecrow of jutting ribs, sunken eyes, hollow cheeks. I craved fats so desperately that I chugged squeeze cheese from the bottle. I saw others do the same with liquid margarine.<\/p>\n

At night I writhed with longing. I missed my girlfriend. I missed my family. I missed air conditioning. I missed cold beer and hot showers. I missed freedom from lightning, rattlesnakes, high rock ledges, and toppling trees. And my discomfort and exhaustion and stink and hunger and homesickness rarely waned, for more than five months.<\/p>\n

So, no, not the easiest. But wonderfully simple, because all I had to do was something I\u2019d been doing since around my first birthday, and that I\u2019d honed with daily practice over decades. I had only to maintain my balance while putting one foot in front of the other. The whole of my mission was to walk.<\/p>\n

I took my first step on a mountaintop in Maine. When my journey ended 157 days later, I\u2019d taken an estimated five million more\u2014and in so doing, had traipsed nearly 2,200 miles across fourteen states. That sounds like a lot of walking, and I\u2019m here to testify that it was; but when that\u2019s all you\u2019re called upon to do, it\u2019s only so big a challenge.<\/p>\n

I emerged with a new sense of the vastness, beauty, and hospitality of a country I thought I knew. Turned out I didn\u2019t. It was bigger and lovelier than I realized. More inspiring than I imagined. Kinder than I hoped.<\/p>\n

Granted, this was not a smooth, flatland odyssey. My walk took me over the peaks and ridges of the Eastern highlands, on a narrow footpath that rose and fell thousands of feet in the course of an average day. In places, the path nosed up rock so steep I had to hoist myself hand-over-hand; in others, it tiptoed across fields of sliding scree, stumbled through gale and blinding fog high above treeline, and forded rushing streams. It slopped into wallows of loose mud, mazed through boulder fields, and shoved its way past grasping thickets of blackberry, rhododendron, and mountain laurel.<\/p>\n

Here and there, the path ran level and soft underfoot, and the walking felt nearly effortless. Far more often, it required gasping toil. It provoked cascades of sweat on frigid mornings. It made my muscles shriek, my knees tremble, my lungs burn. But again, there was just that to do. I didn\u2019t have any complex problems to solve, any thorny decisions to make. I didn\u2019t really have to think much at all: The path was already there. I merely followed it.<\/p>\n

Besides, the payoffs eclipsed most of the discomforts I suffered. The trail led the way to windswept heights from which I could gaze down on multiple states at once, into secretive, mossy woods that stretched unbroken and dark for days, and down the main drags of a half-dozen cheery villages. It dropped me into cornfields and barnyards and pastures busy with curious cows, and into close company with bears, moose, snakes, deer, and crazy, wing-thumping grouse that charged me on foot all through the state of Maine. It introduced me to big-hearted humans from every walk of life. I emerged with a new sense of the vastness, beauty, and hospitality of a country I thought I knew.<\/p>\n

Turned out I didn\u2019t. It was bigger and lovelier than I realized. More inspiring than I imagined. Kinder than I hoped.<\/p>\n

This came into focus bit by bit, as I made my way southward at just over two miles an hour, my pace checked not only by diabolical terrain but by the bag strapped to my back\u2014a pack crammed with the food, water, clothing, and shelter I needed to survive the days and nights between my irregular brushes with civilization. Freshly provisioned, my payload equaled a third of my own weight.<\/p>\n

Some days, when my burden seemed especially heavy, I thought of little else. Some days, the weight of that pack had me convinced that I would not, could not, finish the walk. On a few occasions, when it threw off my balance or snared the wind like a spinnaker, it seemed I might not survive it.<\/p>\n

But how hard was it, really, next to so much that we\u2019re called upon to do in life?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not like I was studying particle physics.<\/p>\n

I just walked.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

All these years later, that\u2019s what I marvel over most when I reflect on hiking the Appalachian Trail: that a walk from the North Maine Woods to the hogbacks of northern Georgia was so straightforward in its demands. At no other time as an adult have I enjoyed such uncomplicated days. I woke up in the woods. I ate. I broke camp. I walked all day, then set up a new camp. I ate. I was asleep before nightfall. The next day, I did it all again. I achieved a sort of rustic luxury with a few carefully curated possessions.<\/p>\n

My fondest memories of the hike speak to that simplicity, and to the unmatched freedom that sprang from it. For twenty-two weeks I enjoyed an enchanted escape from the mundane turns and everyday worries of my life in the city. I lived as a vagabond\u2014free to go where I wished, when I pleased, for as long as I wanted, all the while beholden to no person, job, or itinerary. I dispensed with the clock and calendar. I broke free of the dragging anchor of stuff<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The effects of this uncomplicated venture lingered. Years later, it had become the signature life event around which I organized all others, a point of inflection marking my graduation from immature, unfocused, and selfish youth to (according to some sources) a more thoughtful and self-reliant grownup. It helped make me a more productive worker. Prepared me for the task saturation of parenthood. Deepened my passion for the wilds, and graced me with know-how I have used ever since. It shot my confidence sky-high.<\/p>\n

It also proved a theorem that I did not take to heart until I saw it demonstrated every day in the woods: I could accomplish virtually anything, no matter how impossibly large or difficult or complex, as long as I broke it down into its component parts\u2014then broke those parts into their individual ingredients, and those into theirs, and tackled the resulting, manageable fragments of the whole in sequence. It\u2019s borderline nuts to decide you\u2019ll take five million steps across the roof of the eastern United States. It\u2019s a lot more reasonable to commit to thirty thousand by sundown.<\/p>\n

In short, my 1990 hike became, and remains, central to who I think I am. Which partly explains why, almost as soon as I reached the trail\u2019s end in the mountains north of Atlanta, I felt pulled back into the woods. I lived hours east of the trail in Norfolk, Virginia, amid coastal marsh the tides flooded twice a day, so for years I answered this siren song with lowland variations on backpacking\u2014a six-week sea kayaking expedition around the Chesapeake Bay, a 435-mile canoe trip down the James River, various adventures by bike. Eventually, though, my work shifted me inland to Charlottesville, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge. I began hiking on the A.T. several mornings a week.<\/p>\n

In the process, I rediscovered all I had been missing. Under the canopy, I could lose myself to the sound of my breathing, trade conscious thought for brainstem reflex, and in this Zen state happen upon truths that eluded me at home. As my daily five-milers became sacrosanct, I moved to a house a dozen miles closer to the trailhead at Rockfish Gap\u2014and, later still, to the gap itself, into an apartment carved from a moldering former roadside inn that travelers once prized for its Brunswick Stew. The place looked every second of its hundred years\u2014it would be fair to call it \u201ctumbledown,\u201d or \u201ctimeworn,\u201d or even \u201ca goddamn eyesore\u201d\u2014but it stood just a mile from the spot where the trail, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Shenandoah National Park meet. From my living room windows, I could admire the farms and vineyards of the Rockfish Valley from a thousand feet up, and trace the A.T.\u2019s course across the great gray bulk of Humpback Mountain, on the valley\u2019s far side. In less than five minutes I could drive to the park, check in with the rangers, and head up Skyline Drive to a trailhead.<\/p>\n

I banged out more than thirteen hundred miles a year after moving there. Without fail, I ended each hike wanting more. I\u2019d get to a turnaround spot and pause for a long moment to consider the trail ahead as it curved from view beyond timber and stone. I knew where it went. I\u2019d walked it before. Yet, standing there, I had to fight the urge to keep going.<\/p>\n

Until I realized one day I didn\u2019t have to fight the urge. I didn\u2019t need to stop.<\/p>\n

A second hike would be a very different experience from my first. The trail itself hasn\u2019t changed much, but everything around it has. Would-be through-hikers now number in the thousands each year, rather than the mere hundreds of yore. Hiking gear weighs a fraction of what it did. Smart phones have replaced cameras, radios, paper maps, and long road walks to telephone booths. An elaborate cottage industry has sprung up along the A.T.\u2019s flanks, catering to hikers\u2019 willingness to pay for beds, showers, laundry, and shuttles into town. All of that is window dressing next to the biggest change of all: I am more than twice as old as I was the first time around. But the pull is strong, because one aspect of the long walk has not changed since 1990\u2014that beautiful simplicity, which remains as essential to the experience as ever.<\/p>\n

One other thing. I want another shot at an end-to-end hike because my first, for all of its wonders, was colored by tragedy. Alongside my memories of sylvan bliss lurk the discordant effects of terrible violence in a place that almost never sees it.<\/p>\n

It did not touch me directly: When it struck I was 120 miles away, asleep and safe in my tent. Even so, that violence has haunted me for more than three decades. It defied my understanding then, and continues to confound me half a lifetime later.<\/p>\n

Another long walk, I think, might put it in perspective.<\/p>\n

Another walk might answer questions I don\u2019t even know to ask.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s come to an understanding, right off the bat: I\u2019m no Daniel Boone.<\/p>\n

I was not raised an outdoorsman. I have never killed an animal for its meat. I could not start a fire using string, sticks, and wood shavings to save my life. I\u2019m the store-bought brand of adventurer, capable of surviving weeks in the wilderness if equipped with a pile of gear and food\u2014and only<\/i> if equipped with it. If I were lost in the backcountry and had to rely on my orienteering skills to get to safety, I would stay lost.<\/p>\n

My first backpacking experience, at age twelve, took me into the Big Thicket of East Texas with my Boy Scout troop, and without an atom of preparation. I carried a canvas Scout backpack crammed with canned chili, cotton clothes, and a flannel sleeping bag intended for slumber parties\u2014a load that probably weighed fifty pounds, on a hiker who weighed less than ninety, in a pack that didn\u2019t feature a hip belt. That weekend was a study in deprivation and pain. Especially pain.<\/p>\n

A clever boy would have moved on to other hobbies. Not me. My subsequent backpacking trips were every bit as miserable as the first. My leaden pack tortured me to tears. My cotton socks invited blisters by the dozen. Mosquitoes and ticks feasted on my young flesh. I lay scratching in my fifteen-pound sleeping bag under a tarp that provided almost zero protection from the elements, wondering why I wasn\u2019t slouched on the sofa at home, watching Star Trek<\/i> reruns. Only after I suffered through two years without a good answer did I decide that I was done.<\/p>\n

I stayed that way for years. I camped a lot in my teens, but I had no desire to strap on a backpack; I didn\u2019t find much value in elective pursuits that made me cry. Not until I was in my early twenties did I reopen my mind to the idea, and it happened in roundabout fashion. On a camping trip with college friends, I explored a cave punched into a high limestone bluff along Missouri\u2019s Meramec River: a wild cave, minus the piped-in music, recessed lighting, and chirpy tour guides of the caverns I\u2019d braved before. In profound dark a quarter-mile from the entrance, a succession of breathtaking flowstone formations appeared in the flickering yellow glow of our candles\u2014in testament to just how stupid we were, yes, we lit our way with candles\u2014and I returned to daylight eager for more. My enthusiasm for caving gave way, in time, to a broader hunger for the beauty and freedom of the outdoors, and the excitement of exploring the wilds far from the nearest road. That, by necessity, meant traveling on foot, while carrying all I needed to survive.<\/p>\n

One aspect of the long walk has not changed since 1990\u2014that beautiful simplicity, which remains as essential to the experience as ever.<\/p>\n

Later, living in Alaska, I bought my first serious gear, including a then-cutting edge external-frame Kelty backpack. I did not put it to much backcountry use up there, as I found it hard to relax while sharing the Bush with half-ton carnivores that viewed me as (a) a trespasser, (b) a threat to their offspring, and (c) delicious. Rather, I bided my time until I moved back to the Lower 48. I settled in Norfolk, dimly aware that two hours to the west, a rough footpath meandered along the crest of the Blue Ridge. I don\u2019t recall whether I understood that a hardy band of adventurers set out each year to hike the entire path, but if I did, it was in the vaguest terms. Then, in the spring of 1987, a feature appeared in National Geographic<\/i> about that path and those hikers. Titled \u201cA Tunnel through Time: The Appalachian Trail,\u201d the story was the first I read that explained through-hiking in detail\u2014not to mention in lyrical, wonderfully descriptive prose. It lit a fire in me.<\/p>\n

It burned brighter and hotter the following year, when I convinced my newspaper to let me spend two weeks on the trail for my own story. A photographer and I covered roughly eighty miles of the A.T., during which I fell comfortably into the rhythm of hiking for eight to twelve hours a day\u2014and discovered, to my surprise and delight, that backpacking was no longer the excruciating hell it had been in my youth. My Kelty didn\u2019t feel good<\/i> on my shoulders, but it didn\u2019t carve deep trenches into them, either. I reckoned I could hack a long trip.<\/p>\n

And by long, I meant really long. I got it in my head that I should hike all of the trail, that I should follow that rough footpath on its crooked course down the whole of the Eastern Seaboard. I imagined myself striding over windblown mountain peaks, sturdy-legged and resolute. I pictured myself camped in peaceful glades, lulled to sleep by the chatter of gin-clear brooks and waking to the trill of friendly songbirds. I would become a creature of the forest, a brother to the bears, bobcats, and coyotes that shared it with me.<\/p>\n

The specifics of the odyssey took shape over the next two years. Most through-hikers, then and now, start at the A.T.\u2019s southern end, at Springer Mountain, Georgia, and travel north to Maine. Northbounders, or NOBOs, usually begin in the spring and finish in the late summer or early fall, so the weather is decent for most of the way\u2014cool in the early going, hot for a brief while in the Mid-Atlantic, and cooler once again in New England. Another plus: They conclude their journeys with a dramatic flourish at the trail\u2019s northern terminus, up top of mile-high Katahdin, Maine\u2019s tallest peak. And for those seeking a social experience as well as an outdoor adventure, northbound is the way to go, because from the first day, they have company. Sometimes they have too much of it.<\/p>\n

A far smaller share of end-to-enders\u2014maybe one in ten\u2014hike the other way, starting at Katahdin. This is, by most accounts, the hardest way to attempt a through-hike, in that southbounders make the trail\u2019s longest, toughest ascent on their first day, and on the second are thrust into the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, a rugged and remote week of hiking through boreal forest. The going stays tough from there. Many of Maine\u2019s streams and rivers are unbridged. The weather can turn nasty with little warning. The summertime trail is swarmed by black flies, tiny but blood-crazed. And all the way to Georgia, solitude abounds, except during the few weeks that a SOBO passes through the migrating herd of NOBOs.<\/p>\n

Despite its difficulties, a southbound hike called to me. My newspaper assignment had offered a glimpse of the northbound hordes, and I didn\u2019t see much appeal in joining a veritable city on the hoof. I preferred quiet communion with the woods, even if it meant occasional bouts of loneliness. Besides, I was of the mind that, once I got through the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, going south couldn\u2019t be that much tougher than the reverse. After all, the same mountains stood in the way in either direction: Both NOBO and SOBO hikers gained more than 464,000 feet in elevation over the length of the A.T., roughly equivalent to summiting Mount Everest from sea level sixteen times. Rather than hair-splitting over which way was easier, it seemed better to assume that regardless, I was in for a workout.<\/p>\n

So in the spring of 1990, I sent away for a pile of freeze-dried food, and packed it into thirteen boxes addressed to myself, care of general delivery, at post offices up and down the trail. I walked the streets of Norfolk with a fully provisioned pack on my back, trying to forge a partnership with my load. I broke in a new pair of all-leather hiking boots. I practiced setting up a featherweight tent the size of a coffin. I landed a six-month leave of absence from my job. In mid-June, I flew to Maine and climbed Katahdin with my then-girlfriend.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t recall much about the four thousand-foot ascent\u2014certainly not that it felt like I\u2019d nailed down the longest and hardest climb of the whole journey. The next day I hiked ten miles to the edge of a sprawling state park surrounding the mountain, bid my girlfriend goodbye\u2014\u201cThere are a lot of people counting on you to come home,\u201d she told me. \u201cBe smart<\/i>.\u201d\u2014and stepped into the Hundred-Mile Wilderness. Five months and four days later, I reached Springer Mountain.<\/p>\n

Was it hard? Hell, yes, it was hard, a thousand times harder than I imagined. But once back home, and subsumed into the routines of my job, bills, the hassles of the city, I missed it\u2014I pined for the hike\u2019s constant movement, each day\u2019s measurable progress, the simple comforts of camp. I longed for its unavoidable beauty. I even missed the spiders, mice, and snakes. Plus, I quickly lost my physical edge: I reached Springer a tight bundle of muscle, gristle, and testosterone, which morphed to fat and flab once I was back behind a desk five days a week. Regular life seemed sedentary, safe, and predictable.<\/p>\n

Fast-forward more than three decades. While planning my second through-hike, I remained uninterested in traveling northbound. America had discovered the trail, and the annual \u201cbubble\u201d of hikers starting in Georgia, thousands strong, flattened or consumed everything in its path like a column of army ants. At the same time, I realized that work obligations would prevent me from retracing my SOBO expedition. My schedule cornered me into starting in the late fall, well past the first snows on Katahdin.<\/p>\n

What made sense was a third approach to through-hiking, an option that had not yet taken root in 1990, but which had blossomed in popularity since: the flip-flop. This called for starting the trail near its middle, hiking to one end, then either flipping to the other end and hiking back to the middle, or flipping back to the middle and hiking to the other end. By flip-flopping, I\u2019d begin my hike with the trail\u2019s easiest stretch, the relatively flat middle, which would give me time to get in shape\u2014to grow \u201ctrail legs\u201d\u2014before coming to the craggier, more demanding country at either end.<\/p>\n

I hatched a plan to start in Duncannon, Pennsylvania, just north of Harrisburg, and to hike south to Springer Mountain over the winter and spring; I\u2019d then flip up to Katahdin, and head back to Duncannon over the following summer and fall.<\/p>\n

So it is that I come to be standing on Duncannon\u2019s central square early one Monday morning, hunched under the weight of a backpack stuffed with new gear and four days\u2019 worth of food.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Excerpted from<\/em> Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail<\/a> by Earl Swift. Published by Mariner Books, August 18, 2026. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Earl Swift. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollinsPublishers.<\/em><\/p>\n

This story was co-published with\u00a0Re:Public Lands Media<\/a>, an independent, non-profit news organization. Sign up for Re:Public\u2019s\u00a0newsletter here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It might be the simplest thing I\u2019ve ever done. Which is not to say the easiest, because I was hurting from the first minute, and kept hurting through every minute after. Cramps racked my legs. My shoulders, hips, and feet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8354,"featured_media":275736,"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":[6,43103,43231,43092],"tags":[44093,11782,70118,56926,18581,40270,20907,29883,111701],"class_list":["post-275517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-memoir","category-nature","category-newsandculture","tag-appalachian-mountains","tag-appalachian-trail","tag-earl-swift","tag-harpercollins-publishers","tag-hiking","tag-mariner-books","tag-the-natural-world","tag-the-outdoors","tag-up-on-cove-mountain-adventure-tragedy-and-a-quest-for-meaning-on-the-appalachian-trail","story-type-hiking"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19FP","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cove-mountain.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275517","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\/8354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275692,"date":"2026-08-18T05:09:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T09:09:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275692"},"modified":"2026-08-17T22:22:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T02:22:10","slug":"edwidge-danticat-wishes-her-former-english-teachers-would-read-her-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/edwidge-danticat-wishes-her-former-english-teachers-would-read-her-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Edwidge Danticat Wishes Her Former English Teachers Would Read Her Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edwidge Danticat\u2019s new book, D\u00e8y<\/i><\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>is available now from Alfred A. Knopf, so we asked her a few questions about favorite characters, writing advice, writer’s block, and more.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Who do you most wish would read your book?
\n<\/strong>Of course I would love for everyone to read my book. The only people I ever wanted to hold off from reading my books, at least for a while, were my parents. I feared their opinions more than anyone else\u2019s. But if I had to choose two people I’d most want to read it, I\u2019d choose my first teachers in this country\u00a0at Jackie Robinson Intermediate School in Brooklyn, New York. My English as a Second Language teacher, Mr. Dusseck, and my first English teacher whose name I\u2019m never sure of because I only had her for a while. They were the first people who told me I had a way with words and made me seriously think I could possibly be a writer.<\/p>\n

Which of your characters is your favorite?
\n<\/strong>My most recent characters are always my favorites, so it’s not a permanent position. Magnolia from\u00a0D\u00e8y<\/i>\u00a0now holds that place. She\u2019s stubborn in a way I wish I could be, with a job that lets her peek into people\u2019s homes while wearing an incredible wardrobe I secretly envy. She\u2019s a \u201cgood\u201d daughter, but not so good that she doesn\u2019t challenge or question her parents. I sometimes think of her as the heir to my earlier characters, a descendant of the women in my debut novel\u00a0Breath, Eyes, Memory<\/i><\/a>\u00a0and my first story collection\u00a0Krik? Krak!<\/i><\/a> She’s managed to find the type of financial stability her forebears could only dream of while at the same time realizing there’s more that she can be and that she can also contribute to her family and her community.<\/p>\n

How do you tackle writers block?
\n<\/strong>I\u2019ve never really had writer\u2019s block, mostly because I refuse to acknowledge it. If something I’m writing and want to write isn\u2019t coming, I simply tell myself it\u2019s not ready yet, and I try to trust that it will arrive in its own time. During these times, I\u2019ll read a lot or I\u2019ll draft shorter pieces to keep my creative juices flowing. Middles are often where I get most stuck, after the excitement of a beginning fades, so I muddle through, writing very imperfect sentences and paragraphs until I find my way forward. I also try to use my down time from writing to reconnect with life beyond the page. Living more fully can sometimes bring the words back.<\/p>\n

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?
\n<\/strong>I\u2019ve been fortunate to receive some excellent writing advice early on that I still carry with me today. After I turned in my final proofs for\u00a0Breath, Eyes, Memory<\/i>, some 33 years ago, my editor, Laura Hruska at Soho Press, told me to start writing something else right away. You\u2019re young, she said, and both praise and criticism, or some combination of the two, can end a writing career even before it starts. Get something else going so you can project yourself into the future beyond this book<\/i>. I remember that conversation nearly word for word because I went home and wrote about\u00a0it in my journal that night.<\/p>\n

That same night\u00a0I also began assembling the stories in\u00a0Krik? Krak!<\/i>, which was nominated for the National Book Award two years later. At the ceremony, Erica Jong, who was one of the fiction judges that year, came over to my table and told me, \u201cIt\u2019s good you didn\u2019t win so young. It wouldn\u2019t have been good for your writing in the long term. Now get back to work.” She’d graduated from the same college I did\u2014Barnard College\u2014so I considered us part of a loose sisterhood. I really appreciated her saying that.<\/p>\n

If you weren\u2019t a writer, what would you do instead?
\n<\/strong>I used to say I would be a psychiatrist. I might even have declared this in my high school yearbook after spending four years at a high school geared toward the health professions. Later I realized there\u2019s a long tradition of writers imagining themselves in professions where they could access people\u2019s stories. Now I think I\u2019d do something visual, like be a photographer or a visual artist. I\u2019ve interviewed some visual artists whose practice has made me fall in love with the way they see and recreate the world.<\/p>\n

Also, I know it may sound a bit morbid, but after watching both my parents die over the course of several months after receiving terminal diagnoses some years ago, I\u2019ve thought that someday I might become a death doula, even as a volunteer. There\u2019s something profoundly moving about helping others exit this world surrounded by love and with dignity. That work is, in my opinion, as honorable as being a midwife or the kind of doula who helps deliver babies.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

D\u00e8y<\/a> by Edwidge Danticat 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":"

Edwidge Danticat\u2019s new book, D\u00e8y,\u00a0is available now from Alfred A. Knopf, so we asked her a few questions about favorite characters, writing advice, writer’s block, and more. * Who do you most wish would read your book? Of course I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":275698,"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":[43071,43069,6,43072,43070],"tags":[4740,111742,265,3512,60655,36387,16228],"class_list":["post-275692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-in-conversation","category-literary-criticism","tag-alfred-a-knopf","tag-dey","tag-edwidge-danticat","tag-interview","tag-knopf-doubleday-publishing-group","tag-lit-hub-questionnaire","tag-penguin-random-house","story-type-lit-hub-questionnaire"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19IE","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Edwidge-Danticat-.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275692","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=275692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275691,"date":"2026-08-18T05:09:29","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T09:09:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275691"},"modified":"2026-08-18T09:46:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T13:46:16","slug":"chiang-rae-lee-on-channeling-his-immigrant-childhood-into-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/chiang-rae-lee-on-channeling-his-immigrant-childhood-into-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Chang-rae Lee on Channeling His Immigrant Childhood Into Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chang-rae Lee\u2019s family history influences most of his novels, especially his latest, A Tender Age<\/a>.<\/i> Lee was born in Seoul, in South Korea; his father\u2019s family was from Pyongyang, now North Korea\u2019s capital. He came to the U.S. at three and grew up in Westchester County, went on to Exeter and Yale, and soon found himself in a writing program at the University of Oregon. His thesis became his celebrated first novel, Native Speaker<\/i><\/a>, a spy-for-hire tale in which a first generation Korean-American, Ed Park, is hired to gather intelligence on a Korean-American politician. Native Speaker<\/i> won the PEN\/Hemingway Award. Lee has continued to turn out impressive novels while teaching creative writing at Hunter, Princeton, and, currently Stanford. My favorites to date are On Such A Full Sea<\/i><\/a>, a dystopian vision set in the former Baltimore (B-mor), and The Surrendered<\/i><\/a>, which I called a \u201charrowing and elegiac novel about the anguish and cruelty of war\u201d in my Boston Globe<\/i> review. The Surrendered<\/i> won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.<\/p>\n

A Tender Age<\/i> is a coming-of-age novel with Lee\u2019s inimitable emotional nuance, impeccable language and flair. It features the distant perspective of a grown-up Jeon-Gi, as he traces the year leading up to the summer he turns eleven, in 1976, and begins to make the transition from beloved son in a closely connected family where his Korean immigrant parents seem infallible to the complex universe of adulthood in a second language.<\/p>\n

Lee begins with a retrospective chapter, the adult Jeon-Gi: \u201c…we can\u2019t help but keep going back to the old times, futilely scratching at a spot,\u201d he writes. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter how significant a certain event or instance was, sometimes the barest irritation will draw incommensurate attention and the skin can go raw before you realize it. Lately, I can\u2019t seem to help but linger on this time or that, those tender ages rife with curiosities, and go over in serial fashion what I might have done or said to defuse a tricky situation or take a more principled stand or else assuage my frustrated heart.\u201d Then he dives into the visceral point of view of \u201ca mere boy\u201d who is emotionally isolated, bullied, frustrated, exploring, until he impulsively acts in ways that shock everyone around him.<\/p>\n

What motivated you to write this new novel? I asked Lee. \u201cPerhaps it\u2019s my own not-so tender age, but I\u2019d been musing a lot about my family\u2019s early years in America, and my own adventures in the \u2018wilds\u2019 of suburban New York City,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt was a time when we were learning so much about making a life in our bustling tenement, a place so rich in events and personages, and I wanted to capture something of those energies before it was lost to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Jane Ciabattari:<\/strong> Why focus on the summer Jeon-Gi turns eleven?<\/p>\n

Chang-rae Lee:<\/strong> For me that particular age was one when I knew that I was still very much a child, emotionally and physically, while also being on the verge of an adult knowingness, if not quite adult-level intellection. There\u2019s a visceral, gut-level clarity Jeon-Gi has that in certain situations doesn\u2019t square with how he thinks things should be, which in a story can make for captivating episodes.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> How difficult is it for a young boy of immigrant parents to find his way through a world in a second language, in a place that is unfamiliar to his parents? What are the options? How much does Jeon-Gi\u2019s universe reflect your own experience?<\/p>\n

CL:<\/strong> All immigrant children know how complicated this \u201cnew world\u201d is, and that no matter how much their parents may try to ride herd, they are essentially traversing this realm solo. It\u2019s a journeying full of excitement and fright, and laden with a startlingly heavy burden of responsibility, given that they are often the ones necessarily leading the way. I certainly felt so, wanting to do the right thing by us all but never knowing if we were heading in a good direction or towards some maelstrom.<\/p>\n

All immigrant children know how complicated this \u201cnew world\u201d is, and that no matter how much their parents may try to ride herd, they are essentially traversing this realm solo.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> The dual morality of Jeon-Gi\u2019s parents \u2018s expectations versus the customs and behaviors of the culture he\u2019s growing into is stark and troubling. This creates tension throughout the novel. Does it seem to you to be unresolvable?<\/p>\n

CL:<\/strong> Probably, yes. Any given culture is immensely powerful, it seeps into the deepest parts of you, and it feels almost impossible to recast yourself into a fundamentally new shape in the face of another, differing culture. We live in such a narrow slice of time and space. But I do think that in examining the various intersections and clashings we are also, if very finely, re-forming the culture, pushing it with our efforts and presence along a slightly altered path.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Your narrator\u2019s interior world is in many ways more vivid than the external world of his immigrant parents, his sister, the boys he encounters on the derelict playground, at his school. Where does that perspective come from?<\/p>\n

CL:<\/strong> The narrator, like all narrators, is seeing\/thinking\/feeling from a place removed from the tumult and noise of his boyhood life, which gives him the psychic space to slow things down, to calmly and methodically explore notions and feelings that had at the time overwhelmed him. I surely wanted the narrator to capture in full the roiling emotions of Jeon-Gi but stay atop the deluge of those sensations in order to recreate them in detail and thereby understand them anew. That understanding for the narrator is one tinged with mourning for the boy who endured but also the suspect boy who was always there, even before all the unfortunate happenings.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> There are scenes of intense cruelty in this novel, especially those between rival boys. Were these difficult for you to write?<\/p>\n

CL:<\/strong> Not as difficult as I expected, even as they cut close to the bone. I\u2019ve written much more intense scenes in previous novels, and it\u2019s always the same for me. You write with a bit of nervousness, like the butterflies in your chest before some big event or game, but then suddenly you\u2019re so far inside the fictive moment that you sort of let go and feel the sheer pull of it, and there\u2019s nothing you can really do but hang on, simply focusing on the word that\u2019s coming next.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> The prison tour is seen from an angle of innocence being ripped apart, as the inmates expose some of the most common sadistic elements of prison life, to encourage these teenage and pre-teen boys who are getting into trouble to take a different path and avoid prison. What sort of research was involved in writing these scenes? To what extent do you think including Jeon-Gi , not close to being a teenager, in this cohort is an adult mistake that could haunt him?<\/p>\n

CL:<\/strong> When I was young I remember watching a TV documentary about a \u201cscared straight\u201d prison visit program like the one I portray in the novel, and I was able to find a few online links and videos. I also recall thinking back then how scary and cool it would be to participate in something like that, as happens to Jeon-Gi, but of course it\u2019s a terrible error and oversight that he\u2019s included in the visit, which affects him in ways that he can\u2019t fathom.<\/p>\n

I do think that in examining the various intersections and clashings we are also, if very finely, re-forming the culture, pushing it with our efforts and presence along a slightly altered path.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Jeon-Gi\u2019s parents hope to give him a better sense of belonging by sending him to a Korean church camp, which sets him up for some moments of joy and disastrous actions. How did you create the realities of this camping experience\u2014the storms, the cooking, the choosing of bunks, the interactions between boys and girls, especially Jeon-Gi and Susan, who is special to him, even the witnessing of adult sexual behavior?<\/p>\n

CL:<\/strong> Going to such a camp is drawn from my youth, when I attended a church-sponsored Korean camp for many years. So I know those camping details intimately. I still can taste the \u201ccamper\u2019s stew\u201d we made back then while overnighting, and that Jeon-Gi helps make in the novel. Some of the other stuff I describe is both as remembered and semi-fictionalized, but I won\u2019t specify more than that.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Jeon-Gi\u2019s chief rival at church camp is Dickens. \u201cHis self-assurance filled me with loathing and envy\u2026He somehow sensed my own feeling that I ought to be punished for my failings, his nose for someone\u2019s tender spots a capacity I realized I wished I had more keenly. This is what they mean by keeping your antagonists close; you think you are learning how to deal with a foe, anticipating their tactics, their antagonisms, rehearsing all the ways of defending yourself, but what happens is that you begin to see certain concordances, reflections of the contours of who you might be.\u201d The complexity of their connection from the first day of camp is visceral. How did you develop this relationship? Were you able to draw upon any of your own life experiences, from boyhood on, at university, in academia?<\/p>\n

CL:<\/strong> Those camps days are still so vivid for me and my friends. I still see a handful of them from time to time and we\u2019ll talk and laugh about some odd moment or person like it was last summer, here almost 50 years later. Some tough things happened to me that I use as material\u2014the episode with the Dickens character is one example\u2014but mostly it was all silly and joyous and fun, a time when we felt the sort of natural communion that rarely occurs in adult life. I cherish those days.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> Occasionally you jump forward and give us a sense of Jeon-Gi\u2019s future (his reconnecting with Susan, for instance). This adds to the suspense. At what point did you add this element to the narrative structure?<\/p>\n

CL:<\/strong> I don\u2019t think I ever \u201cadded\u201d in those reports from the future\/present, rather simply feeling the need at certain points for the narrator to re-appear for us and do some contextualizing. I suppose it\u2019s always like that with me and the writing, more just feeling my way through and sensing when I need a pause or hard break in the rhythm.<\/p>\n

JC:<\/strong> What are you working on now\/next?<\/p>\n

CL:<\/strong> I\u2019ve been making notes on a new novel about a youthful romance, so maybe you could say it\u2019s another coming of age story. It\u2019s a happy story and a sad one, too, and drawn a bit from my own life. So maybe I\u2019m on a run of telling self-stories.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A Tender Age<\/a> by Chang-rae Lee is available from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chang-rae Lee\u2019s family history influences most of his novels, especially his latest, A Tender Age. Lee was born in Seoul, in South Korea; his father\u2019s family was from Pyongyang, now North Korea\u2019s capital. He came to the U.S. at three<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":188,"featured_media":275694,"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":[111615,71419,30034,50,2955,39238,16228,6552],"class_list":["post-275691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-in-conversation","tag-a-tender-age","tag-author-interview","tag-chang-rae-lee","tag-interviews-2","tag-jane-ciabattari","tag-penguin-publishing-group","tag-penguin-random-house","tag-riverhead-books","story-type-in-conversation"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19ID","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Chang-rae-Lee-c-Michelle-Lee-1.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275691","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=275691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275505,"date":"2026-08-18T04:37:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T08:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275505"},"modified":"2026-08-17T22:37:42","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T02:37:42","slug":"joby-warrick-latoya-watkins-katy-simpson-smith-and-more-20-new-books-out-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/joby-warrick-latoya-watkins-katy-simpson-smith-and-more-20-new-books-out-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Joby Warrick, LaToya Watkins, Katy Simpson Smith, and more: 20 new books out today!"},"content":{"rendered":"

August zooms on, or trickles on, depending on how you look at it. We’re reaching a quieter moment of the publishing cycle: a few weeks of slowness and peace before the onslaught of September. But until then, enjoy the numberous treats that still await us in August. Such as Joby Warrick’s work of nonfiction about a legendary terrorist, Katy Simpson’s new novel, and many more. Read on, and happy Tuesday!<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"Joby<\/p>\n

Joby Warrick, The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Scribner)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A riveting portrait of the larger-than-life man who invented the role of celebrity terrorist\u2014and of the journalists, ideologues, spymasters, and dictators who helped elevate him to prominence.”
\n\u2013<\/em>David McCloskey<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

LaToya Watkins, The Book of Chuck<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Tiny Reparations)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cA transcendent reading experience that reveals life\u2019s darkest corners while transmitting a surprising amount of hope.\u201d
\n\u2013Kirkus<\/em><\/p>\n

\"maltese<\/p>\n

Katy Simpson Smith, The Maltese Version<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(FSG)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Katy Simpson Smith playfully turns the Mediterranean psychological thriller on its head with this lush, finely textured, riveting dive into lives tangled by language and time.”
\n\u2013<\/em>T\u00e9a Obreht<\/p>\n

\"dorthe<\/p>\n

Dorthe Nors, trans. by Caroline Waight, Range<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Graywolf)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A brilliant novel that is as intellectually vast as it is deeply rooted in the everyday experience of being human.”
\n\u2013Kirkus<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Raphael Montes, The Secret Dinner<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Celadon)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Dark, compelling, and wickedly smart, The Secret Dinner<\/em> is a deliciously twisted thriller about friendship and ambition with a mind-blowing end.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Lisa Jewell<\/p>\n

\"Finding<\/p>\n

Julie Kliegman, Finding Renee Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis\u2019s Trans Pioneer<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(HarperOne)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A fascinating account of an important and often overlooked figure in American sports and culture.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Jonathan Eig<\/p>\n

\"Steve<\/p>\n

Steve Hawk, Nearshore<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Viking)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Engrossing, graceful, and transporting, this is a terrific\u2014if terrifying\u2014tale of near apocalypse.\u201d
\n\u2013Publishers Weekly<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Tom Rosenstiel, The Next Journalism: How the Press Must Change to Serve Democracy<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Crown)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAcclaimed journalist and novelist Rosenstiel presents thoughtful strategies to cope with this increasingly fragmented media landscape.”
\n\u2013Booklist<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Hello<\/p>\n

Kim Eui-Kyung, trans. by Sora Kim-Russell, Hello Baby<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Hogarth)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat a humane, sometimes funny, and always illuminating exploration of the hopeful, painful pursuit of pregnancy and birth that so many people undertake around the world every day.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Lydia Kiesling<\/p>\n

\"Danny<\/p>\n

Danny Ramadan, Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Soft Skull)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAn elegantly told, candid, and often intriguing personal history, the memoir never fails to edify.”
\n\u2013Vancouver Sun<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Camille<\/p>\n

Camille Acker, A Very Special Episode<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Random House)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A sly social commentary on the interplay of race, class, and family legacy.\u201d
\n\u2013The Millions<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Anjet Daanje, trans. by David McKay, The Song of Stork and Dromedary<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(FSG)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A significant and moving literary achievement, an unforgettable story of a historical mystery.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Elizabeth DeNoma<\/p>\n

\"Malavika<\/p>\n

Malavika Kannan, Unprecedented Times<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Holt)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A sparkling work of fiction, this story feels like pages ripped straight from your funniest friend\u2019s diary.\u201d
\n\u2013Booklist<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Togetherness,<\/p>\n

Rowan Hooper, Togetherness: Symbiosis and the Hidden Story of Life’s Greatest Collaborations<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Knopf)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“I think this may be one of those rare books that’s a classic upon its publication. It calmly and comprehensively helps you see the world in a very new and hopeful way.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Bill McKibben<\/p>\n

\"first-summer\"<\/p>\n

Ekin Oklap, First Summer<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Summit)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“This gorgeous novel will immerse readers in its heady and tender story of young love. This dreamy, queer, coming-of-age story about deep friendship and first love will resonate with teens.\u201d
\n\u2013Booklist<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Mariana Salomao Carrara, trans. by Julia Sanches and Alison Entrekin, The Loneliest Tree in the World<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Catapult)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“An arresting exercise in naturalism.”
\n\u2013Publishers Weekly<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Jennifer<\/p>\n

Jennifer Givhan, The Sleeping Sisters<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Little Brown)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“A thrilling and heartbreaking ride from the first page, Givhan lyrically draws us into the emotional wounds, obsessions, grief, guilt, and trauma of complex characters living in the Southwest.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Nina McConigley<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lucinda M. Vardey, The Green Soul: Returning to Our Sacred Belonging in Nature<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(HarperOne)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“This hugely important book should be read by anyone who cares about the life of the Spirit and the future of the planet.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Jennifer Kavanagh<\/p>\n

\"Siren<\/p>\n

Jennifer Michelle Herrera, Siren Says<\/em><\/a><\/strong>
\n(Putnam)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Siren Says<\/i> blooms with enchantment, mystical secrets, and otherworldly connections, the story’s characters seeking purpose and redemption while navigating intimate bonds and past harms.”
\n\u2013<\/em>Diane Marie Brown<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

August zooms on, or trickles on, depending on how you look at it. We’re reaching a quieter moment of the publishing cycle: a few weeks of slowness and peace before the onslaught of September. But until then, enjoy the numberous<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5494,"featured_media":275725,"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":[43069,43070,43135,43646],"tags":[111773,111774,40494,111772,82194,15528,72034,111765,111733,111771,49710,111781,14296,109029,6599,111769,80860,111692,111418,111777,111767,45195,111763,78343,111782,111766,111653,111691,111760,111779,111421,111768,111764,111780,111776,111761,111690,24252,111762,111775,111778,111770,111419],"class_list":["post-275505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","category-the-hub","tag-a-very-special-episode","tag-anjet-daanje","tag-camille-acker","tag-crooked-teeth-a-queer-syrian-refugee-memoir","tag-danny-ramadan","tag-dorthe-nors","tag-ekin-oklap","tag-finding-renee-richards-the-groundbreaking-story-of-tenniss-trans-pioneer","tag-first-summer","tag-hello-baby","tag-jennifer-givhan","tag-jennifer-michelle-herrera","tag-joby-warrick","tag-julie-kliegman","tag-katy-simpson-smith","tag-kim-eui-kyung","tag-latoya-watkins","tag-lucinda-m-vardey","tag-malavika-kannan","tag-mariana-salomao-carrara","tag-nearshore","tag-range","tag-raphael-montes","tag-rowan-hooper","tag-siren-says","tag-steve-hawk","tag-the-book-of-chuck","tag-the-green-soul-returning-to-our-sacred-belonging-in-nature","tag-the-jackal-the-rise-and-fall-of-carlos","tag-the-loneliest-tree-in-the-world","tag-the-maltese-version","tag-the-next-journalism-how-the-press-must-change-to-serve-democracy","tag-the-secret-dinner","tag-the-sleeping-sisters","tag-the-song-of-stork-and-dromedary","tag-the-worlds-first-super-terrorist","tag-togetherness-symbiosis-and-the-hidden-story-of-lifes-greatest-collaborations","tag-tom-rosenstiel","tag-trans-by-caroline-waight","tag-trans-by-david-mckay","tag-trans-by-julia-sanches-and-alison-entrekin","tag-trans-by-sora-kim-russell","tag-unprecedented-times","story-type-new-books-tuesdays"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19FD","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-jackal-9781668070550_hr.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275505","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\/5494"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275763,"date":"2026-08-17T13:06:03","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T17:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275763"},"modified":"2026-08-17T13:06:03","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T17:06:03","slug":"now-amazon-is-destroying-rare-books-to-train-its-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/now-amazon-is-destroying-rare-books-to-train-its-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Now Amazon is destroying rare books to train its AI."},"content":{"rendered":"

Per a 404 Media<\/a> report published this morning, Amazon, that evil empire, “is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.”<\/p>\n

This news follows slow-creeping revelations that other AI companies<\/a> have been practicing “destructive scanning<\/a>” to train their LLMs for at least the past two years.<\/p>\n

Dominos stated to fall this January, when The Washington Post<\/em><\/a> broke the story that Anthropic was at work on a secret project to “destructively scan all the books in the world.”<\/p>\n

Details about this “Project Panama”\u2014because what is an evil plan without a nom de guerre befitting a Bond villain\u2014emerged during a much-publicized copyright lawsuit<\/a> authors brought against Anthropic earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Though this scoop made the company behind Claude seem uniquely horrible, ongoing lawsuits against Meta, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI now suggest similar practices.<\/p>\n

Everywhere, big corporations are stealing author’s work to train their LLMs. With a special recent focus on dead<\/em> authors, who cannot protest.<\/p>\n

Amazon has previously denied that they<\/em> practice “destructive scanning.” (Or at least, they have kept very, very quiet about the subject.) But as Emanuel Maiberg reported, new signs point to complicity.<\/p>\n

How do we figure? In a neat bit of practical research, 404Media followed a rare book they “suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data,” and traced its journey around the country:<\/p>\n

That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process.<\/p>\n

But wait, there’s even more Bond villain where this came from! Apparently, the offending team\u2019s logo \u201cis a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

So the Rex is out of the park, Mr. Bezos.<\/p>\n

Perhaps you too are wondering: beyond the silent plaintiff part, what makes rare books so valuable for AI companies?<\/p>\n

According to documents WaPo<\/em> uncovered re: Project Panama, “one Anthropic co-founder theorized that training AI models on books could teach them ‘how to write well’ instead of mimicking ‘low quality internet speak.'”<\/p>\n

Maiberg echoed this theory. “Printed books are valuable as training data because a lot of the text they contain is not readily available on the internet, which AI companies have already scraped,” he wrote in this morning’s brief.<\/p>\n

The data is also conveniently organized and, if the book was printed before 2022, is guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text, which can make any AI model that is trained on it worse via a recursive process called ‘model collapse.’<\/p>\n

Here’s hoping.<\/p>\n

There is another<\/em> silver lining here. The American public is, generally speaking, still pretty against book destruction. On the optics level, if nowhere else.<\/p>\n

Certain companies<\/a> have already seemed to respond to public pressure about this un-beautiful, all-too-on-the-nose practice.<\/p>\n

So assuming they don’t collapse on themselves, let us pray the shame spigot will short these machines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Per a 404 Media report published this morning, Amazon, that evil empire, “is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.” This news follows slow-creeping revelations that other AI companies have<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17066,"featured_media":275844,"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":[43201,43099,43109,43092,43095,43444,43445,43646],"tags":[100607,20922,2120,104316,32209,99337,51624,111810,111809,99290,16671,52888,6952,49477,71331],"class_list":["post-275763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-design-newsandculture","category-events","category-newsandculture","category-politics","category-science","category-technology","category-the-hub","tag-404-media","tag-ai","tag-amazon","tag-anthropic","tag-book-burning","tag-bummer","tag-copyright-infringement","tag-creative-destruction","tag-destructive-scanning","tag-llms","tag-meta","tag-openai","tag-rare-books","tag-scoop","tag-to-be-clear-jeff-bezos-is-sauron-here"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19JN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-23.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275763","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\/17066"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275782,"date":"2026-08-17T06:30:51","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T10:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275782"},"modified":"2026-08-17T09:12:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T13:12:18","slug":"lit-hub-daily-august-17-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-august-17-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: August 17, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":" TODAY: In 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman dies. <\/span>\n