[{"id":275544,"date":"2026-08-13T05:10:52","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T09:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275544"},"modified":"2026-08-13T07:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T11:53:09","slug":"are-dating-apps-the-last-great-hope-for-the-american-literary-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/are-dating-apps-the-last-great-hope-for-the-american-literary-journal\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Dating Apps the Last, Great Hope For the American Literary Journal?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Monday, Hinge\u2014yes, that<\/em> Hinge\u2014released a free audiobook<\/a> comprised of five original short stories inspired by the dating sagas of real Hinge couples. The five pieces were written and narrated by a sparkly cohort of contemporary authors: Tembe Denton-Hurst<\/a>,\u00a0Nicola Dinan<\/a>,\u00a0Curtis Garner<\/a>,\u00a0Raven Smith<\/a>, and\u00a0Rufi Thorpe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This project represents the latest iteration of the dating app\u2019s No Ordinary Love<\/a> series, which has spotlit writing on romantic themes across two previous volumes and a Substack<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Previous issues have invited the likes of<\/a> Roxane Gay, R.O. Kwon, Brontez Purnell, Isle McElroy, and Ois\u00edn McKenna to riff on romantic themes. Stories in the latest (audio)book aim to get daters “to say how they really feel in a dating culture built on playing it cool.”<\/p>\n

All well and good, as lit mag news goes. But what’s curious is the growing bevy of literary talent on the Hinge masthead. For this anthology slots into a peculiar new modern phenomenon: the unlikely alliance of dating, apps, and literature.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Last fall may have brought us the first of these signs, with the launch of AFM<\/em>, a buzzy magazine<\/a> published by the kink-friendly app, Feeld.<\/p>\n

Billed as “an arts and literary magazine exploring sexuality and relationships through essays, fiction, poetry, conversations and visual art,” AFM\u2019<\/em>s first two issues featured a multigenerational cross-section of cool literary kids. (As well as some distressing wild cards<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Open an issue and one can find Nan Goldin, Carl Phillips, and James Ivory sharing scenic space with Orlando Reade, Tony Tulathimutte and Haley Mlotek.<\/p>\n

Last year our own Julia Hass attended their second issue launch<\/a>, where she observed that the party was “in short, a fantasy\u2014in the way that Feeld itself, or any dating app, promises you a fantasy.”<\/p>\n

Fantasy, as thematic umbrella, can help us understand the appeal of projects like No Ordinary Love\u2014at least from a digital marketing perspective. In our tech-mediated times, a date and a book theoretically offer two kinds of live, intimate experience.<\/p>\n

And as the AFM<\/em> and No Ordinary Love architects understand, if everyone is out here craving the sensual, the live\u2014but also, escape<\/em>!\u2014prose that appeals to the desiring body may well enchant two birds with one…seed.<\/p>\n

We must also consider the commercial angle. Romance is the fastest growing genre in publishing<\/a>, and it’s currently carrying the rest of us piddly genres through anti-literary sea change on its lovey dovey wings. But despite the evident craving for stories about L-O-V-E, literary fiction has struggled to master the art of the crossover.<\/p>\n

Lately, we can look to the rise of small presses like 831 stories<\/a> for a fresh playbook. This up and coming “romantic fiction” house aims to bridge a cultural gap by lifting romance into the chic literary space from which it’s long been siloed.<\/p>\n

Featuring a stable of hep-coded freelancers and cultural critics turned romance writers like Carrie Wittmer, Alexandra Romanoff, and Upasna Barath, the imprint is expanding ideas around what a romance novel can look like. And ditto the chic color block covers, on the design front.<\/p>\n

As with AFM<\/em> and No Ordinary Love, both the branding and the masthead are sending dog whistles here. Namely? That romance can be cool.<\/em><\/p>\n

But does coolness preclude fantasy? Hasn’t this, in fact, been one of the romance’s biggest crossover problems, historically? That the earnestness the genre requires galls us cynics, who love to hide in our books, away from all those pesky bodies<\/em> in the first place?<\/p>\n

On the other hand, we really are starting to hate those screens.<\/p>\n

Camille Sojit Pejcha, author of the popular Pleasure Seeking<\/a> newsletter, offers a third way to join the life of the body and the life of the mind. The trendsetter has also<\/em> spent the past few years intuiting a timely connection between stories and sex\u2014if not exclusively stories about<\/em> sex.<\/p>\n

This spring, Pejcha hosted her second, successful “Night of Desire<\/a>,” a reading series catering to the up and coming New York literati that occurs in an actual bath house<\/em>.<\/p>\n

As the hostess told Page Six<\/a> of this unlikely social event of the season, “the idea of the event was to bring sex back to the city\u2019s literary scene.\u201d Which assumes these bedfellows are natural in the first place.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to bring back what\u2019s missing in today\u2019s literary world,” Pejcha went on, to reporters. “The in-person, hedonistic element that used to drive creative scenes in New York, where the city\u2019s thinkers and makers rubbed shoulders in a real-world setting instead of discoursing about it online.”<\/p>\n

Making reading and writing\u2014and, in Hinge’s case listening<\/em>\u2014sexy is the shared fantasy here. And an endeavor worth supporting, absolutely! But as with all experiences one must eventually buy<\/em>, it is worth noting who benefits<\/a> from the bottom line of your desire.<\/p>\n

The apps can be an ironic place to pour one’s hope in meatspace. But at least today, No Ordinary Love<\/a> is free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Monday, Hinge\u2014yes, that Hinge\u2014released a free audiobook comprised of five original short stories inspired by the dating sagas of real Hinge couples. The five pieces were written and narrated by a sparkly cohort of contemporary authors: Tembe Denton-Hurst,\u00a0Nicola Dinan,\u00a0Curtis<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17066,"featured_media":275661,"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":[43201,43069,11,43070,43092,43098,43445],"tags":[97286,107087,61319,20602,39486,7138,15185,111709,111710,5089,8906,95509,58646,64636],"class_list":["post-275544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-craftandcriticism","category-fullwidth-slider","category-literary-criticism","category-newsandculture","category-style","category-technology","tag-831-stories","tag-afm","tag-audiobook","tag-dating-apps","tag-feeld","tag-hinge","tag-literary-magazines","tag-no-ordinary-love","tag-pleasure-seeking","tag-podcasts","tag-romance","tag-romantasy","tag-substack","tag-trends"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Gg","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/hinge.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275544","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=275544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275619,"date":"2026-08-13T05:10:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T09:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275619"},"modified":"2026-08-11T20:40:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T00:40:19","slug":"am-i-the-asshole-for-abandoning-my-first-love-fantasy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/am-i-the-asshole-for-abandoning-my-first-love-fantasy\/","title":{"rendered":"Am I the Asshole For Abandoning My First Love, Fantasy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hey there, howdy!<\/p>\n

Welcome back to another enormously entertaining episode of Am I the Literary Asshole?<\/em>, an advice column that runs on Steel Reserve and Writer\u2019s Tears. I\u2019m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I\u2019m about to head off to the great state of Texas. That\u2019s right, I\u2019m leaving Florida behind (for just a little while). I\u2019ll be the visiting writer this fall at the Michener Center at UT Austin! Don\u2019t worry, I\u2019ll be back home in December after classes end. But while I\u2019m there working, I\u2019m looking forward to hanging out with all my Texas buddies. Do you think they greet you with a six-pack of Lone Star when you cross over the state line? Much to consider.<\/p>\n

This column sails on, however! How about we crack open a couple of cold ones? Let\u2019s cheers and say bon voyage, Dad! Safe travels!<\/p>\n

Bottom\u2019s up, here\u2019s our first question of the day:<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0 Dear Dad, I used to be an avid fantasy reader and writer. Then two years ago, I fell out of love with the genre quite suddenly and unexpectedly. The change seems to be permanent. I\u2019ve read barely any speculative fiction since then, and honestly, I can\u2019t see myself ever going back. As a reader, I\u2019ve fallen in love with contemporary and historical fiction as well as memoirs and narrative nonfiction. As a writer, though, I\u2019m struggling. I\u2019ve spent most of the last two years working on a fantasy novel. At first I still loved it, despite my changing reading tastes, then I continued to work on it because of the sunk cost fallacy and because my friends, family, and writing group all seemed to genuinely love it (whereas with my previous project, they were encouraging, but I got the sense they didn\u2019t really \u201cget it\u201d). <\/strong><\/p>\n

I finally set it aside six months ago to try to write a contemporary novel. And . . . nothing. All my ideas seem stupid or boring and if I try to write them anyway, they just fizzle out. I don\u2019t know what to do, I\u2019ve never been this stuck before. I\u2019ve tried thinking about what draws me to contemporary novels so that I can replicate that, but what I love about them is the beautiful writing. At least three of my favorite books have really boring sounding premises, and I never would have picked them up if they hadn\u2019t won literary prizes. That\u2019s helpful for me to know as a reader, but not super useful for coming up with story ideas. Should I just go back to writing fantasy, even though I don\u2019t enjoy it? At least I\u2019m confident I can pull that off.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hello, friend. Thanks for writing in with this one. I\u2019m going to try my best to help.<\/p>\n

The first thing I\u2019m going to tell you is that you need to cut yourself some slack. Part of being a writer means being human (it\u2019s reason number 237,823,748 why AI can never replace real art or make any kind of meaningful impact), and being human means we are continually and forever learning new things about ourselves. The late Dorothy Allison once said: \u201cChange, when it comes, cracks everything open.\u201d I believe you are on the precipice of cracking right now. Change is scary, sure. But it\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing.<\/p>\n

Your tastes have changed. What you\u2019re interested in has veered from the known path, and now you\u2019re charting unknown territory. Lean into the new. I challenge you to look at this as an opportunity for continued growth. Something in the back of your mind told you that you were done with what you had been working on and thinking about before. Now, your brain is trying to catch up with what you already learned intuitively. To try and force yourself to make some big amazing great huge book project without thinking on it for a while will only cause you frustration and grief.<\/p>\n

Instead, allow yourself to wade into what you might<\/i> make. Glory in the possibilities. Set that old project aside for now\u2014perhaps another version of yourself, a future you, will be the right writer for it\u2014and let yourself consider what you might create. No pressure. No sitting down eagerly and staring at a blank document, hoping to craft the next great American novel. Instead, think about what you like, what you\u2019re interested in, what charms you, what gives you natural curiosity. There is no timeline here. No race to the finish. Luxuriate in it. Be present.<\/p>\n

The right project will arrive in due time. Don\u2019t hold yourself to a shape or a deadline. Making art doesn\u2019t mean checking off boxes. It means allowing ourselves the freedom to see what might be and who we could become.<\/p>\n

Enjoy the ride. It seems like it\u2019s going to be a hell of a lot of fun.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s the Sagittarius in me, but God, I really love a road trip. Let\u2019s have another beer while I finish packing (and check out our second caller of the day):<\/p>\n

2) Hey I\u2019m hoping you can help me here.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I finished a rough draft of a novel last month. I was working on it for about three and one-half years. It took up all my time. Well, last month I typed THE END at the bottom of page 346 and closed the document.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The problem is that I haven\u2019t been able to open the document since that day. I could open it, but I don\u2019t want to. I guess I\u2019m nervous about what I\u2019ll find. It\u2019s probably not any good. How can I make myself do this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Buddy, it\u2019s time to rip off the Band-Aid.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re nervous about encountering something bad, so you\u2019re not letting yourself celebrate this very cool thing that you\u2019ve done: you finished a draft of a project! That\u2019s amazing!<\/p>\n

But because you\u2019re scared it won\u2019t live up to your (very high) expectations, you\u2019ve denied yourself the absolute pleasure of engaging with your work again. This isn\u2019t just something you threw together. You\u2019ve been working on it for literal years! Regardless of how messy the draft is\u2014it will be, inevitably, because every first draft is\u2014it doesn\u2019t mean the project will be bad. You\u2019ve spent a lot of time in this world, building this story, crafting these characters. You know them. Believe that.<\/p>\n

You care about this book. And because you care, it also scares you. So you\u2019ve decided that you\u2019ll just let it sit there on the proverbial shelf, collecting dust, all so that it won\u2019t wind up disappointing you.<\/p>\n

I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but by not allowing yourself to open your project and dig back into it, you\u2019re only disappointing yourself. There is no one who\u2019s going to stand over you and make sure you get back to work. Only you can do that.<\/p>\n

And the very first step? Clicking open that document.<\/p>\n

Close out of this browser and please go write. Thank me later.<\/p>\n

Almost out of time (and almost out of beer)!! One last question before we close out for the day:<\/p>\n

3) Is there a non-asshole way to tell another writer that you think they\u2019re annoying and that you don\u2019t want to hang out in social settings?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The short answer? No.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t tell someone you think they\u2019re annoying and not come off as an asshole. Them\u2019s the breaks, kid.<\/p>\n

But! You can find other places to be when they want to hang out. You can make excuses for why you don\u2019t have time for them. Sooner or later, after several rebuffed attempts to garner your friendship, they\u2019ll get the hint. Will they think you\u2019re an asshole for it? Maybe. But fingers crossed they\u2019ll make some other friends out there who find them charming!<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s all the time we have for today, folks. Join me next column when I answer more of your anonymous questions (send them HERE) and I also get into that Lone Star beer.<\/p>\n

Deep in the heart of Texas,<\/em>
\nDad<\/em><\/p>\n

__________________________<\/p>\n

Are you worried you\u2019re the literary asshole? Ask Kristen via email at AskKristen@lithub.com<\/a>, or anonymously here.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hey there, howdy! Welcome back to another enormously entertaining episode of Am I the Literary Asshole?, an advice column that runs on Steel Reserve and Writer\u2019s Tears. I\u2019m your host, Kristen Arnett, and I\u2019m about to head off to the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1764,"featured_media":275620,"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":[43071,43069,6,43070],"tags":[92580,16348,9210,1039,28771,7703,34598,1341],"class_list":["post-275619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","tag-am-i-the-literary-asshole","tag-drafts","tag-fantasy","tag-genre","tag-kristen-arnett","tag-literary","tag-socializing","tag-writing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ht","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/fantasy-is-the-best.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275619","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\/1764"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275641,"date":"2026-08-13T05:09:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T09:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275641"},"modified":"2026-08-12T20:50:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T00:50:45","slug":"russian-literature-does-not-belong-to-the-russian-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/russian-literature-does-not-belong-to-the-russian-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Russian Literature Does Not Belong to the Russian State"},"content":{"rendered":"

The designation of \u201cforeign agent\u201d is used by the Russian government to label individuals and organizations that receive foreign support or are (more nebulously) deemed to be under “foreign influence.\u201d Those so designated are subject to extensive reporting and labeling requirements, restrictions on employment, education, political participation, and public activities, and face significant legal, financial, and social penalties that often make it difficult to continue living and working in the country. A sort of attempted social and political death sentence, the designation has become a powerful tool for suppressing independent journalism, civil society, and cultural figures, imposing onerous legal requirements and social stigma on those who receive it.<\/p>\n

Such a designation constitutes one of our era\u2019s most respectable distinctions. And it is an honor that belongs to the Dar Prize<\/a>, a literary award which just last month celebrated its sophomore class and is currently accepting entries for its third outing. In practical terms, the Dar Prize seeks to award excellent writing in the Russian language, regardless of the writer’s citizenship or nationality. More importantly perhaps, the prize offers the winners translation into English, German, and French\u2014the languages of the international book market\u2014and hence access to a global audience.<\/p>\n

The Prize\u2019s website declares that it aims for a world \u201cwhere literature in Russian takes its rightful place in the world, being responsible to humanity, and not to dictatorships.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am, by nature, usually distrustful of such ambition, particularly when it is applied to history, literature, art, and other such things in which people like me often naively believe one might be able to find aid or solace. And yet, over the past few weeks, as I have read my way through this year\u2019s Dar Prize short list and winners, I find myself not only eagerly awaiting next year\u2019s nominees, but also beginning to believe that the Prize\u2019s goals may be\u2014while still ambitious\u2014not unrealistic.<\/p>\n

Modern nationalism would have you believe that languages\u2014and by extension literary traditions\u2014are possessions that belong to one people or (more often) one state\u2014theirs to control and define. But this is undoubtedly one of nationalism\u2019s many lies.<\/p>\n

Mikhail Shishkin, one of the co-founders of the Dar Prize and chairs its jury, is undoubtedly one of the Russian language\u2019s greatest living literary titans. In addition to his own \u201cforeign agent\u201d badge of honor, Shishkin is the only person to have won all three of Russia\u2019s top literary awards: Russian Booker Prize, the Russian National Bestseller (2005), and the Big Book Prize (2010). His assessment of literature inside of Russia today is stark. Writing in response to questions sent to him by me via email, he notes that \u201c…living literature has been outlawed. Thousands of books are still published there, book fairs are still held, and literary prizes are still awarded, but for the past five years writers have largely pretended that everything is fine, that there is no war.\u201d It is an immoral omission that the Dar Prize has sought to correct. All three of this year\u2019s winners (the Jury awarded all three after they tied) wrestle with questions of war and its impact.<\/p>\n

Alexandra Krashevskaya\u2019s A Lullaby for Mariupol <\/em><\/a>(Freedom Letters, 2024)<\/a> perhaps takes on the issue most directly. Krashevskaya offers a first-hand, surreal view of the nearly three-month long 2022 siege of her native city that marked the beginning of the \u201cfull-scale\u201d Russian invasion. Written in the form of a non-chronological diary, A Lullaby for Mariupol <\/em>is a book that defies genre, neither a fictional account of real events nor an example of artistic journalism. The prose throughout is raw, visceral, and shocked. Dreams are one of the central organizing principles in a book that takes much of its power from how disturbingly unmoored the narrative is. This is because dreams, Krashevskaya wrote to me, \u201cmost accurately convey what it feels like to exist within a war.\u201d Which is to say, A Lullaby for Mariupol <\/em>seeks to do that most important thing: to witness.<\/p>\n

To bear witness to horrors visited on us by those forces at work in the world that would strip us of our humanity is perhaps the best act of human-ness open to us. It is, often, the last way in which we might do our duty to one another. But it is also a way of exculpating ourselves of the moral crimes even when we do not deserve such clemency. How guilty are we as individuals of the collective crimes of not just our species but of our nations and families? This is a question with which every thinking, feeling Russian I know is wrestling these days. It is a question with which a good deal many more Americans ought to be struggling.<\/p>\n

And it is the question at the heart of the second Dar Prize winning novel, Oleg Radzinsky\u2019s Days of Repentance<\/em><\/a> (BABooks 2024)<\/a>. At the center of the novel is the Naidenov family of Moscow. The family seeks to live in parallel to their country and society, a plan that might have worked if not for two dual intrusions. In the year the war in Ukraine begins, a new member of the family arrives. Daletskaya is the family patriarch\u2019s illegitimate daughter. A woman with dwarfism, her gradual intrusion into the family\u2019s home mirrors the way in which state power\u2014and then dependency upon it, followed by loyalty to it\u2014crept into homes and lives of ordinary Russians.<\/p>\n

While it seems unthinkable now, in the midst not only of the war in Ukraine, but what seem like very dark days for humanity everywhere, there will one day be an after.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot every person can right the historical wrongs, but every person can choose how to behave when met by the individual choice,\u201d Radzinsky wrote to me in an email. Our collective abandonment of this moral fact could go a long way to explain the current state of things in much of the world. But the level of personal culpability we are each willing to accept is even critical to what comes after conflict. While it seems unthinkable now, in the midst not only of the war in Ukraine, but what seem like very dark days for humanity everywhere, there will one day be an after.<\/p>\n

The third 2026 Dar Prize winner, Ksenia Buksha’s Little Paradise<\/em> (Freedom Letters, 2024), is set in the fictional town of Rayok, fifteen years after the end of a fictional war\u2014in the still yet to come \u201cafter.\u201d At its center is the disappearance of a fourteen-year-old boy, a child born after the fighting had already ended. The novel is suffused with a quiet mystical atmosphere\u2014the missing boy turns out to be a kind of prophetic figure, missing as he has gone to seek understanding in the mountains among the old terrorist hideouts. Ultimately, I would argue, it is less a political novel than a spiritual one.<\/p>\n

Buksha’s response to my very first interview question sent me back to the novel. “As a Christian, I would put it this way: the very nature of love is divine,” she wrote to the second round of questions. Reading that answer, I realized I had missed something essential on my first pass, and I reread the book with entirely different eyes. I had somehow forgotten that one often encounters a deeply spiritual imagination in Russian literature, and that this is possible in the new Russian literary tradition being created outside the borders of the state today.<\/p>\n

The three winners of this year\u2019s Dar Prize\u2014and the shortlisted books as well\u2014reveal the complexity of the canon taking shape. Ilya Danishevsky\u2019s Damocles Techno <\/em><\/a>(Freedom Press 2024) <\/a>is one of the most linguistically and culturally complex and demanding books I have ever read. Meaning that I hope desperately that it too will be translated into English (and other commercially viable languages), but I also worry that it will find the right translator. Similarly, Igor Beloded\u2019s short-story collection The Morning Was The Eye<\/em><\/a> (Alpine Nonfiction 2024)<\/a> proves gloriously strange, making it both a joy to read and a challenge for any translator who is brave enough to take it on. And those are just my favorites of the \u201crunners up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Russian state has systematically set out to silence its boldest and most innovative writers. Indeed many\u2014if not most\u2014have left the country in order to continue working. At the same time, the state has, through the insidious \u201cRussky mir\u201d <\/em>doctrine attempted to claim for itself ownership over the Russian language, a campaign that has been so successful that former Soviet states have increasingly targeted the Russian language in their quests for national sovereignty. This includes Ukraine, where the <\/a>Russian language recently lost protected status. <\/a><\/p>\n

Modern nationalism would have you believe that languages\u2014and by extension literary traditions\u2014are possessions that belong to one people or (more often) one state\u2014theirs to control and define. But this is undoubtedly one of nationalism\u2019s many lies. French belongs as much to a Frenchman in Paris as it does to a Nilotic woman in Kinshasa, after all. And no one would demand that Ayi Kwei Armah cease to write in English or Ivonne Co\u00f1uecar never publish again in Spanish. And the same is true for Russian.<\/p>\n

The Russian language and Russian literature do not belong to the Russian state, and they certainly are not the possessions of the Putin regime. The Dar Prize not only proclaims this truth, but works to make it a viable and visible reality. This is because the Prize does not simply celebrate writers, who defy the state\u2019s directive to write certain things in a certain way, but by ensuring that the work of the defiant crosses borders and enters new literary traditions through translation, without the support of the Russian state.<\/p>\n

The writers honored by the Dar Prize are all, in different ways, recording a catastrophe. But in that recording of destruction they are building something alive. If Shishkin is right that living literature has been outlawed inside Russia, then the future of Russian literature is already being written elsewhere. The Dar Prize simply recognizes that fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The designation of \u201cforeign agent\u201d is used by the Russian government to label individuals and organizations that receive foreign support or are (more nebulously) deemed to be under “foreign influence.\u201d Those so designated are subject to extensive reporting and labeling<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27782,"featured_media":275648,"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":[43069,6,43070,43095],"tags":[111726,111725,111718,111717,111724,111720,110289,108213,111721,111722,111723,2209,111719],"class_list":["post-275641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-politics","tag-a-lullaby-for-mariupol","tag-alexandra-krashevskaya","tag-damocles-techno","tag-dar-prize","tag-days-of-repentance","tag-igor-beloded","tag-ilya-danishevsky","tag-katherine-kelaidis","tag-ksenia-buksha","tag-little-paradise","tag-oleg-radzinsky","tag-russian-literature","tag-the-morning-was-the-eye"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19HP","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Untitled-design-2026-08-12T141553.125.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275641","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\/27782"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275300,"date":"2026-08-13T05:08:49","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T09:08:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275300"},"modified":"2026-08-13T10:24:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T14:24:14","slug":"surrendering-to-subjectivity-in-praise-of-maggie-nelsons-the-argonauts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/surrendering-to-subjectivity-in-praise-of-maggie-nelsons-the-argonauts\/","title":{"rendered":"Surrendering to Subjectivity: In Praise of Maggie Nelson\u2019s The Argonauts<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a writer and thinker, my life is divided into a B.N. and A.N.: a before-Nelson and after-Nelson.<\/p>\n

Before cracking open Maggie Nelson\u2019s The Argonauts<\/i>, I’d been all phobic about the first-person whenever I sat down to write. For decades, I’d avoided the first-person because respectable authorities had warned me away from it. Starting a sentence with \u201cI\u201d was like running with scissors or getting into a panel van driven by a hyperventilating stranger. Just don\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n

The first-person was portrayed as a gateway-drug into a slacker’s subjectivity, an immediate forfeit of hard-won authority, an entryway to peripheral-ness, and a slippery slope toward that authorial purgatory that is “opinion” writing.<\/p>\n

Prior to Nelson, I held on to the artifice of airtight writerly authority because it promised an escape from what her idol Roland Barthes had called\u2014admiringly, I think, or more to the point realistically\u2014”the muck of language.” But I now see chasing respectability and factuality as a Faustian pact, and reclaiming my soul became a way of surviving the harrowing early 2020s. Like Nelson, I\u2019ve always loved Barthes\u2014my own touchstones are The Pleasure of the Text<\/i> and the devastating Camera Lucida<\/i>. And I’ve actually come to love the writerly muck, \u201cafter Nelson.\u201d The muck has become necessary.<\/p>\n

Nelson doesn\u2019t gain her readers\u2019 trust despite <\/i>the first-person, but rather through <\/i>her particular deployment of it. Yet that trust isn\u2019t so much created as presumed.

<\/p><\/p>\n

More to the point, Nelson doesn\u2019t gain her readers\u2019 trust despite <\/i>the first-person, but rather through <\/i>her particular deployment of it. Yet that trust isn\u2019t so much created as presumed. Her intimacy is radical and instantaneous, and this is how she pulled me immediately into The Argonauts <\/i>even before her beautiful and painful little book broached the subjects that became fundamental to my own work. I\u2019m speaking of gender, sex, pain, pleasure, ideas, and critical theory\u2014as beheld by a liberal mind and body as they\u2019re now besieged at a difficult time.<\/p>\n

What was that about respectability? Nelson begins her memoir with a real-time account of bottoming on the floor<\/i>, face squished against cement, as topped by her transitioning husband-to-be Harry Dodge. And take note, it\u2019s the kitchen floor that Nelson is inelegantly splayed against\u2014the most abject and abused surface of the home.<\/p>\n

Nelson\u2019s mind quickly sails from cold floor-pragmatics to high theory. The naked veracity of her low-down leads to the rhetorical question \u201cDoes it get any better?\u201d, which then quickly carries her mind to Ludwig Wittgenstein. This great theorist of language and thought becomes The Argonauts\u2019<\/i> first ray of clarity, bringing high seamlessly together with low already on page 1. \u201cBefore we met,\u201d Nelson hears herself telling Harry in the kitchen, \u201cI had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein\u2019s idea that the inexpressible is contained\u2014inexpressibly!\u2014in the expressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t get enough of this Argonauts <\/i>opening, can\u2019t find my fill of its so-very smooth continuum between visceral inelegance and extraordinary knowledge, between body and mind. With its brutal openness, her book reminded me of perhaps the very first memoir in the modern sense, Jean-Jacques Rousseau\u2019s Confessions<\/i>. To borrow Rousseau\u2019s description of his own memoir, we could say Nelson presents herself \u201cin every way true to nature\u201d and indeed holds back nothing. Such acknowledgments allow Nelson a tone of confessional sincerity in her intricate self-narrative on parenthood, and gender fluidity that she titled \u201cthe argonauts\u201d after Barthes’s allusion to the perilous search for love.<\/p>\n

I have to confess my disciplinary jealousies. While Nelson has the world at her fingertips as a poet, memoirist, and teacher of what higher education still calls creative writing, I have had the restrictive misfortune of \u201cscholarly\u201d training as a historical musicologist, with hard-earned, Ivy-League expertise in paleography, primary source filiation, post-tonal analysis, and causal style histories. But I felt my disciplinary walls come a-tumbling down, noisily and for keeps, as soon as I came across her free-range, cage-free thinking (in The Argonauts<\/i>, but even more poignantly and intimately in her poetic Bluets<\/i>).<\/p>\n

(OK, I admit those walls had already been cracked by the likes of Barthes, T.W. Adorno, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Eve Sedgwick. But the coup de gr\u00e2ce was Nelson\u2019s doing.)<\/p>\n

After being validated with a doctorate, I labored for more than 30 years to elicit trust from my own readers: to inspire credence through demonstrating my own scholarly training, authority, knowledge, credentials, archival skills, and intellectual compass. And now here, in half a page, Maggie Nelson\u2014New York Times<\/i> bestseller-list-er, Macarthur Fellow and professor of English at USC\u2014elicits the reader\u2019s trust almost instantly by describing being fucked on the floor in picaresque detail. It\u2019s anal sex. And the anal sex is made even more outrageous by its lack of footnotes.<\/p>\n

Under her influence, I even began to look at my earlier \u201cscholarly\u201d work through the prisms of intimacy and honesty. Almost right away, I petulantly and maybe enviously started comparing Nelson with my own roles as published scholar\u2014and as sexual partner. Because how can those two functions possibly be separated?, she left me asking.<\/p>\n

<\/p>It\u2019s a clich\u00e9 to envisage one thinker \u201cgiving permission\u201d to another. But I can only conclude that Maggie Nelson allowed me to do what I need to do.<\/p>\n

Thinking back to my own dark days in the closet, sexually and intellectually…My debutante essay was a highly learn\u00e8d and heavily footnoted article in the flagship peer-reviewed journal in my field. The article went on to win a major award, what I call the \u201cHeisman Trophy\u201d of American musicology. But looking back on it now, I\u2019d say my essay reeks of avoidance. I can\u2019t find myself anywhere in it. Every word oozes an academic solicitation of trust, each oversize term is an invitation to boredom. And now that the world and its meritocracies are burning around us, who cares?<\/p>\n

The best scholarly work tends to be autobiographical in some ulterior sense, and of course Nelson is highly \u201cscholarly\u201d in her own fashion. Yet she elicited my own readerly trust by not writing her book as a disciplinary history that includes her own place in it\u2014which is the basic rationale of most published scholarship. I would say, in fact, that I found any genre considerations counterproductive while reading The Argonauts<\/i>. \u201cAm I reading fiction, or maybe some kind of \u2018talking cure\u2019 on the part of a hugely literate subject?\u201d \u201cIs this person in a real existential crisis, or is she counting how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?\u201d Any such questions quickly submerge under her rich writerly textures, her lush panoply of thoughts.<\/p>\n

Yes, it\u2019s a clich\u00e9 to envisage one thinker \u201cgiving permission\u201d to another. But I can only conclude that Maggie Nelson allowed me to do what I need to do. The ultimate sign of her influence on my own work is that I\u2019m now doing the musicologically unthinkable, which is to write a book that has nothing to do with music. The new project on my hard drive focuses not on songs or symphonies but on cruelty, injustice, dishonesty, and the politics of everyday language. As I pen this, respectability is still holding on for dear life in my (working) title. But I hope that will be the last platitude, and that it will surrender soon. My new study has to snarl and snap and sing at every turn, and it has to tell a story. The legacy of writer Maggie Nelson merits no less.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My 1980s Gayboy Playlist<\/a> by Arved Ashby is available from Punctum Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a writer and thinker, my life is divided into a B.N. and A.N.: a before-Nelson and after-Nelson. Before cracking open Maggie Nelson\u2019s The Argonauts, I’d been all phobic about the first-person whenever I sat down to write. For decades,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31516,"featured_media":275320,"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":[43069,6,43070],"tags":[10985,111647,6121,5670,3401,564,111648,42003,101710,7521,13552],"class_list":["post-275300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","tag-academia","tag-arved-ashby","tag-autobiography","tag-creativity","tag-inspiration","tag-maggie-nelson","tag-my-1980s-gayboy-playlist","tag-nonfiction-writing","tag-punctum-books","tag-the-argonauts","tag-writing-process","story-type-inspiration"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ck","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-argonauts.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275300","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\/31516"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275652,"date":"2026-08-13T05:08:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T09:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275652"},"modified":"2026-08-12T20:52:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T00:52:33","slug":"5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-8-13-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-8-13-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Lauren LeBlanc on T\u00e9a Obreht\u2019s\u00a0Sunrise<\/em>, Jane Hu on Chang-Rae Lee\u2019s\u00a0A Tender Age<\/em>, Stephanie Burt on Marlon James\u2019s The Disappearers<\/em>, Laura Miller on Rachel Cusk\u2019s\u00a0Life of M<\/em>, and Julia Case-Levine on Daniel Poppick\u2019s\u00a0The Copywriter.<\/em><\/p>\n

Brought to you by\u00a0Book Marks<\/a>, Lit Hub\u2019s home for book reviews.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cObreht flexes her skills as a literary writer who deploys a thriller\u2019s pacing, the vivid description crucial for realistic historical fiction, and the steady, calm voice of a central narrator, our entry point into a multifaceted tale of abuse and generational trauma. Much of this country was founded by men who seized fortunes at any cost, and we find it hard to shake the lasting repercussions of those actions. As a conniving man states to a dying gunman late in the novel, \u2018Inheritance\u2026is a matter of spirit.\u2019<\/p>\n

Obreht is a writer who doesn\u2019t rush into easy patterns of storytelling but seizes control from the jump.\u00a0Sunrise<\/em>\u00a0begins with a plane crash in 2024. Rather than build up to an intense moment like this, Obreht opens the novel with a catastrophe. It\u2019s a bold choice; after the fact, she must establish character, stakes, backstory, and the connective tissue of all these elements. She earns our confidence with flinty characters who escape easy moral stances. She is a writer who asks the reader to follow a complex examination of the truth through overlapping narratives: a survival narrative, a historical novel, an interview transcription. Confronted with loose ends, she asks herself what these desperate characters are searching for: \u2018Peace, relief, rest?\u2019 Beyond glory or gold, Obreht mines a tale about legacies of betrayal in the American West to discover what\u2019s truly at the heart of western expansion.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat may feel like a puzzle in these pages is in many ways an accordion. Obreht allows the stories of both the past and the present to speak for themselves as connections surface throughout the course of the book. We see how the crimes committed in one moment overlap with those of a later time. Women\u2019s voices are overlooked and dismissed. Men barrel ahead, truth be damned, in accordance with what they see as a larger goal\u2014power, status, money, authority. And it\u2019s control that remains elusive for the men in Obreht\u2019s novels. Hers are often broken, disappointed men, some facing death. Each struggles to see beyond his own concerns and petty grievances. And it\u2019s generally a woman who attempts to set the story straight. It\u2019s a thankless task.<\/p>\n

But isn\u2019t that so often the fate of the novelist? To reconcile the past through the guise of a story? Obreht distinguishes herself as a spellbinding writer who recognizes the ways that mythologies bend the truth to dazzle us with stories that capture a larger history.\u00a0Sunrise<\/em>\u00a0is a blistering look at the mythologies we just can\u2019t shake. Far be it from me to ever underestimate the pull of Western tales again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Lauren LeBlanc on T\u00e9a Obreht\u2019s\u00a0Sunrise<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(Alta<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\u201cWhereas Lee\u2019s prior novels are largely transnational in scope,\u00a0A Tender Age<\/em>\u00a0is a far more insular affair. In some ways, the book feels like a return to\u00a0Native Speaker<\/em>, in that it emphasizes the\u00a0American<\/em>\u00a0of Korean American assimilation. The young age of Lee\u2019s protagonist further limits the range of experience. Much of the novel is set in playgrounds and apartment courtyards, juvenile intervention meetings, and, finally, the Christian Korean summer camp to which Jeon-Gi\u2019s parents send him in a final attempt at rehabilitation. These contained spaces function as microcosms of the broader social world, controlled theaters for children to play out the dramas of adulthood. But they\u2019re also powder kegs, where even the slightest shift in mood or atmosphere might prove disastrous.<\/p>\n

Lee\u2019s novels often end with an abrupt instance of violence, working like a release valve for narrative pressure. And as Jeon-Gi\u2019s time at summer camp unfolds, the reader is made persistently aware of some fatal crisis to come. It\u2019s a testament to Lee\u2019s craft that, despite such frequent and furious foreshadowing, the actual event still arrives as a shock. I had to read the scene a few times over to make sure I understood what was happening.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pathos of\u00a0A Tender Age<\/em>\u00a0lies in its young protagonist\u2019s waning ability to hold the realities of the adult world at bay. When the novel begins, Jeon-Gi is already middle-aged\u2014his own children having recently left home\u2014though his narration rarely strays from that delicate year leading up to his 11th birthday. What seems to make this age so tender, for Jeon-Gi, is the malleability of the self, the rawness of experience and seemingly endless capacity to be wounded. \u2018I still think about those times,\u2019 he reflects, \u2018more often than makes any sense in the wider context of my life.\u2019 For most of the book, Jeon-Gi\u2019s first-person voice remains suspended in the uneasy space of his childhood consciousness, re-enacting the uncertainty and confusion of adolescence.<\/p>\n

Looking back, the aging Jeon-Gi seems to encounter his past as a distant land, and his younger self as a kind of uncanny stranger. He confesses that his 10-year-old self existed as a kind of cipher, trying on different personas through a steady drip of small, seemingly inconsequential lies. At camp, he recounts, the fibbing \u2018went on and on, so much so that it became a tic, a compulsion from deep within me that was bent on dark invention.\u2019<\/p>\n

In this way, the novel is an exploration of a theme threading through all of Lee\u2019s books: that people, especially the displaced children of immigrants, often look to find versions of themselves in other people. Lee shows how a young boy\u2019s search for how an immigrant should be can easily slip into the uneasy terrain of projection and overidentification\u2014especially, and often hazardously, through the channels of fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Jane Hu on Chang-Rae Lee\u2019s\u00a0A Tender Age<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>(The New York Times Book Review<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\u201cBrief History<\/em>\u00a0looks at power in a place of violence and examines what secrets it hides. Now James has written a book about people whose whole lives feel like secrets. And he has a thesis: Those who grow up learning that they are bad and do not deserve to exist\u2014people who might get raped, maimed, or murdered for trying to be themselves\u2014almost inevitably organize their life around attempts to disappear, escape, or else retreat to the margins, becoming (like Eddy) figures who observe others, themselves unseen, or (like Jordan) agents of vengeance who stick to the shadows.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cLike\u00a0Brief History<\/i>,\u00a0The Disappearers<\/i>\u00a0offers a big, modernist assemblage of contrasting styles, personas, and points of view. It, too, is a work of classic realism, touring the social layers in a changing Kingston as its characters earn and lose money, rise and fall. But unlike\u00a0Brief History<\/i>, which includes gay characters but mostly isn\u2019t about them,\u00a0The Disappearers<\/i>\u00a0also belongs with those earlier chronicles of gay America that Jordan and Eddy name-check, especially John Rechy\u2019s\u00a0The Sexual Outlaw<\/i>. And so it\u2019s full of gay sex: ecstatic, conflicted, reluctant, a desperate secret or an open secret. James acknowledges occasions of sweet, mutual, that\u2019s-how-it-should-be sex\u2014but those happen largely offstage. Most of the on-page couplings instead mix, alarmingly, sex with violence. Some people seek humiliation; some want to inflict it. Some get hurt by their tricks. James manages not to kink-shame anyone, but he\u2019s less interested in kink education than in displaying a sexual world where every hookup comes with scary risks: assault and battery, for example, or public exposure, or HIV in the age before retrovirals. Living in fear of \u2018the AIDS\u2019 entails its own \u2018long set of disappearing acts\u2019\u2014not just sickness and death, but shame and denial and an inability to mourn.<\/p>\n

\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThe novel opens up many pleasures for literary readers, in its pacing, in its observations, and especially in the ventriloquism of Havelock\u2019s old-school prose (he even writes one letter in the obsolescent gay slang Polari). But it\u2019s not, mostly, a book about pleasure: These lives are often\u2014realistically\u2014scary or sad. We should not label them tragedies, though, because that implies a controlling divinity, or at least a fixed fate. As Havelock insists, \u2018We need to stop calling atrocities tragic.\u2019\u00a0The Disappearers<\/i>\u00a0is, among other things, one novel responding to many atrocities.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Disappearers<\/i>\u00a0ends up as a violence-driven protest, a scream of rage\u2014like Nirvana\u2019s final album\u2014against a world that keeps trying to kill people like him and then pretends that they asked for it, or that they never existed. The novel is a superbly fashioned instrument for showing what felt wrong, what went wrong, in Jamaica in the late 1980s and \u201990s, and what\u2019s still wrong in other places, too, where people who grow up marginalized get blamed for their own persecution, or else celebrated as brave exceptions when, against the odds, they succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Stephanie Burt on Marlon James\u2019\u00a0The Disappearers<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you want to know the\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0scuttlebutt about Natalie Portman and Rachel Cusk\u2019s new novel,\u00a0<\/em>Life of M<\/em>,<\/em>\u00a0the book that is supposedly based on Portman herself? You can read about the \u2018uncanny\u2019<\/a>\u00a0similarities between Portman and Cusk\u2019s title character, M,\u00a0all<\/a>\u00a0over<\/a>\u00a0the<\/a>\u00a0internet<\/a>, and about how the novel apparently amounts to a \u2018literary assassination<\/a>,\u2019 so I won\u2019t summarize those points here. Since the rumors about M\u2019s inspiration have made their way from publishing-circle dinner parties to online hearsay, commenters have barely been able to contain their thrilled titillation over the idea that an acclaimed novelist is dishing the dirt on her movie-star friend, a supporter who has previously recommended Cusk\u2019s titles. But, for those hungry for juicy morsels of gossip within the pages of the novel, I have disappointing news: The truth about\u00a0Life of M<\/em>\u00a0is that the book isn\u2019t really about Natalie Portman at all.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cUntil the final chapter of the novel, M and the narrator won\u2019t meet again. Instead,\u00a0Life of M<\/em>\u00a0alternates between scenes from the lives of both the narrator and \u2018M.\u2019 That\u2019s \u2018M\u2019 in quotes because by the time the reader gets to that last chapter, it has become increasingly apparent that the passages describing M\u2019s life are, for the most part, mere speculation on the narrator\u2019s part. After the first chapter, the narration switches from first-person singular to first-person plural, as the narrator moves through obsessions familiar to readers of\u00a0Cusk\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0previous<\/a>\u00a0novels<\/a>: frustration over the inauthenticity of contemporary life, the instability of identity, and a sort of neurasthenic aestheticism that makes simple activities like going to a museum distressing if the other visitors respond to the art in a too-boisterous manner.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThe narrator of\u00a0Life of M<\/em>\u00a0mostly seems interested in M\u2019s hopeless desire to make contact with \u2018reality,\u2019 her unsureness about who she truly is, the impossibility of \u2018sincerity,\u2019 and her abiding sense that she is mere performing herself. Anyone who prides herself on the refinement of her taste as much as Cusk does would know that making observations like these about an actor is banal, as is a line comparing M\u2019s home in the city to a \u2018big doll house, with her as the doll inside it.\u2019 And anyone who has read even a little of Cusk\u2019s previous work will recognize that these concerns map suspiciously closely to Cusk\u2019s own preoccupations with artificiality.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cLife of M<\/em>\u00a0is a narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman \u00e0 clef about a celebrity. To my mind, only one true mystery remains: Was Portman in on it? Is she just pretending to be offended for a lark, or in a bid to drive interest in her friend\u2019s book? As of this writing, neither woman has made a public statement on the matter, but I\u2019m not sure if we can believe either one of them when they\u00a0do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013Laura Miller on Rachel Cusk\u2019s\u00a0Life of M<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(Slate<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"the<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Money is a kind of poetry,\u2019 Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive better known as a poet, once wrote. As metaphors, money and poetry might be improbably alike; they can both transform one thing (time) into something else (a hairclip, a frozen lake). But for Stevens, maybe this equation had a special import. How could someone who wrote that he had \u2018no life except in poetry\u2019 explain the incongruous fact that he spent most of his day parsing surety, risk, and fidelity bonds? Another way to ask this question: If most American poets are required to work at another job (such is the condition of an economy that assigns poetry almost no market value), what tools can be marshaled to make that situation tenable\u2014what fantasies get us through the day?<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cStevens never wrote about his work, giving the impression of its ephemerality and unrelatedness, as if it were completed in a vacuum-sealed container and excised from his inner life. And yet the office\u2014its smells and politics, its grievances petty, existential, or edifying\u2014must have made an impression. Perhaps Stevens chose to locate those conflicts elsewhere, in a snowy field. Poppick takes a different approach:\u00a0The Copywriter<\/em>\u00a0is part office satire but also part poetics of absurdity, making use of the corporate world\u2019s vacuous jargon and ugly furniture. The question becomes: What can poetry do to transform or remake the dull day job\u2014to make it bearable, make it interesting, or simply make it mean something else?<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not that D__\u2019s poetry is equivalent to his copywriting, but that they have something important in common. And if D__ understands his presence at work to be a form of playing pretend, his writing suggests that the division between art and work might not quite hold up. More unnerving than the requirement to perform a false self at work may be the knowledge that we carry something of ourselves between places, that the choices we make in one arena of our life will eventually affect our expression in another. The day job is never just a day job.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd yet this moment also suggests the ways in which money and poetry are not alike. If corporate work asks us to conflate ourselves with our job, to merge our ambitions and standards with those of the office, poetry urges us to take this situation less literally, to ask: What else could this be? What could be substituted for it? And what does that look like, sound like? It\u2019s the poet, not the good employee, who imagines a way to wriggle out of a tricky bind. Which is to say, when it comes to money and poetry\u2019s likeness, a line of verse can do what a line of credit does not: It can make the normal relation between things less standard. It can create the distance necessary to look again, and to respond to the circumstances of our life in our own language. To make the next word not the obvious link but one that undoes the sentence, clearing the path for something else on its way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Julia Case-Levine on Daniel Poppick\u2019s\u00a0The Copywriter<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The Nation<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Lauren LeBlanc on T\u00e9a Obreht\u2019s\u00a0Sunrise, Jane Hu on Chang-Rae Lee\u2019s\u00a0A Tender Age, Stephanie Burt on Marlon James\u2019s The Disappearers, Laura Miller on Rachel Cusk\u2019s\u00a0Life of M, and Julia Case-Levine on Daniel Poppick\u2019s\u00a0The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":275654,"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":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[36298,15654,13821],"class_list":["post-275652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week","tag-book-marks","tag-book-reviews"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19I0","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Life-of-M.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275652","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\/873"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275401,"date":"2026-08-13T05:06:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T09:06:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275401"},"modified":"2026-08-20T08:56:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T12:56:13","slug":"on-the-carceral-ideology-underpinning-the-anti-trans-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-the-carceral-ideology-underpinning-the-anti-trans-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Carceral Ideology Underpinning the Anti-Trans Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

In most global contexts, anti-trans politics align with rightwing populism and are part of wider attacks against LGBT+ rights, gender equality, reproductive justice, and sexual freedoms. The international \u201canti-gender\u201d movement has roots in conservative, Christian, and ultra-nationalist groups and targets a range of issues including abortion, contraception, sex education, same-sex marriage, and trans health care\u2014all in the name of protecting \u201ctraditional values.\u201d In the United States, for example, opposition to trans rights splits sharply along party lines, with Republicans far more likely to take anti-trans and anti-gender positions than Democrats.<\/p>\n

Likewise in Europe, far-right leaders such as Viktor Orb\u00e1n in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy have spearheaded crusades against so-called \u201cgender ideology\u201d and include anti-trans positions within their wider agendas. In Latin America, right-wing figures like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Christian evangelical groups in Peru, Costa Rica, and Colombia have similarly championed the anti-trans and anti-gender cause. Across the globe, anti-gender campaigning is frequently tied to right-wing nationalism, white supremacy, and assertions of patriarchal power.<\/p>\n

In contrast, the gender critical movement in Britain is more singularly focused on trans issues and crosscuts left-right political divides. While anti-trans sentiment has long been present in Britain, the specific rise of an organized<\/em> gender critical movement is relatively new. It initially emerged within leftwing feminist and lesbian circles who objected to proposals to expand trans rights. Dovetailing with conservative groups who also objected to gender reform, and amplified by media outlets invested in culture-war disputes, the gender critical movement has since gained support across the political spectrum. Gender critical subgroups now exist within all major British political parties\u2014Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Green, and Scottish Nationalist\u2014with the exception of the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru.<\/p>\n

The anti-trans backlash is not only impactful for trans and gender nonconforming people; it shapes how all people navigate gendered spaces, services, and public life.<\/p>\n

While political commentators frequently conflate different anti-trans positions in Britain, branding them all \u201cTERFs\u201d on the one hand or right-wing neo-fascists on the other, in reality these campaigners occupy a range of political positions. Some gender critical figures are firmly right-wing and anti-feminist, even when deploying the language of women\u2019s rights. Others, including high-profile Conservative Party politicians, endorse gender critical politics from a conservative feminist position. Many key gender critical advocates come from the left. A Woman\u2019s Place UK, for example, was founded in 2017 by trade unionists and other left feminists. Though disbanded in 2024, A Woman\u2019s Place UK played a prominent role in early gender critical organizing. It explicitly described itself as left-wing and had supporters from a range of left organizations, including the longstanding anti-violence organization, Southall Black Sisters. These feminists generally position themselves as \u201cpro-women\u201d rather than \u201canti-trans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other groups, such as Fair Play for Women, For Women Scotland, and Sex Matters, position themselves as non-partisan and include members across the political spectrum. The LGB Alliance and Get The L Out, who also espouse gender critical views via separation from the wider LGBT+ community, similarly claim nonpartisan positions but also publicly eschew both left and right politics.<\/p>\n

Anti-gender conservatives and gender-critical feminists both oppose what they describe as \u201cgender ideology,\u201d but from different political positions. Conservatives uphold \u201ctraditional\u201d gender norms, advocating for sex \u201ccomplementarity\u201d (i.e. distinct roles and identities for men and women). They blame changing gender norms for a range of social ills. In contrast, gender critical feminists view \u201cgender identity\u201d as reinforcing stereotypes of what men and women should be (i.e. women as \u201cfeminine\u201d and men as \u201cmasculine\u201d). They worry that, instead of accepting a range of expressions and sexualities, \u201cgender ideology\u201d encourages \u201cmasculine\u201d women and girls, particularly lesbians, to become men and \u201cfeminine\u201d men and boys to become women.<\/p>\n

Gender critical feminists also argue that using the category of \u201cgender\u201d rather than \u201csex\u201d obscures biological differences, and hampers efforts to collect accurate data on equality measures, such as unequal pay, crime rates, and health, even though both sex and gender data categories are fraught with empirical challenges. Fundamentally, gender critical feminists see trans rights as a threat to women\u2019s equality and gay rights, whereas conservatives oppose gender and sexual equality altogether.<\/p>\n

Although gender critical feminists and lesbians often feature prominently in the media and public disputes, they represent a minority perspective in Britain. Opinion polls show that non-trans lesbians and bisexual women are among the most trans inclusive demographics. In fact, many of the newer gender critical groups emerged precisely to challenge the more longstanding feminist and women\u2019s organizations that had adopted trans inclusive positions.<\/p>\n

The range of anti-trans perspectives in Britain is also evident in ongoing debates amongst gender critical feminists about whether to work with right-wing groups. While some feminists reject these alliances outright, others advocate strategic collaboration\u2014echoing similar, contentious alliances in the past, including those between feminists and conservatives who aligned to oppose pornography and prostitution during the \u201csex wars\u201d of the 1980s and 1990s.<\/p>\n

British gender critical campaigning exemplifies a growing trend of \u201cpolitical diagonalism,\u201d where unexpected alliances across the left and right are forged less by shared goals than a common enemy. These coalitions do not require left feminists to embrace conservative ideology or conservatives to adopt feminist positions; rather they claim legitimacy and mobilize wide support by positioning themselves as ideologically diverse.<\/p>\n

Conspiracy theories have been central to this dynamic as widespread misinformation on social media has drawn in new gender critical sympathizers across the political spectrum. Online claims that \u201cbig pharma\u201d is funding the \u201ctrans lobby,\u201d that pornography is causing people to become transgender, or that trans women have \u201cmale pattern criminality\u201d circulate widely and attract supporters who might otherwise reject anti-trans rhetoric. When repeated by academics, think tanks, and celebrities, these claims gain credibility. Trans historian Jules Gill-Peterson describes this as \u201cthe laundering of conspiracy,\u201d whereby fringe claims are repackaged into seemingly reasonable and \u201ccommon sense\u201d arguments.<\/p>\n

This diagonalism is further enabled by the flexible use of terms like \u201cgender\u201d and \u201cgender ideology.\u201d Because these concepts have no fixed meeting, they can act as an empty signifier that different groups can fill with their own meanings and anxieties, from fears about social change to opposition to feminism, allowing alliances to form across divergent political agendas.<\/p>\n

Many British gender critical feminists also frame their politics as born from disillusionment with the left. They describe feeling abandoned by left political parties, trade unions, and women\u2019s organizations, or displaced by younger generations who embrace trans inclusive feminism. Many describe feeling \u201cpolitically homeless\u201d as a consequence of their views on trans issues and as justification for why they have turned to right-wing media platforms or formed unconventional alliances. Gender critical feminists have forged a sense of shared identity through their perceived marginalized status while simultaneously claiming to speak for a majority of ordinary people.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

So how have these gender critical groups in Britain, with such vast ideological differences, become aligned? Who or what is the \u201cshared enemy\u201d that brings these strands together in diagonal formations? And why are these alliances so powerful?<\/p>\n

This book argues that safety concerns\u2014and the specific incitement of fears of gender-based violence, sexual danger, and harm to women and children\u2014have been a central framework for uniting divergent anti-trans groups. Gender critical campaigners across left and right, conservative and feminist alike, gained momentum by presenting trans rights and \u201cgender ideology\u201d as an acute danger to non-trans women and children. These claims about safety are integral to the story of how gender-critical campaigners built cross-political support in Britain.<\/p>\n

While newly formed gender critical groups, like Fair Play for Women, initially campaigned around questions of \u201cfairness,\u201d \u201cdignity,\u201d and \u201cwomen\u2019s rights,\u201d they soon found that framing trans rights as a safety threat to women and children proved a far more effective tactic. These \u201ctrans danger\u201d arguments gained prominence in public debates around reforming the Gender Recognition Act. Opponents of gender recognition reform argued that self-identification would allow predatory men to access women-only spaces and harm women. Campaigners began to actively associate gender self-identification with sexual danger and risk. Keeping trans women out of women\u2019s spaces therefore became a central focus for gender critical campaigners and a key strategy for mobilizing fear.<\/p>\n

By tapping into concerns about gender-based violence and invoking a sense of women\u2019s shared vulnerability, gender critical groups channelled wider fears of harm into anti-trans positions. Their emotional appeals drew on longstanding cultural tropes that cast trans and gender-diverse people as deviant or dangerous, amplifying public anxieties about trans rights, despite a lack of evidence for such claims.<\/p>\n

The moral panic that ensued is now a defining feature of the contemporary British gender wars. However, the political underpinnings of that panic are rarely identified and challenged. At the center lies carceral safety politics<\/em>\u2014logics that turn fears of violence into justifications for punitive responses. These dynamics have given transphobic claims a veneer of legitimacy under the guise of protecting women and children. They play out repeatedly across the debates: dividing the world into innocent victims and dangerous others, casting harm as an external threat from dangerous others, pathologizing individuals and groups rather than addressing structural conditions of harm, and seeking safety through identity policing, surveillance, and punishment.<\/p>\n

Carceral safety politics in Britain are not confined to the gender critical side. They are often mirrored by trans rights advocates. Because trans rights are framed as a danger to women and children, with trans women portrayed as \u201csexual threats,\u201d trans advocates have counter-claimed that they are the real victims, not perpetrators. Trans advocates rightly highlight the high levels of discrimination, harassment, and violence faced by trans communities to argue for greater protection from harm. These claims are not wrong, but within the wider frame of safety politics, they too can play into carceral politics.<\/p>\n

We are witnessing how anti-trans feminists are increasingly intertwined with the acceleration of right-wing and reactionary politics more broadly.<\/p>\n

For example, in response to widespread hostility, many trans organizations endorsed Scotland\u2019s 2021 Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which introduced new offenses for threatening or abusive behavior intending to stir up hatred on the basis of transgender identity, age, disability, religion, and sexual orientation. Though framed by the government as providing \u201cgreater protection for victims and communities,\u201d in reality the legislation simply enables longer prison sentences (up to seven years) for \u201cinciting\u201d or \u201cstirring up hate.\u201d Such measures rely on the carceral assumption that harsher punishments will deter violence, despite strong evidence to the contrary. After the new law came into force in 2024, a large number of vexatious complaints were launched in protest, and gender critical and trans campaigners argued over which group most needed the law\u2019s protection.<\/p>\n

Both gender critical feminists and trans activists have become locked in endless battles around safety and danger, victim versus perpetrator. These disputes pivot on questions of who is most deserving of support and protection and who is most dangerous and needs to be excluded. Identity becomes the grounds for protection, and surveillance, control, and exclusion the remedy for danger. In doing so, these conflicts obscure deeper structural conditions of harm and divert attention and resources from more effective violence prevention strategies.<\/p>\n

These disputes are inevitably a trap because carceral politics do not keep us safe. They pit marginalized groups against one another and channel fear into demonization, surveillance, and punishment. What is needed is a vision of safety that is not build on dividing the \u201cdeserving\u201d from the \u201cunderserving,\u201d but on creating conditions where safety is possible for all.<\/p>\n

What has unfolded in the British gender wars should not be mistaken for a debate that is only about trans rights or identity politics. At stake are broader questions about which social norms and moral values should guide public policy. These conflicts\u2014and the growing reliance on litigation to settle them\u2014carry significant implications for law, policy, and culture, both in Britain and internationally. The anti-trans backlash is not only impactful for trans and gender nonconforming people; it shapes how all people navigate gendered spaces, services, and public life. These issues impact us all.<\/p>\n

Equally troubling is the export of Britain gender critical politics and strategies abroad.90 Gender critical groups formed in the UK are setting up international chapters, forging global links, and sharing resources. The LGB Alliance, formed in 2019 to separate lesbian, gay, and bisexual interests from trans rights, claims chapters in sixteen countries around the world. Likewise, the Women\u2019s Declaration International (WDI), which also originated in the UK, has grown to more than forty international chapters with supporters across 160 countries. As trans organizer Nim Ralph observes, a \u201cBritish version of anti-trans feminism is spreading worldwide, mostly in settler-colonial nations like the U.S., Australia, and Canada.\u201d<\/p>\n

This transnational anti-trans and anti-gender organizing is reinforced by the flows of global funding. US-based Christian groups, already funding anti-LGBT and anti-abortion campaigns at home, are now supporting anti-gender initiatives abroad. Anti-gender funding from the United States to Europe has increased significantly in recent years. These international collaborations increasingly bring liberal and left feminists together with far-right actors, under the banner of protecting women and children from \u201cgender ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across different international contexts, the consequences of the growing anti-trans backlash are clear. The United States, for example, has seen a dramatic rise in bills attempting to block trans people from accessing health care, education, sports, and legal recognition. In 2015 there were nineteen anti-trans bills tabled in the United States, and in 2020 there were sixty-six. By 2025, the number had skyrocketed to 1,020 anti-trans bills across forty-nine states. While initially led by right-wing conservative and religious organizations, these campaigns now draw active support from gender critical feminists. We are witnessing how anti-trans feminists are increasingly intertwined with the acceleration of right-wing and reactionary politics more broadly.<\/p>\n

For references cited in the above excerpt please see the\u00a0full book<\/a>.<\/small><\/p>\n

___________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash<\/span><\/a> by S. Lamble. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Published by Haymarket Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In most global contexts, anti-trans politics align with rightwing populism and are part of wider attacks against LGBT+ rights, gender equality, reproductive justice, and sexual freedoms. The international \u201canti-gender\u201d movement has roots in conservative, Christian, and ultra-nationalist groups and targets<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31550,"featured_media":275561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43092,43095],"tags":[85356,28242,4299,111683,53743,15171,12559,19646,111684],"class_list":["post-275401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-newsandculture","category-politics","tag-anti-trans","tag-haymarket-books","tag-lgbtq","tag-s-lamble","tag-trans-issues","tag-trans-rights","tag-transphobia","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unsafe-the-carceral-roots-of-the-anti-trans-backlash","story-type-transphobia"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19DX","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/trans-rights.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275401","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\/31550"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275176,"date":"2026-08-13T05:06:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T09:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275176"},"modified":"2026-08-11T15:50:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T19:50:20","slug":"the-annotated-nightstand-what-ed-park-is-reading-now-and-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-annotated-nightstand-what-ed-park-is-reading-now-and-next\/","title":{"rendered":"The Annotated Nightstand: What Ed Park is Reading Now, and Next"},"content":{"rendered":"

The beloved novelist, journalist<\/a>, short story writer, and editor Ed Park is continuing to put out excellent work at a startling clip. After having his recent novel Same Bed Different Dreams <\/i>named a Pulitzer finalist (which, he explains in a lively interview<\/a>, was largely written while sitting sentinel during his sons\u2019 hockey practices), Park published the short story collection An Oral History of Atlantis<\/i> and, this fall, The Repairer of Reputations<\/i>\u2014a \u201cwork of weird horror\u201d according to the author. Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties<\/i>, is delightfully sandwiched between these two volumes. Three Tenses<\/i> is born from a draft Park had written, saved on a floppy disc, then plum forgot about for a couple decades.<\/p>\n

Park adeptly took up the effort he began in his twenties and developed it into something remarkable, melding autobiography with fiction through 1,500 pithy dispatches. These describe everything from seeing a man carrying an aquarium filled with books to the experience of selecting the prettiest nail clipper from the shop. The starred review in Publishers Weekly<\/i><\/a> for Three Tenses<\/i> explains: \u201cPark wisely downplays narrative arc in favor of stray ruminations and insights that coalesce to illuminate his endlessly curious, mordantly funny worldview.\u00a0It adds up to an engrossing and beguiling trip through the consciousness of a budding wordsmith.\u201d Park also generously annotated his to-read pile with the spirit of someone lovingly walking you through his eclectic art collection, so I\u2019m going to get out of the way for you all to enjoy the tour.<\/p>\n

Park says of his TBR pile, \u201cThis stack is taller than normal, though not by much. The nightstand itself is a modest thing I\u2019ve had through many apartments\u2014I don\u2019t know where it originated. When I read in bed, I sometimes use a small reading light that clips on to the back cover. (I also read on Kindle, though I don\u2019t know where it is at the moment.) Also, there are some pens here, which (in theory) I use to jot down dreams while they\u2019re fresh in my head. Usually I\u2019ll tell myself the dream is so interesting that there\u2019s no way I\u2019ll forget it, and go back to bed, and forget.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The New Yorker <\/i>\u2013 March 2, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

On the bottom of this stack is an old issue of The New Yorker<\/i>. This one\u2019s from March; it has Rachel Aviv\u2019s wrenching piece on Gis\u00e8le Pelicot, which I read, so I think it\u2019s safe to toss it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jack Finney, Time and Again<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Next we have Jack Finney\u2019s 1970 novel Time and Again<\/i>, which I\u2019d sent to my dad for his 59th birthday, back in the \u201990s. I don\u2019t know if he ever read it. I brought it back from Buffalo (where my parents live and where I was born) to New York on a recent trip, and just cracked it open two weeks ago. Interestingly, the narrator, a commercial artist, mentions that he came to New York from Buffalo. (Had I known this five years ago, I would have shoehorned an allusion into Same Bed Different Dreams<\/i>.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jon Peterson, Playing at the World Volume 1: The Invention of <\/i>Dungeons and Dragons<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Playing at the World<\/i> is the first volume of Jon Peterson\u2019s study of Dungeons & Dragons and the world of role-playing games. I\u2019ve been working on a piece about RPGs for the past two years or so, mainly in my head. This book has a lot of detail about various miniature warfare enthusiasts, their newsletters and meet-ups, and how these subcultural forces led to the invention of D&D. Incredible scholarship! I have the second Peterson volume somewhere but I haven\u2019t started it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

John Langan, Children of the Fang<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Above this tome rests a John Langan\u2019s 2020 collection Children of the Fang. <\/i>Horror fans revere him as the author of The Fisherman<\/i>; I\u2019m also fond of \u201cOn Skua Island,\u201d a perfect story from his first collection.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Joshua Clover, Roadrunner: A Song by Johnathan Richman and the Modern Lovers<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Next is a book from Duke University Press about the Modern Lovers\u2019 song \u201cRoadrunner.\u201d It\u2019s by the late Joshua Clover, who used to write for me when I was an editor at The Village Voice<\/i>. Here he untangles the various versions, presents a psychogeography of Massachusetts, and places the song inside and outside of history\u2014just genius. I have fond memories of Clover. For some reason, we went to see The Da Vinci Code<\/i> together in New York. He also came to my first and only Berkeley reading, for Personal Days<\/i>. It was nice to see a familiar face, so far from home. (Interestingly, he was the first person I took a picture of on my very first flip phone.) We lost touch over the years. I was a huge Jonathan Richman fan in college, and I was aware that this book was coming out, but I missed it. I\u2019m grateful to my friend David, who gave this copy to me recently.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Another buddy, Lucas, sometimes brings me books he finds on a big table in Queens. It\u2019s famous in Queens. Just a guy who puts out books every day. Look at this great edition of Pynchon\u2019s Slow Learner<\/i>. I remember reading the intro years ago\u2014wonderful, but also so self-deprecating that it makes you worry that the stories themselves won\u2019t be worth reading. (I believe Nicholson Baker mentions this in U and I<\/i>.) I jumped to the last story, \u201cThe Secret Integration,\u201d which is good. I also love the narrow trim size and the quality of the paper.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jason Rekulak, Look What the Cat Dragged In: A Novel<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a Jason Rekulak completist\u2014I\u2019ve been a fan ever since (unsuccessfully) trying to acquire his debut novel, when I was an editor\u2014so I\u2019m excited for his forthcoming Look What the Cat Dragged In<\/i>. (It\u2019s designed by the great Will Staehle, who did the covers for Three Tenses<\/i> and my previous two books.) This one has a comic-book element\u2014the adventures of an enigmatic feline named Godfrey\u2014integrated into the regular text.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Speaking of comics, I dug up Marjane Satrapi\u2019s Persepolis<\/i> after her untimely death earlier this year. It\u2019s great from the first page, the first panel. She wields such authority in the drawing, such precision and emotion in the writing. Even though it was her tragic end that led me back to Persepolis<\/i>, I\u2019m glad to be reminded of the immensity of her achievement. It\u2019s one medium\u2019s landmark works for a reason.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A Public Space \u2013 Issue 33<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Next up is the recent issue of A Public Space<\/i>\u2014I\u2019ve only dipped in. Good line from Astrid Seme: \u201cIn Ancient Greece, there was no segmentation between words and sentences\u2026This made reading out loud quite difficult as the reader had to work out from the context where the gaps and pauses should be. Aristophanes of Byzantium, who worked at the library of Alexandria, invented a system of dots that indicated how long a pause to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

John Brackett, Touch of Grey, or How the Grateful Dead Became Pop Stars<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Thinner than the issue, like a blanket resting atop, is John Brackett\u2019s monograph Touch of Grey, or How the Grateful Dead Became Pop Stars<\/i>. I guess this is the part where I tell you that, to my surprise, I\u2019ve become a pretty rabid Deadhead over the past year. One unusual thing about the Dead is that the bulk of their oeuvre was penned by non-performing songwriters, chiefly Robert Hunter, who collaborated mainly with Jerry Garcia. (John Perry Barlow wrote for\/with the recently departed Bob Weir.) \u201cTouch of Grey\u201d is a Hunter song, which he performed solo for years, before it became part of the Dead\u2019s repertoire, where it underwent further transformation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kyle Winkler, The Ship of Death: A Novel<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Kyle Winkler\u2019s The Ship of Death <\/i>continues the RPG theme\u2014it\u2019s a novel presented as a series of documents involving a rare, weirdly malevolent role-playing game by a shadowy designer. It reminds me of Harry Stephen Keeler\u2019s dossier novels, e.g. 1936\u2019s The Marceau Case<\/i>. Every chapter is a different document. Sometimes this seems like the only honest way to present a piece of fiction: it should consist of words that might conceivably be written down for nonliterary purposes. Does that make sense? You can ask me about it later.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Thirty Cabins: Stories<\/i><\/a> Anthology, ed. Josh Riedel<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thirty Cabins<\/i> (title not visible on the spine) is an anthology chapbook put together by Josh Riedel and inspired by cabin designs published in the 1920s. He invited me and 29 other writers to contribute a story based on one of the plans. I chose \u201cCabin in the Clouds,\u201d because I thought it would be a good way to force myself to finish a story I\u2019d been toying with, part of a larger fictional project I\u2019m working on\u2014I thought my cabin would be a haunted ski lodge, a portal to some Lovecraftian ice-entities. I made six (at least) different starts to this story, but then I scrapped it and just banged out something that feels like an ominous preface to the collection as a whole (my story comes first): a nameless visitor approaches the titular cabin, perhaps programmed like the Manchurian Candidate. There\u2019s a Grateful Dead song on the car radio, \u201cDire Wolf,\u201d in which they sing, sweetly: \u201cPlease don\u2019t murder me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Rachel Aviv, You Won\u2019t Get Free of It<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

I picked up the aforementioned Rachel Aviv\u2019s You Won\u2019t Get Free of It<\/i> at her book launch last month. She\u2019s revised some of her best-known New Yorker<\/i> pieces for this collection (including her masterful feature on Alice Munro), revisiting and revising them from the point of view of being a mother. It\u2019s hard to believe, but over 20 years ago, Rachel was my intern when I was an editor at the Voice<\/i>. She wrote a lot for me there\u2014book reviews, as well as articles for the EdSupp, which was not named for me but was short for \u201cEducation Supplement\u201d\u2014and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Philip E. High, Invader on My Back \/ <\/i>David Grinnell & Lin Carter, Destination: Saturn<\/i><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

In the foreground is a mini-stack. On top is an \u201cAce Double\u201d found by the aforementioned Lucas at the aforementioned Queens table. (I am enamored of this s-f flip-book format, having included a fictitious version in Same Bed Different Dreams<\/i>.) This specimen has Philip E. High\u2019s Invader on My Back <\/i>on one side (\u201cThey dared not look at the sky!\u201d), and Destination: Saturn<\/i> by David Grinnell and Lin Carter on the other. I hesitate to say I\u2019m in a Lin Carter phase, but I\u2019ve been teaching a very short story of his that I think is great (\u201cThe Doom That Came to Sarnath\u201d), and I also recently bought a book he wrote on Lovecraft\u2019s Cthulhu mythos and Conan of Aquilonia<\/i>, which he cowrote with L. Sprague de Camp. Anyway, Carter\u2019s contribution here bears a goofy Kelly Freas painting and an irresistible, barely grammatical tagline: \u201cWhen identical planet-kings meet, one must be a Saturnian!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Eve Babitz, Too L.A.<\/i>: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were)<\/i><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Below this we have Eve Babitz\u2019s Too L.A.<\/i>, with the confounding subtitle Letters Never Sent (But Some Were)<\/i>. I wish we knew, more clearly, which were and which weren\u2019t, but it\u2019s a pretty addictive read. As Deborah Shapiro pointed out on Substack, it\u2019s like a West Coast companion piece to my late friend Duncan Hannah\u2019s diaries of the \u201970s, 20<\/i>th<\/i> Century Boy<\/i>. I don\u2019t personally like to gossip, but I like reading old gossip. It doesn\u2019t hurt anyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The beloved novelist, journalist, short story writer, and editor Ed Park is continuing to put out excellent work at a startling clip. After having his recent novel Same Bed Different Dreams named a Pulitzer finalist (which, he explains in a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9656,"featured_media":275192,"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":[43071,43069,6,43135],"tags":[111556,7693,111568,9918,20738,111560,111562,14870,111554,111557,111565,111561,24322,111564,31654,111555,28149,111558,111559,111566,111567,1688,65460,111570,111563,111569],"class_list":["post-275176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-readinglists","tag-children-of-the-fang","tag-ed-park","tag-ed-josh-riedel","tag-eve-babitz","tag-jack-finney","tag-jason-rekulak","tag-john-brackett","tag-john-langan","tag-jon-peterson","tag-joshua-clover","tag-kyle-winkler","tag-look-what-the-cat-dragged-in-a-novel","tag-marjane-satrapi","tag-or-how-the-grateful-dead-became-pop-stars","tag-persepolis","tag-playing-at-the-world-volume-1-the-invention-of-dungeons-and-dragons","tag-rachel-aviv","tag-roadrunner-a-song-by-johnathan-richman-and-the-modern-lovers","tag-slow-learner","tag-the-ship-of-death-a-novel","tag-thirty-cabins-stories-anthology","tag-thomas-pynchon","tag-time-and-again","tag-too-l-a-letters-never-sent-but-some-were","tag-touch-of-grey","tag-you-wont-get-free-of-it"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ak","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/ed-park-nightstand.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275176","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\/9656"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":274792,"date":"2026-08-13T04:58:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T08:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=274792"},"modified":"2026-08-11T15:58:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T19:58:29","slug":"my-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/my-person\/","title":{"rendered":"My Person"},"content":{"rendered":"

Margot and I were preparing to host our monthly dinner party when I told her this wasn\u2019t working for me anymore. I had decided to end our friendship earlier that evening while grocery shopping at the Metro in our neighborhood. I\u2019d filled my cart with all the ingredients I would need to make meat loaf, which I made every Sunday when we\u2019d host these parties\u2014our Sunday Loaf parties. It was Margot\u2019s favorite meal, my mother\u2019s recipe, a staple in our home. It was my way of saying: Yes, I want this to end, but look at how much I still care. It took eight minutes to walk through the Metro parking lot and back to the apartment. I wasn\u2019t thinking of anything. Our friendship did not flash before me like some kind of dead-wife montage in a film. I did not experience some kind of come-to-Jesus moment in which the Earth cracked open. There was no sudden realization. It was all just cool.<\/p>\n

Outside, it was dark. Women wore workout sets while walking their dogs, goldendoodles in their creamy apricot coats. Really, I wasn\u2019t thinking of anything critically, except dodging dog shit. The air was stiff and shifted my mood; I became melancholic, felt even a little exhilarated with anticipation. We\u2019d been hosting these dinner parties since I moved in, not this past August, but the August the year before. It began with a housewarming. Weeks later, on the first Sunday of the following month, I made the meat loaf again for the exact same group of people, and like that, we\u2019d created a tradition.<\/p>\n

Before all this, when I had floated the idea of us living together, our friends expressed concerns about our compatibility. She\u2019s so type A, they said. And you\u2019ve just sold your next book, don\u2019t writers need solitude to write? Still, the Sunday Loaf parties had evolved into a celebration of our love: Margot and I always color-coordinated our dresses\u2014merlot or crimson in the fall, shades of blue in the winter, pastels in the spring. We decorated the apartment according to the season and collaborated on the menu. But the meat loaf remained the centerpiece. We both agreed this was proof that we really were in this for the long run. \u201cThis\u201d being our friendship, our community, the fine china we displayed in the wooden cabinet behind the dining table.<\/p>\n

I was aiming for a clean separation without any complications. I couldn\u2019t figure out an exact reason for wanting to leave. This was causing me a lot of stress, because Margot was the kind of person who\u2019d need an exact reason. There was a void I couldn\u2019t quite explain and this voice in my head that kept saying: It\u2019s time to go. But I couldn\u2019t say that to Margot because I did not want to be therapized. She\u2019d gently present that I was just \u201cbeing a poet\u201d then suggest I needed a meaningful vacation, somewhere like Delhi. I\u2019d find myself crazed with a sudden loss of faculties and agree with her, and if I wasn\u2019t careful, I might even end up on a red-eye to a meditation retreat, paid for by Margot. A gift she\u2019d then hold over me for the rest of our lives.<\/p>\n

I did not write poetry anymore. It had not paid me enough to feed myself, so I\u2019d turned to fiction. I was trying to write a second novel that my agent sold a few weeks before I moved in with Margot. At the time of acquisition, I had a finished first draft. Then, when I moved in, something about the draft suddenly wasn\u2019t working, so I deleted everything and convinced my editor to pause on the edits, assuring her that I\u2019d have a fresh manuscript by winter. That deadline was a year ago and still I had nothing. They had to push the pub date and remove the book from the catalog, which didn\u2019t really mean anything to me because I did not understand what a catalog was. But I knew that I was in hot water. After I missed my deadline, I rarely answered my editor\u2019s emails or calls. The advance, the awards, the being-recognized-at-Toronto-indie-bookstores\u2014it was just distracting me from the real work. Not that I didn\u2019t appreciate the exposure, but I desired a more secluded life. I thought I could just write a little book and resume my little life of being, for example, someone\u2019s person. Because I did desire that: intimacy, joy. And I no longer knew if Margot was it for me, or if we were one of those magical accidents that leave you saying: fuck.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s everything I knew about Marguerite on a superficial level: She was white, for starters. We called her Margot because she told us to. It was a self-appointed nickname that turned into an identity. Margot because she was blond and lean with brown eyes. Margot because her hair had recently been cut into a straight bob, her face was shaped like an upside-down triangle. Margot because it suited her. Made her sound serious, a little cunty. She had wide hips, which, was a point of agreement for her, said her hips were made for birthing, called them love handles, as in \u201clove knobs,\u201d thought they made her look like a woman who would have an easy time bringing life into the world.<\/p>\n

Margot was supposed to be a stay-at-home mother by now. Instead, she was a social media specialist for a luxury bridal shop, where she felt crazy constantly witnessing other people\u2019s happiness. Crazy on Margot looked like desperation. It gave her some kind of edge. I had a thing for a woman with some kick to her. My mother was an extreme version of such a woman. As for Margot, she was the kind to wear Lululemon exclusively. She had a fat ass and ate lettuce frequently. She walked around with a YETI mug and preferred to speak directly into her Apple Watch as opposed to just typing out a text. It was easy to correctly categorize her as a woman who lived in Liberty Village, but to be fair: so did I.<\/p>\n

Margot\u2019s big internal conflict was that she was failing at convincing her boyfriend to put a baby in her. The boyfriend was named Ryan. I paid exactly no mind to him whatsoever, unless he came up in conversation with Margot. The thing was: He showed no signs of wanting what she wanted. Children, for example, were a nonstarter for him. Marriage was capitalism set on fire. This was at the root of all their problems, however, in the year of mine and Margot\u2019s joint cohabitation, this become my problem too. Her job was light work, so she had all day to obsess over her uterus, the amount of mucus she discharged between cycles, her chances of getting pregnant after thirty. I understood that she was going through a lot. It didn\u2019t feel right to leave someone worse off than I had found them.<\/p>\n

Except that, as Eli had recently pointed out, I found Margot twenty-two years ago. Surely, he had said during one of our late-night phone calls, there\u2019s room for negotiation, maybe you can redefine the terms of your friendship. I didn\u2019t know what he meant by that, and I didn\u2019t ask. Eli was Margot\u2019s cousin. Yes, there had been a time in childhood when I was undeniably in love with him. He was into books and so cool, had taught Margot and me how to hit a bong, and whenever we were alone together, there was this electricity that raptured me. And yes, Margot had explicitly asked me not to fuck her cousin, so I\u2019d spent my life working overtime to keep those thoughts out of my head. And then one day they were just gone.<\/p>\n

Eli was in finance, like all the men in Margot\u2019s family. He had this big, logical, disciplined brain that made him act like an older brother to us both. Similar to the rest of their relatives, he had an all-American look. He was clean-shaven, blond, brown-eyed too. Thin, rosy lips. He checked in on me regularly, treated me the way he treated Margot. I could have been anyone, I understood that. His kindness wasn\u2019t about me, it was just his nature. I was the impulsive one, Margot was the dramatic one, and Eli was the warmth. He was the calm. Older by only a year but he knew, almost professionally, how to pull us back. He did not call as frequently as he used to. He was getting married. I supported that. It was just that, without his constant interference, I could not shake the feeling that something felt off.<\/p>\n

Not that our survival depended on Eli\u2014it would be stupid to pretend that our roles were not predetermined. Nothing about my life felt like a choice anymore. It was like I had fallen into writing and fallen into a sensitive roommate situation and fallen into a specific kind of body\u2014Afro, artist, atheist\u2014and regardless of how extraordinary these things seemed at times, all I felt, really, was the fall. So no, I did not know the exact reasons I was leaving Margot. I supposed it was a combination of things, mainly the length of time. Things rust. They deteriorate. This theory could apply to relationships too. We were eight, then twelve, then eighteen, then twenty-five, et cetera. It didn\u2019t even matter. All I knew was that, for once, I was standing still, firm in my decision.<\/p>\n

I got home from Metro around ten o\u2019clock. I played with the keys outside our door. The hallway was dark. It had this green carpet that smelled of air freshener. I felt both excited and humiliated about what I was going to do. Margot and I lived in an open-concept apartment that was basically just one gigantic room with a clean island and a sleek velvet sectional. It was not uncommon for me to arrive home to find Margot in a bathrobe with some kind of face mask on\u2014whatever was trending at the time: clay or sheet, Korean or Indian\u2014with a big bowl of popcorn, a bottle of wine and two glasses. I slowed my breathing and placed my ear to the door. I heard nothing. Which meant she had the TV on pause while she scrolled through her Instagram feed, likely overanalyzing her posts from the bridal shop. I opened the door.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey.\u201d Right away, her singsong voice.<\/p>\n

\u201cHi.\u201d I said back.<\/p>\n

I stepped into the foyer, the kitchen. Margot glanced in my direction for the first time, as if to say: You\u2019re home. I made a face, as if to say: Sure looks like it. I was being cold and she could sense it. From the unchanged expression on her face, I knew that she had accepted aloofness as one of my little quirks. She\u2019d often tell me I had a tendency to shut down in response to gestures of intimacy but that she\u2019d given me a pass because this quality of mine didn\u2019t seem fixable. I disagreed with her. What she perceived as me shutting down was actually me surrendering to fatigue, but at some point I stopped trying to get her to understand that. She\u2019d respond to this, my aloofness\/fatigue, by reminding me that she loved me, which was okay, fine, because I loved her too. I just didn\u2019t like her anymore. It had taken me this long to realize.<\/p>\n

Margot got up from the sectional. I was trying not to look her in the eyes. I placed the bags down to get out of my boots. She walked over, grabbed the groceries, and took them to the kitchen, commenting on everything I bought. The strawberries looked \u201cso fresh,\u201d and the yellow onions were \u201cmuch better than white ones,\u201d and coconut water had \u201cnatural electrolytes.\u201d We were standing in between the island and the stove. Margot was talking a lot, but I was distracted by the faucet. It had been leaking for a couple of days. There were several reminders in my Notes app to call someone to fix it\u2014Eli maybe or a professional of some sort. It was making this sound like glop, glop, glop.<\/p>\n

Margot began recounting her day with impressive specificity. She was generally a prude, but with me, nothing was off-limits. Leaning on the island, she told me her diva cup didn\u2019t fill up anymore. This made her feel like less of a woman. In fact, she wanted to know if not producing enough period blood meant she wouldn\u2019t make enough \u201cfood\u201d to properly feed a fetus. I didn\u2019t think that was scientifically sound, but I had gotten tired of challenging her on that. Right away, I was put back in the awkward position of faking interest. Saying, Oh, and, I don\u2019t know, and, Sounds really tough.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re making meat loaf tomorrow?\u201d Her voice, again, was drawn out and high-pitched.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t call it Sunday Loaf for fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, we do.\u201d She gave a little laugh. \u201cWe literally call it that for fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI guess asking me what I\u2019m making when I make the same thing every time we host these parties is a little redundant, don\u2019t you think?\u201d<\/p>\n

She asked if everything was all right, that I\u2019d been hot and cold all month, pulling away and being weird. I asked her to expand. She told me I seemed low energy. I said nothing, just nodded. I was moving around the kitchen, still putting things away. There were some dishes on the counter. A cereal bowl. A spoon. A mug. I placed them in the dishwasher. And though only a minute ago I had it all figured out, that moment had passed. I was withering. A familiar feeling, a heart palpitation, was flaring up again, \u201cpanic outburst,\u201d Margot had been calling them, the latest condition she\u2019d diagnosed me with, linking it to that one mention of my novel in the New York Times. It wasn\u2019t negative or anything like that. It was just a small nod to my book in a review about someone else\u2019s novel, but I did not see the correlation. Margot had printed the review anyway, highlighted my name and pinned it to the fridge. She walked around the kitchen island and stood on the other side of me. Quietly, I told her I needed space. She began asking me a series of questions:<\/p>\n

1. Is it your deadline? They\u2019re made to be broken, so fuck that, it\u2019s not worth your mental, babe, call your agent or editor or whatever and say you need more time\u2014<\/p>\n

2. Is it Eli? Tomorrow doesn\u2019t have to be about his engagement. If that feels like too much pressure, we can order Chinese, you don\u2019t have to cook\u2014<\/p>\n

3. Is it me? Have I offended you\u2014god, just tell me what I\u2019ve done wrong this time\u2014<\/p>\n

4. And what do you mean by, \u201cI need space?\u201d<\/p>\n

About the apartment: Legally, it belonged to Margot, but financially, her parents had taken care of the down payment, and my role in all this was to be a good tenant and write my little book in peace. Margot couldn\u2019t stand the emptiness of a newly built high-rise, and she didn\u2019t want to find a roommate on the internet. Living together, she had pitched, would benefit us both. Actually, it was Margot\u2019s mother who had called and said they had put an offer on a two-bedroom apartment in Liberty Village. Margot was in the background on speakerphone, saying: Think about your situation.<\/p>\n

We studied one another for a beat, the way we sometimes did to communicate in a private language. The expression on her face then changed. Her eyes got big. She brought her hands to her mouth as though to say: Oh, you\u2019re being serious. She moved to the living room. I followed behind. She poured huge glasses of wine before placing the bottle back on the coffee table. Neither one of us said anything for a while. We drank in silence. Then, Margot asked if the grocery store had been busy. She knew I didn\u2019t like leaving the house on the weekend because this part of the city got too crowded with 905ers. She was pulling at the skin between her thumb and index finger, then switching to do the other hand. I absentmindedly drained my glass and then refilled it. I realized I was supposed to be answering her questions, and I made a weird involuntary sound. I told her that nobody grocery-shopped on Saturdays. But there was this one woman who had given me that look, like I was foreign, and I internalized it the entire time I was there. But maybe it was all in my head.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t do that,\u201d said Margot. \u201cDon\u2019t second-guess yourself. She was probably a racist.\u201d<\/p>\n

I laughed a little then. I always found it funny the way she added a determiner in front of an insult. Someone was always a cheater or a religious. It was like she was highlighting a singular character trait as opposed to an entire ideology. On the TV, the latest episode of Grey\u2019s Anatomy was paused on Arizona\u2019s face. The conversation went on. We both drank a little and talked about nothing interesting. Eventually, her eyes began to fill up. \u201cSo, what\u2019s going on?\u201d<\/p>\n

I owed her some consideration, so I paused and took my time. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re really working anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLike, in what sense?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just not really happy here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCan you be a bit more specific?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we\u2019ve stopped adding value to each other\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

She considered this for a moment. The wine smelled potent, which loosened me enough to aim for honesty. She murmured softly now, as if unprepared for the sound of her own voice. \u201cYou\u2019re doing that thing where you\u2019re being vague and all metaphoricky and I\u2019m gonna need you to get to the point of what you want to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not trying to spare your feelings, if that\u2019s what you\u2019re suggesting.\u201d My voice had changed now too. An almost false confidence. \u201cI quite literally just said I don\u2019t think we\u2019re working anymore. I don\u2019t know how to be clearer than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut what does that even mean? \u2018Not working anymore,\u2019 I just don\u2019t get that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Margot and I rarely fought. Mainly because we didn\u2019t address things directly. We were somewhere between \u201csweep it under the rug\u201d and \u201cwhatever it is, it doesn\u2019t matter because I forgive you before it even happens.\u201d We were, in the words of Margot, \u201csisters,\u201d \u201ca family unit.\u201d I processed a lot of my feelings through my writing, while Margot had access to external resources (therapist, acupuncturist, private Pilates trainer) to work out all that we didn\u2019t address. I drained a second glass. Margot nursed her first. She was sitting with her legs tucked, leaning on the armrest of the sectional. She reached over and placed a hand on my thigh. She did this sometimes to command my attention. I repeated myself, slower this time: I \/ do not \/ think \/ we \/ add \/ value \/ to each other\u2019s lives \/ anymore.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, no, I heard you. I just don\u2019t understand you. Like, say it in plain English.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re always together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, yeah, no shit, we live together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe sleep in the same bed almost every night. I\u2019m just so tired of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOkay, sure, I won\u2019t sleep in your bed anymore,\u201d said Margot. \u201cNo need to make a whole scene about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not hearing me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not really saying anything, though, are you?\u201d<\/p>\n

I glanced at her. I tried to manipulate my facial expressions so that I appeared fragile and unthreatening. Softened my voice: \u201cI don\u2019t want to say that I don\u2019t want to be friends with you anymore, because that sounds insane.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, I mean, you sound ridiculous right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to, like, I don\u2019t know how else to say it but, I want to unknow you.\u201d<\/p>\n

A moment of silence. Then, Margot started laughing. She pressed on my thigh, still laughing. I knew there was no malice in her\u2014she was simply reaching for balance. \u201cAre you dumping me or something?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, when you put it like that, it sounds a little, I don\u2019t know. But yeah, I guess so. I think so.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you think so or are you actually breaking up with me?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we were boyfriend and girlfriend, then yeah, I\u2019d be saying, I am breaking up with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOkay, but we\u2019re not boyfriend and girlfriend.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m aware, I\u2019m just saying.\u201d I paused to arrange my words. \u201cIn my mind, it was supposed to be the end of a thing, not the breaking of a thing, does that make sense? Like, a good movie that ends, you know what I mean? But a bad movie, you stop it. You press Pause or whatever, you walk away from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t say anything for a while. She just looked at me. A bit startled. Began controlling her breathing. Not sure which one of us started crying first, but we were both unraveling. It was that movie analogy. Made me realize I hadn\u2019t actually thought this through. Perhaps I did not think we\u2019d get this far in the conversation. I thought she would have stopped it before I could even start. A part of me hoped for that. So I could say at least I tried. There was a part of me that felt relief. At the same time, the inability to take it all back was suddenly building in my chest like hot oil. I placed a hand over hers.<\/p>\n

What Margot had meant by \u201cmy situation\u201d all those months ago, was that I was living check to check. And I didn\u2019t always know when the next check would arrive. So, reluctantly, after the second novel had sold, I accepted the offer to move in. I wasn\u2019t thinking: Margot&Tania4ever. I was thinking: I need to eat. So, I moved in. Paid almost nothing in rent and made up for it through domestic services. In turn, Margot didn\u2019t have to be alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not a movie,\u201d said Margot. \u201cWe\u2019re real life.\u201d She shook my hand away and left. I heard her bedroom door slam shut and felt her absence in an extreme way. All of a sudden, our apartment appeared surgical. As if now a showroom. Outside, Lake Ontario was visible this high up. It was at a standstill. The lights from the neighborhood condos glistened on the water. All of it visceral without color.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

From <\/em>My Person<\/a> by T\u00e9a Mutonji. Used with permission of the publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by T\u00e9a Mutonji.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Margot and I were preparing to host our monthly dinner party when I told her this wasn\u2019t working for me anymore. I had decided to end our friendship earlier that evening while grocery shopping at the Metro in our neighborhood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":274793,"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":[25508,3,43074,43076,26764],"tags":[12398,111415,45693],"class_list":["post-274792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-from-the-novel","category-novels","tag-g-p-putnams-sons","tag-my-person","tag-tea-mutonji","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19u8","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/9798217180233.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274792","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\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275656,"date":"2026-08-13T04:56:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T08:56:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275656"},"modified":"2026-08-12T20:53:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T00:53:28","slug":"the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-nonfiction-30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-nonfiction-30\/","title":{"rendered":"The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Nonfiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are this week\u2019s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers<\/a> for nonfiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association.<\/a> Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

1. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants<\/em><\/a> by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed)
\n2. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald<\/em><\/a> by John U. Bacon (Liveright)
\n3. This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy<\/em><\/a> by Ben Wikler (W. W. Norton)
\n4. The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss<\/em><\/a> by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris (W.W. Norton)
\n5. Is a River Alive?<\/em><\/a> by Robert Macfarlane (W.W. Norton)
\n6. Triage<\/em><\/a> by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press)
\n7. A Resistance History of the United States<\/em><\/a> by Tad Stoermer (Steerforth)
\n8. Inner Propaganda: Leading Hearts and Minds Through Turbulent Times<\/em><\/a> by Owen Fitzpatrick (Ideapress Publishing)
\n9. Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature<\/em><\/a> by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (Spiegel & Grau)
\n<\/span>10. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)<\/em><\/a> by Dean Spade\u00a0(Verso)
\n<\/span>11. S.P.Q.R.: A History of Ancient Rome<\/em><\/a> by Mary Beard (Liveright)<\/span>
\n12. The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life<\/em><\/a> by Helen Whybrow (Milkweed Editions)
\n13. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate\u2014Discoveries from a Secret World<\/em><\/a> by Peter Wohlleben (Greystone Books)
\n14. Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences<\/em><\/a> by Anton J\u00e4ger (Verso)<\/span>
\n15. The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail<\/em><\/a> by Eric Jay Dolin (Liveright)
\n16. Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old<\/em><\/a> by Mary Beard (University of Chicago Press)
\n<\/span>17. A Philosophy of Walking<\/em><\/a> by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Gros, John Howe (Transl.)\u00a0(Verso)
\n<\/span>18. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses<\/em><\/a> by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Oregon State University Press)
\n<\/span>19. We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution<\/em><\/a> by Jill Lepore (Liveright)
\n<\/span>20. Man’s Search for Meaning<\/em><\/a> by Viktor E. Frankl (Beacon Press)<\/span>
\n21. The Wave in the Mind: Imagination and the Art of Writing and Reading<\/em><\/a> by Ursula K. Le Guin (Shambhala)
\n22. The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary<\/em><\/a> by Terry Tempest Williams (Grove Press)
\n<\/span>23. A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps<\/em><\/a> by John Elledge (The Experiment)<\/span>
\n24. Great Bakes: Modern Classic Recipes from the Midwest<\/em><\/a> by Martin Sorge (Agate Midway)
\n25. These Truths: A History of the United States<\/em><\/a> by Jill Lepore (W. W. Norton)
\n<\/span>26. Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground<\/em><\/a> by Zayd Ayers Dohrn (W. W. Norton)<\/span>
\n27. Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were)<\/em><\/a> by Eve Babitz (NYRB)
\n28. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats<\/em><\/a> by Ursula K. Le Guin (Library of America)<\/span>
\n29. Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy<\/em><\/a> by Mary Roach (W. W. Norton)
\n30. Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering<\/em><\/a> by Joseph Nguyen (Authors Equity)
\n<\/span>31. The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change<\/em><\/a> by Rebecca Solnit (Haymarket Books)
\n<\/span>32. How to Relax<\/em><\/a> (Mindfulness Essentials #5) by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press)
\n<\/span>33. The Wretched of the Earth<\/em><\/a> by Frantz Fanon (Grove)<\/span>
\n34. Constitution of the United States<\/em><\/a> by Founding Fathers (Applewood Books)
\n35. The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government<\/em><\/a> by Barbara McQuade (Seven Stories Press)
\n36. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States<\/em><\/a> by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Beacon Press)
\n37. On Democracy<\/em><\/a> (Library of America Broadsides #3) by Walt Whitman (Library of America)
\n38. How to Love (Mindfulness Essentials #3)<\/em><\/a> by Thich Nhat Hanh, Jason DeAntonis (Illus.) (Parallax Press)
\n<\/span>39. A Philosophy of Shame<\/em><\/a> by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Gros, John Howe (Transl.)\u00a0(Verso)<\/span>
\n40. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America<\/em><\/a> by Richard Rothstein (Liveright)
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are this week\u2019s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for nonfiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus. * 1. Braiding Sweetgrass:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":266893,"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":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[108921,107978,53909],"class_list":["post-275656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-independent-press","tag-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers","tag-independent-publishers"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19I4","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/NONFICTION-BESTSELLER.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275656","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=275656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275655,"date":"2026-08-13T04:56:25","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T08:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275655"},"modified":"2026-08-12T20:52:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T00:52:58","slug":"the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-fiction-30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-fiction-30\/","title":{"rendered":"The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are this week\u2019s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers<\/a> for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association.<\/a> Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

1. The Calamity Club<\/em><\/a> by Kathryn Stockett (Spiegel & Grau)
\n2. The Odyssey<\/em><\/a> by Homer, Emily Wilson (Transl.) (W.W. Norton)
\n3. John of John<\/em><\/a> by Douglas Stuart (Grove Press)
\n4. I Who Have Never Known Men<\/em><\/a> by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books)
\n5. Heart the Lover<\/em><\/a> by Lily King (Grove Press)<\/span>
\n6. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 1<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n7. Fruit Fly<\/em><\/a> by Josh Silver (Crooked Lane Books)
\n8. The Iliad<\/em><\/a> by Homer, Emily Wilson (Transl.) (W.W. Norton)
\n<\/span>9. Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel<\/em><\/a> by Shuang-zi Yang (Graywolf Press)
\n10. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 2<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n<\/span>11. Small Things Like These<\/em><\/a> by Claire Keegan (Grove Press)
\n12. On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)<\/em><\/a> by Solvej Balle, Barbara J. Haveland (Transl.) (New Directions)
\n13. (Mostly) Human Resources: A Novel<\/em><\/a> by Grace Viall (Alcove Press)
\n14. I See You’ve Called in Dead<\/em><\/a> by John Kenney (Zibby Publishing)
\n<\/span>15. Stoner<\/em><\/a> by John Williams (NYRB Classics)
\n16. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 3<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)<\/span>
\n17. Lights Out<\/em><\/a> (Into Darkness Series #1) by Navessa Allen (Slowburn)
\n18. The Employees<\/em><\/a> by Olga Ravn (New Directions)
\n19. We Were Forbidden<\/em><\/a> by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit)
\n20. Victorian Psycho: A Novel<\/em><\/a> by Virginia Feito (Liveright)
\n21. Foster<\/em><\/a> by Claire Keegan (Grove Press)
\n22. Writers & Lovers<\/em><\/a> by Lily King (Grove Press)
\n23. Clown Town<\/em><\/a> (Slough House #9) by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
\n24. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 4<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n25. The Berry Pickers<\/em><\/a> by Amanda Peters (Catapult)
\n26. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 5<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n27. Culpability<\/em><\/a> by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel & Grau)
\n28. Helen of Nowhere<\/em><\/a> by Makenna Goodman (Coffee House Press)
\n29. Harvest Season<\/em><\/a> (The Seasons of Carnage Trilogy #2) by Brynne Weaver (Slowburn)
\n30. My Brilliant Friend<\/em><\/a> by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions)
\n31. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 6<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n32. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 7<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n33. Game On<\/em><\/a> by Navessa Allen (Slowburn)
\n34. The Very Definition of Love<\/em><\/a> (The Bancroft Sisters) by Sophia Benoit (Slowburn)
\n35. Kindred<\/em><\/a> by Octavia E. Butler (Beacon Press)
\n36. The Overstory<\/em><\/a> by Richard Powers (Norton)
\n37. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 8<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n38. Witch Hat Atelier 1<\/em><\/a> by Kamome Shirahama (Kodansha Comics)
\n39. Orbital<\/em><\/a> by Samantha Harvey (Grove)
\n40. Three Bags Full<\/em><\/a> (A Sheep Detective Story) by Leonie Swann (Soho Crime)<\/span><\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are this week\u2019s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus. * 1. The Calamity<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":269719,"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":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[108921,111531,111025],"class_list":["post-275655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-independent-press","tag-independent-top-40","tag-the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19I3","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/fiction-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275655","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=275655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]