[{"id":277104,"date":"2026-09-23T05:08:30","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T09:08:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277104"},"modified":"2026-09-21T21:26:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T01:26:27","slug":"what-learning-to-paint-and-reading-the-elements-of-style-have-in-common","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/what-learning-to-paint-and-reading-the-elements-of-style-have-in-common\/","title":{"rendered":"What Learning to Paint and Reading The Elements of Style<\/em> Have in Common"},"content":{"rendered":"

I envy painters the freedom to convey thoughts without words. So much so that at one difficult stretch in my life I resolved to give up writing and pick up a paint brush.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t that I supposed that by learning to paint I might master shape and form and apply it to my work. I simply wanted to lose myself in color. To paint a perfect shade of blue, dive into it, swim a lap or two.<\/p>\n

By embracing a completely new art form, I thought I might escape the crises large and small that were making it difficult to write: the emptying nest, the crumbling marriage, the challenges of managing an aging parent. I had set aside the novel I was working on, which in the great scheme of life disruptions is known as a pause, but at that moment walking away from my novel in progress\u2014my fifth if I could see it through\u2014felt cataclysmic.<\/p>\n

You are no doubt familiar with the little book, the style guide first written and privately printed in 1918 by William Strunk Jr.<\/p>\n

Part of my desire to paint had to do with becoming enamored with an illustration of a baby named Chlo\u00eb. Chlo\u00eb is cherubic, with teal blue eyes, carrot-colored hair, and a perfect cherry bow of a mouth. \u201cChlo\u00eb smells good, as a baby should,\u201d reads the caption beneath her portrait, meant to illustrate a rule of grammar having to do with usage of the words like<\/i> and as<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I had stumbled upon Chlo\u00eb while preparing for the writing class I was teaching at the time. I liked to press on my students The Elements of Style<\/i>, aka \u201cthe little book.\u201d<\/p>\n

You are no doubt familiar with the little book, the style guide first written and privately printed in 1918 by William Strunk Jr. This book was later updated and expanded by Strunk\u2019s former student, E.B. White, and it has continued to evolve with multiple editions, including the one that contains the depiction of Chlo\u00eb. The edition I have is illustrated by Maira Kalman, who manages to make painting look as simple as the clean, clear writing Strunk and White espouse.<\/p>\n

Use the active voice. Omit needless words. Do not overstate. <\/i>These are just a few of their admonishments.<\/p>\n

Dorothy Parker famously said of this book, \u201cIf you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do is present them with copies of The \u2018Elements of Style<\/i>.\u2019 The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they\u2019re happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was deep in that unhappy place Dorothy was referring to. I wasn\u2019t going to shoot myself, but I did want to stop writing and immerse myself in shapes and colors. I wanted to paint this sweet baby. It wasn\u2019t just about Chlo\u00eb. I wanted to learn to paint each of the dozens of impossibly colorful, whimsical, brilliant illustrations in this book, including the droopy eared, sad-eyed Basset Hound who even addressed me directly: \u201cWell, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in,\u201d the caption reads, in reference to a particular use of commas that I could not have cared less about.<\/p>\n

I did not talk about my fine mess: my empty nest, my flailing, i.e. failing, novel, my what-to-do-with-the-rest-of-my-life middle-aged crisis. <\/p>\n

I signed up for a painting class at a community center, where I spent a few months trying to paint a bowl of pears. My attempts were a shonda<\/i>\u2014Yiddish for a disgrace. My pears were bulbous, disfigured, likely mutant. A kindergartener could have done a better job. The instructor tried to guide me, to no avail. After a few weeks, sensing my frustration, he politely suggested that before I learn to paint, I should learn to draw.<\/p>\n

This bit of guidance led me to the studio of a private instructor. Upon my arrival, she looked at the book in my hand, bookmarked to Chlo\u00eb-the-good-smelling-baby, and said, \u201cOh! So you want to paint like Maira Kalman!\u201d And then she began to laugh.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t see what was so funny. Sure, the pears had not gone especially well, but how hard could it be to draw, then paint, a baby? A big round face, two eyes, a nose, a mouth. For the love of God, the angle captured in the book only required the rendering of one ear!<\/p>\n

But more to the point: Maira Kalman? <\/i>How was it possible that I had been staring, awestruck, at these illustrations without asking myself who Maira Kalman was— an acclaimed writer and artist who has published over 30 books and illustrated many New Yorker covers, a few of which I loved so much I had set them aside to savor. Her work is exhibited around the world.\u00a0 It was akin to wanting to write Mrs. Dalloway without realizing the iconic status of Virginia Woolf.<\/p>\n

To use the sort of overstatement that would make Strunk and White break out in hives, the discovery of Maira Kalman would change my life.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s begin by drawing a pencil, the instructor politely suggested.<\/p>\n

Touch\u00e9.<\/p>\n

I spent a few weeks working hard on the pencil. I enjoyed the time in the quiet, sunny studio, aspiring to be a person who could first draw, then paint a pencil. The instructor and I spoke only about drawing-the-pencil-related things. There was no friendly chit-chat. I did not talk about my fine mess: my empty nest, my flailing, i.e. failing, novel, my what-to-do-with-the-rest-of-my-life middle-aged crisis.<\/p>\n

The pencil was not going well. I had clearly rendered an object that was at least pencil-adjacent, although it could have been mistaken for an AAA battery, a missile, or worse.\u00a0 Even if correctly identified, there was no denying my underlying lack of talent. Replicating this baby, never mind the even more artistically complex Bassett Hound, was an ever-receding fantasy.<\/p>\n

One day, the instructor said something that I interpreted as a breakup line, an it\u2019s-not-you-it\u2019s-me<\/i> kind of thing.\u00a0 She said she had read something of mine, and that she could see why I was drawn to these illustrations. Perhaps someone with more confidence might have heard this as encouragement to keep trying, but I interpreted her comment as a polite way of saying that I could sit here for another ten years and never acquire the ability to draw that pencil well.<\/p>\n

Epiphanies do not drop from the sky\u2014they are the product of random and subjective inputs filtered through what we want or need to hear.\u00a0 At that moment, I thought I heard the instructor telling me to return to my novel, to infuse it with all of the focus and energy I had been pouring into my sad pencil.<\/p>\n

The point is clear, elegant writing, of course, but equally important is to think and write visually.<\/p>\n

Which is precisely what I did. I went back to my manuscript and began again. This time I tried to render each scene as a vivid illustration. Schmaltzy and reductive as it sounds, if I couldn\u2019t paint with a brush, I would paint with words. For the first time in my writing life, I could actually see<\/i> my characters—the color of a dress, the precise shade of lipstick, the floorplan of a house, an animal\u2019s coat. I felt that spark return, my pilot light reignite.<\/p>\n

My adoration for Maira Kalman\u2019s work has continued to deepen to a somewhat embarrassing degree. Her illustrations are screensavers on my computers, inspiring me as I write. This summer, two of my daughters gave birth just a few weeks apart, and when I realized that the image on my computer\u2014the one that had belonged to my mother before she passed away\u2014was a Maira Kalman illustration depicting a cherry pie celebration of a summer birth\u2014I burst into tears. A full circle of life right there on my desk.<\/p>\n

A character in my newest novel is similarly obsessed; among the too many things she is always carrying around is Maira Kalman\u2019s remarkable Women Holding Things<\/i> book which, true to its name, features paintings, as well as self-described ruminations and digressions about women captured in the act of holding things: an irritated woman holding a giant cabbage, for example, or a woman holding a pink ukulele under a giant cherry tree, or a woman holding red balloons walking through the park.<\/p>\n

It is also about women holding things metaphorically. A cluster of women perched in Bertoia chairs outside of what is presumably a museum, holding opinions about modern art. Or, as Kalman writes in the opening pages, they are holding \u201cthe home and the family. And the children and the food. The friendships. The work.\u201d<\/p>\n

I recently began to teach writing again, and I continue to assign The Elements of Style<\/i>. I read passages aloud with such reverence that you might think I was quoting a sacred text or reciting from a cherished volume of poetry, although given the proliferation of AI editing tools that not only volunteer to correct grammar, but to rewrite entire chunks of prose, I\u2019m not sure that my students\u2014or anyone for that matter\u2014cares much about The Elements of Style<\/i> these days.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, I insist that they acquire a copy of the edition illustrated by Maira Kalman. The point is clear, elegant writing, of course, but equally important is to think and write visually. To let one\u2019s mind wander outside the box.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Word Salad<\/a>\u00a0by Susan Coll is available from Harper Focus.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I envy painters the freedom to convey thoughts without words. So much so that at one difficult stretch in my life I resolved to give up writing and pick up a paint brush. It wasn\u2019t that I supposed that by<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10245,"featured_media":277106,"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":[43096,43071,43069,6,43103,43092],"tags":[828,7938,112299,6929,18018,28067,112300,112298],"class_list":["post-277104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-and-photography","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-memoir","category-newsandculture","tag-art","tag-drawing","tag-harper-focus","tag-painting","tag-susan-coll","tag-the-elements-of-style","tag-thinking-outside-the-box","tag-word-salad"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a5q","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/right-sidebar-banner-images-4.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277104","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\/10245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277142,"date":"2026-09-23T05:07:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T09:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277142"},"modified":"2026-09-23T07:32:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T11:32:21","slug":"10-essential-ukrainian-reads-from-memoir-to-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/10-essential-ukrainian-reads-from-memoir-to-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Essential Ukrainian Reads, From Memoir to Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer, journalist and founder of Index: Institute for Documentation and Exchange. Her latest book Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War<\/a><\/em> will be published in the UK September 24th. She recently participated in Lviv Book Forum, September 11 to 13, in digital partnership with Hay Festival Global.<\/p>\n

In its fifth year of partnership with Hay Festival Global,\u00a0Lviv BookForum 2026<\/a> brought together writers from across the globe for three days of hybrid conversations exploring memory, displacement, grief and the enduring power of literature. Events from Lviv Book Forum are available to watch free from anywhere in the world on Hay Festival Anytime\u2014sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

This list below, of books written by Ukrainians in English or translated from Ukrainian into English, sheds light on what has long been overshadowed by empires seeking Ukraine\u2019s erasure: the country\u2019s rich literary tradition and its tradition of resistance. I have compiled this list when Russia targeted Ukrainian publishing infrastructure with missiles and destroyed more than 13 million books in a month\u2014a third of the country\u2019s annual print run. In this light, it is time to consider carefully why Ukrainian letters pose such a threat to the Russian regime.<\/p>\n

From books by canonical Ukrainian authors silenced by the Russian empire to works by contemporary writers who have enlisted in the armed forces, these texts are a guide to the country\u2019s past and present, its literary experiments and diverse cultural geographies. They range across genre and register\u2014fin-de-si\u00e8cle feminist mythmaking and poetry written in frontline trenches, testimony assembled from a war crimes investigator\u2019s unfinished manuscript and postmodern fiction that watches an empire disintegrate from within. Reading these books is a form of restoring justice for a nation which has so long fought for the right to narrate its stories on its own terms.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lesia Ukrainka, Cassandra<\/a><\/em> (HURI Books, 2024), translated by Nina Murray<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lesia Ukrainka is a turn-of-the-century writer who tackled key themes of western canon from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. Her choice to write in the Ukrainian language, persecuted by the Russian empire, and to speak for her nation when it was stateless has for decades denied Ukrainka representation in the world republic of letters. Nina Murray\u2019s fresh translation of her poetic drama Cassandra <\/i>helps us review the myth of Trojan war today\u2014from the perspective of a woman who was cursed to know the truth but never to be believed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War<\/i><\/a> (Harper Collins, 2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n

A novelist turned war crimes researcher, Victoria Amelina travelled her war-torn country photographing bomb craters in children’s playgrounds and recording survivors’ testimonies, standing alongside the women she called her sisters: lawyers, soldiers, journalists, museum workers fighting for justice. She did not survive to finish her telling of their stories\u2014killed by a Russian missile strike in 2023, two-thirds through the manuscript of Looking at Women Looking at War<\/i>. Assembled by her close friends and family, the book’s forced silences and empty pages become its own form of testimony: a verdict for Amelina\u2019s killers, and eternity for her voice. The book received the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Maik Yohansen, Dr. Leonardo\u2019s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with His Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta<\/i><\/a>, translated by Uilleam Blacker (HURI Books, 2026)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maik Yohansen belongs to Ukraine\u2019s so-called Executed Renaissance, the generation of culture makers purged in the early 1930s by the Soviet regime. In 1937, he was arrested and executed by the authorities alongside thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals. In his playful modernist novel about an Italian doctor and his \u201cfuture lover\u201d traveling through northeastern Ukraine, the landscape is the true protagonist while human characters are treated as modernist puppets. This \u201clandscape novel\u201d reads poignantly today when the lands it explores are daily mined, polluted with explosives and mutilated by Russia\u2019s military aggression.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Olena Stiazhkina, Cecil the Lion Had to Die<\/a> <\/em>(HURI Books, 2024), translated by Dominique Hoffman<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2014, Olena Stiazhkina, a writer and professor of history at the Donetsk National University, was forced to flee her city under Russian occupation. Donetsk is a focal point of her literary work and activism, for which she was awarded the Vasyl Stus Prize in 2026. Stiazhkina\u2019s east contains multitudes: her writing challenges the stereotypical (post-)Soviet image of the region as a lump of coal, a monochrome territory populated by lumpen proletariat. The author evokes its complex multi-ethnic history which, among others, had accommodated Greeks from Crimea and German settlers, attracted Belgian and Welsh capitalists, long before it became a flagship industrial site of the Soviet Union, which again entailed mass displacements and reshuffling of the population. Her Cecil the Lion Had to Die <\/i>is a novel about the war, about eastern Ukraine, and about history. It alternates between Russian and Ukrainian, reflecting the linguistic flexibility of eastern Ukrainian society\u2014that is nevertheless politically charged.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kateryna Zarembo, Ukrainian Sunrise: Stories of the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions from the Early 2000s<\/i><\/a>, trans. Tetiana Savchynska (ASP, 2024)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kateryna Zarembo’s book is a nonfiction companion to Olena Stiazhkina\u2019s novels. Zarembo too explores perhaps the most mythologised and demonised region in Ukraine, tracing how Soviet power sought to erase the Ukrainian and European past of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Against this engineered blank slate, Zarembo recovers the patriotic communities and writers, as well as football ultras who kept Ukrainian identity alive in the east of the country from the early 2000s to 2014. A mother of four, a PhD in Political Science, Zarembo finished the book, then joined the volunteer Hospitallers battalion as a combat medic, then enlisted in the Armed Forces\u2014one more Ukrainian intellectual who chose to defend the country with arms not words.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Yuri Andrukhovych, The Moscoviad<\/i><\/a>, trans. Vitaly Chernetsky<\/strong><\/p>\n

Originally written in 1993, The Moscoviad<\/i> offers a view of Moscow from a colonised subject rather than the usual Russian lens or fascinated outsider\u2019s gaze. The novel is set in 1991 and begins inside the literary dormitory of Moscow State University. It follows a Ukrainian poet haunted by KGB officers as the empire disintegrates around him\u2014a collapse enacted at every level: in the plot, in the novel’s fragmented form, and in language itself, as Ukrainian, Russian, German, and obscenity intermingle. Postmodern, postcolonial, and darkly humorous, it captures the Soviet Union\u2019s last gasp from the vantage of one of the peoples it had colonised.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Serhiy Zhadan, Voroshilovgrad<\/i> <\/a>(Deep Vellum, 2016), translated by Isaac Wheeler and Reilly Costigan-Humes\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad<\/i> (2010) is set in a city that no longer exists\u2014renamed four times in the twentieth century, yet alive in the intimate memories of its characters. The novel\u2019s hero Herman, an uprooted loser of the post-Soviet generation, is forced home to piece together a minefield of traumatic memory and take responsibility for his land and community. Though written years before the war, the novel reads as prophetic: it brims with violence, military outfits, and men defending their territory against invaders. Immersed in the myths and light of the eastern steppe, it marks the shift of Ukraine’s centre of gravity eastward, crystallising a new identity on the frontier. Since 2014, Luhansk\/Voroshilovgrad has been occupied by Russia.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Artem Chapeye, Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns<\/i><\/a>, trans. Zenia Tompkins\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Artem Chapeye, a self-described pacifist and prominent male feminist, enlisted the day after 24 February 2022. Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns<\/i> is his memoir and document of the first three years of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Throughout, Russia and the fear, grief, and guilt it brings is named simply \u201cgloom,\u201d encompassing both the army and the psychological toll it inflicts. Chapeye\u2019s inquiry doesn\u2019t shy away from the contradictions experienced by a progressive left-wing intellectual forced to defend his society and values with arms.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Artur Dron, We Were Here<\/i><\/a> (Jantar, 2024), translated by Yuliya Musakovska<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ukrainian literature has a powerful poetic tradition. One of the reasons is that short form, including poetry, is less dependent on cultural infrastructure and material conditions: unlike a novel, a poem can be written in a trench, in a labour camp, or memorised and passed in whispers between the communities of resistance to the imperial power. The collection We Were Here<\/i> was written largely on the frontline, where the twenty-four-year-old poet Artur Dron has served since 2022. Illustrated with children’s drawings sent to soldiers\u2014which, Dron writes, gave him and his fellow fighters the strength to keep going\u2014the collection asks why poetry matters in wartime, when it can protect no one and bring no one back. Its answer is the book itself: masterfully translated into English by the bilingual poet Yuliya Musakovska, it testifies, as one poem puts it, that Ukrainian literature \u2018now contains more\u2019 of the silence between words than the words.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine<\/i><\/a> (2021)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This book by perhaps the most prominent and prolific historian of Ukraine is an essential, intellectually engaging and elegantly written guide through Ukraine’s complex past and its position at the crossroads of history. Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Black Sea, Ukraine has repeatedly served as the strategic gateway empires fought to control\u2014Roman and Ottoman, Third Reich and Soviet. Plokhy tells its history through the figures who tried to claim or resist it, from Vikings and Cossacks to the architects of modern Ukrainian national identity.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

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

Dr Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer, journalist and founder of Index: Institute for Documentation and Exchange. Her latest book \u2018<\/em>Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War<\/a>\u2019 will be published in UK on 24 September 2026. She recently participated in Lviv Book Forum, 11-13 September 2026, in digital partnership with Hay Festival Global. <\/em><\/p>\n

In its fifth year of partnership with Hay Festival Global,\u00a0Lviv BookForum 2026 brought together writers from across the globe for three days of hybrid conversations exploring memory, displacement, grief and the enduring power of literature. Events from Lviv Book Forum are available to watch free from anywhere in the world on Hay Festival Anytime – sign up\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Dr. Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer, journalist and founder of Index: Institute for Documentation and Exchange. Her latest book Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War will be published in the UK September 24th. She recently participated in Lviv<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32242,"featured_media":277174,"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":[43071,43069,11,43092,43095,43135],"tags":[112323,76375,96832,67693,112321,105597,105592,105600,105601,105598,112320,107292,112322,34105,67731,112315,112318,112319,76381,112316,105593,112317],"class_list":["post-277142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-fullwidth-slider","category-newsandculture","category-politics","category-readinglists","tag-apocalypse-baroque-tales-from-ukraine-at-war","tag-artem-chapeye","tag-artur-dron","tag-cassandra","tag-cecil-the-lion-had-to-die","tag-dr-leonardos-journey-to-sloboda-switzerland-with-his-future-lover-the-beautiful-alcesta","tag-kateryna-zarembo","tag-lesia-ukrainka","tag-looking-at-women-looking-at-war","tag-maik-yohansen","tag-olena-stiazhkina","tag-ordinary-people-dont-carry-machine-guns","tag-sasha-dovzhyk","tag-serhii-plokhy","tag-serhiy-zhadan","tag-the-gates-of-europe-a-history-of-ukraine","tag-the-moscoviad","tag-ukrainian-sunrise-stories-of-the-donetsk-and-luhansk-regions-from-the-early-2000s","tag-victoria-amelina","tag-voroshilovgrad","tag-we-were-here","tag-yuri-andrukhovych"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a62","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ukranian-reading-list.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277142","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\/32242"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277233,"date":"2026-09-23T05:07:06","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T09:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277233"},"modified":"2026-09-23T10:25:35","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T14:25:35","slug":"in-praise-of-lost-time-on-a-poetics-that-subverts-linear-chronology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/in-praise-of-lost-time-on-a-poetics-that-subverts-linear-chronology\/","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of Lost Time: On a Poetics That Subverts Linear Chronology"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this year\u2019s heteropessimist horror movie Obsession, <\/i>boyfriend Bear pleads with his possessed girlfriend Nikki, \u201cStop moving so weird!\u201d It\u2019s a funny, fourth-wall-tapping wink to the audience, noting out loud the film clich\u00e9 whereby a sense of the demonic (particularly the female demonic) is conveyed by making a character move at a frame rate all her own\u2014a skittering, insect-like effect that makes limbs appear both more mechanical and more repugnant than they otherwise would.<\/p>\n

The original term for this special effect was \u201cundercranking,\u201d referring to the manual crank that controlled the frame rate of early movie cameras. Slowing down the number of frames recording per second will make an action appear faster and jerkier when played back at normal speed. The Dadaists used this gleefully and compulsively (see Ren\u00e9 Clair and Francis Picabia\u2019s wacky Entr\u2019Acte<\/i>); so, famously, did Hideo Nakata in Y2K hit The Ring <\/i>and countless imitators.<\/p>\n

I think we are inexorably repulsed and fascinated by natural motion made unnatural through subtle changes of speed and timing. The difference between one frame rate and another can be the difference between wanting to ogle a voluptuous demon and wanting to squish her like a bug. So, too, with \u201cunnatural\u201d alterations of natural sound: I remember the prickly feeling of being a teenager on my bedroom carpet, so spooked by the final vocal loop at the end of The Beatles\u2019 \u201cA Day in the Life\u201d that I didn\u2019t dare move for fear that some unspeakable horror would reach out of the Sixties and throttle me. And I remember, in that same summer, on that same carpet, poring endlessly over the garbled hook in Missy Elliott\u2019s \u201cWork It\u201d: the internet being less comprehensive than it is now, it took serious self-study to convince myself that she was not only putting her thing down and flipping it, but yes, in fact, reversing<\/i> it. The line between dread and pleasure within the realm of the temporally-uncanny is a fine one.<\/p>\n

There are many ways to become obsessed with life\u2019s frame rate, with the varying speed of an action and the way that time can be sliced or spun in the presentation.<\/p>\n

The earliest experiments with the moving image and with recorded sound knew this; so too have any number of great poets, perhaps particularly those whose lives put them in special touch with cameras, clocks, and calendars. Parent-poets, poets writing on lunchbreak from their punch-clock jobs, poet-filmmakers and poet-photographers, poets who\u2019ve watched the tracing of a fetal heart rate monitor or a cardiac defibrillator\u2014there are many ways to become obsessed with life\u2019s frame rate, with the varying speed of an action and the way that time can be sliced or spun in the presentation.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I am writing this essay to explain myself. To explain a stylistic choice I fumbled for with the un-grace of a salmon bucking its way up a waterfall, not quite knowing why. That is, I first wrote a chronological, even diaristic book\u2014an account, in poems, of my life during pregnancy and roughly the first year of parenthood\u2014but found that it only made sense to me, and perhaps became art, when in revision I rearranged the manuscript backwards. Questions and progressions that had seemed so universal to the point of being scarcely worth articulating (should I have a child? am I pregnant? am I visibly pregnant? what is this slither moving inside me? I am hurting, now, and a baby is coming out<\/i>) could be shocked into defamiliarization through pressing \u201crewind\u201d or \u201cpause,\u201d altering frame rates, shaking up my sense of the \u201cnext.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of being causality\u2019s passenger\u2014first X happened, then I felt Y way about it<\/i>\u2014I could unhinge more readily from explication. I could embellish, I could remix, I could make my fish tale bigger and bigger if I chose, until the thing I\u2019d caught (a baby? or had it caught me?) would be, in the retelling, humongous enough to have swallowed the whole hook, line, and sinker of the lexicon I knew.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I see a version of this impulse in Frank O\u2019Hara\u2019s famous Lunch Poems, <\/i>like the one written upon Jackson Pollock\u2019s death which begins,<\/p>\n

It\u2019s my lunch hour, so I go
\nfor a walk among the hum-colored
\ncabs. (\u201cA Step Away From Them\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nothing happens quite in its normal order and speed. There are glistening construction workers and disembodied skirts blowing upwards from the convected wind of subway grates and cabs again, a heat-wave dream loop. Suddenly he\u2019s in Times Square. (He started, biographically speaking, north and east at the MoMA.) Figures loom in and out of view. \u201cI look \/ at bargains in wristwatches.\u201d Then<\/p>\n

…Everything
\nsuddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
\na Thursday.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We can imagine a dozen reasons why both O\u2019Hara the poet and his first-person alter-ego speaker are so chronologically jumbled and jumpy. It\u2019s a way of representing the city, or being worked over by the city\u2019s own loony temporality. It\u2019s the kind of dissociative choppiness one feels when the hand of death brushes near. (O\u2019Hara and Pollock weren\u2019t friends, but ran in the same circles, and O\u2019Hara vocally admired Pollock\u2019s painting, while frightened by his aggressive homophobia.) It\u2019s an aesthetic debt to his modernist literary forebears. And also, there\u2019s the larger fact that O\u2019Hara the poet is, truly, on the clock. Lunch hour has its beginning and its ending, and somehow the whole teeming chaos of midcentury Midtown must be crammed within it, before the hour slams shut. Under such pressure, time flickers, flashes out, and transforms like a lab-grown diamond.<\/p>\n

I tell my students\u2014the MFA ones who work in wine shops, bookstores, publicity, marketing, nannying; the MD ones in their long apprenticeship at clinics and hospitals\u2014that having a job outside of writing is an incomparable boon to their creative work. I say this and believe it, and not only because believing that one\u2019s life is essentially lucky seems to me to be one of the tricks to happiness. I say it not in the sense of the well-known Flaubertian dictum (\u201cbe regular and orderly in your life,\u201d etc.) that bourgeois strictures will lead to liberation in the creative work. I say it because having an intimate, almost sensual relationship to the clock is <\/i>the derangement. The way that you caress, slap, or kick the intransigence of adamantine time is what we call, on the micro level, your meter. On the macro level, it\u2019s your voice, your poetics.<\/p>\n

In 1995, Fanny Howe published the quiet minor masterpiece O\u2019Clock <\/i>with the now-defunct, almost-too-perfectly-named press Reality Street Editions. The book\u2019s conceit is startlingly simple: short poems, nearly all under a page, most with a time stamp for a title. Each poem feels like the blinding-bright perception of one sublime minute. Their endings sometimes rail or exult at time\u2019s sprint. (\u201cGet up, girl. \/ A sun is running the world\u201d ends \u201c5:47.\u201d) Other times, they stretch for new ways to wriggle out of metered life\u2019s constraints:<\/p>\n

…I was streets ahead of love in energy and size
\nbut it impressed me with its legalism:
\nthere was always enough for everyone
\ndepending on the way
\neach measured pleasure. (from \u201c15:47\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Howe\u2019s speaker is \u201cimpressed\u201d (but still somewhat skeptical, I think) by the idea that sufficiency is mathematically flexible. Change out my hourglass or yardstick and you change what I call \u201cenough.\u201d Spring forward, fall back: measure is always a bit of a fantasy, a matter of convention. And yet the convention frames the real.<\/p>\n

Choose a pace and you\u2019ve chosen a good deal of your voice, your intention. Tell me your tempo and I\u2019ll tell you some part of who you are.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Many years ago I was in an abbey looking at a statue of St. Benedict, with his Latin motto on the pedestal: Ora et Labora<\/i>. Labor I could figure out. I knew enough Italian to translate ora<\/i> to mean either \u201cnow\u201d or \u201cthe hour.\u201d I knew enough French to think of the word orage<\/i>, a storm. So was this saint advising people to think about work and time, or to work tempestuously, or possibly both? I realized later that ora<\/i> meant \u201cpray,\u201d but some part of me feels that a generative mistranslation is never quite wrong. Maybe I wanted this saint to tell me that my mission in poetry was to keep time (that predictable thing) and watch for lightning (that unpredictable thing), trying, perhaps hopelessly, to bend the former and to manufacture the latter. To rewild the even-keeled and stately minute, and to domesticate the electric wild.<\/p>\n

This dual imperative, to tame time and to rewild it, reminds me of the poet Paul Val\u00e9ry\u2019s description of how a poem gets started (which I first discovered in Mary Ruefle\u2019s essay \u201cOn Beginnings,\u201d and again in Matthew Zapruder\u2019s Story of a Poem, <\/i>both brilliant texts in their own right). \u201cA fine line of poetry,\u201d Val\u00e9ry says, \u201cis a fruit plucked from the tree. But which tree? This leads to the curious point of trying to\u00a0make<\/i>\u00a0the tree whose fruit would be this fruit.\u201d This is a fairly psychedelic, time-tripping sense of what cultivation is: that you are creating a preparation for something that has already happened. You are engaged in paradox from the start: begin at the end, then hit rewind. Flip it and reverse it.<\/p>\n

Life does present itself to us at times as a series of already-finished fruits, and finding their predating source becomes the occupying riddle and investigation. This is daily clear to parents and parent-poets, who live in the funhouse-mirror world in cause-and-effect refract not just across their own bodies but over the lives of those closest to them. I think of Brenda Shaughnessy\u2019s gorgeous, aching collection Our Andromeda, <\/i>parts of which imagine forking pathways of time if a series of misfortunes, choices, and medical inattentions had not attended her son\u2019s birth and disabled him.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll get the chance to walk<\/p>\n

without pain, as if such a thing
\nwere a matter of choosing a song….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Choosing a song: possibly among the smallest and most pleasant autonomies. No coincidence, though, that of all life\u2019s minor pleasures, it\u2019s a liberty of rate<\/i>\u2014do you want something that\u2019ll hop out at you, or that will disclose itself in painstaking degrees? In common parlance, when someone puts on a \u201cslow song\u201d or proposes a \u201cslow dance,\u201d we know what they\u2019re after: an intimacy that exceeds what could be achieved without that soundtrack. Choose a pace and you\u2019ve chosen a good deal of your voice, your intention. Tell me your tempo and I\u2019ll tell you some part of who you are.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In his essay Species of Spaces, <\/i>Georges Perec notes that in French agricultural parlance, a journal <\/i>means the amount of land a farmer can cultivate in a single day. You know you\u2019ve done your journal if the day is over and you worked straight through it. Over time you get to know how big your particular journal is, how far out you will go, how wide. One of the many things that can make a poem different than a Perequian journal <\/i>is that the poet\u2014especially a time-flipping poet, fond of the undercrank, the overcrank, the remix\u2014cannot know, would never want to know, how big the piece of work is, nor its rate.<\/p>\n

The belief that the poem underway has no fixed or preset space and speed, and that its working velocity can be distorted, twisted, and toyed, is a crucial corollary to the belief that aesthetic play is possible, even in a world that contains punch-clocks and metronomes, calendars and stopwatches and theodolites and pulse monitors. There is no set journal, no best o\u2019clock, and the \u201cstep away from them\u201d we take happens at the cadence befitting each idiosyncratic foot. What did I want to say? Let me find it at the end of my speaking. What will I write next? Let me find it in some already accomplished minute, flung way out ahead of me into the past I am facing like a hand-cranked camera or an electric sensor of the shockable heart.<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Decadent Movement<\/a> by Laura Kolbe is available from University of Pittsburgh Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this year\u2019s heteropessimist horror movie Obsession, boyfriend Bear pleads with his possessed girlfriend Nikki, \u201cStop moving so weird!\u201d It\u2019s a funny, fourth-wall-tapping wink to the audience, noting out loud the film clich\u00e9 whereby a sense of the demonic (particularly<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32178,"featured_media":277240,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6],"tags":[16860,1180,24365,212,112265,990,4328],"class_list":["post-277233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","tag-laura-kolbe","tag-motherhood","tag-poetics","tag-poetry","tag-the-decadent-movement","tag-time","tag-university-of-pittsburgh-press","story-type-on-poetry"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a7v","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/clocks.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277233","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\/32178"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276943,"date":"2026-09-23T04:29:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T08:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276943"},"modified":"2026-09-21T21:29:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T01:29:42","slug":"avalon-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/avalon-rise\/","title":{"rendered":"Avalon, Rise"},"content":{"rendered":"

The American Academy of Pediatrics could not explain why Martin, at seven years old, rolled around on the living room floor flapping his arms and cawing, while Teddy, who was not yet five, waited placidly on the front walk. Teddy rolled the empty wagon back and forth and sucked his thumb. Teddy was Emma\u2019s defenseless plum baby who still nursed, who worshipped her weary body the way no man ever had. Martin, her firstborn, rose each morning with novel ways of turning Emma into some\u00adone she hated. Martin refused to get in the wagon until he found his troll doll with the hot pink hair and the hot pink shirt that read TOTALLY RAD, and after ten minutes of him flapping and cawing and not even looking for the troll, Emma wanted badly to hit him. Instead, she leaned down until her nose was almost touching his and she yelled into his face, If you don\u2019t stop that I swear to God I will throw all your toys in the trash and I mean every single one do you hear me.<\/p>\n

For some reason that didn\u2019t make Martin stop. He only cawed louder right back at her, eye to eye, like she was the enemy and he the proud and defiant baby freedom fighter. He was not a baby. He was a big kid, which she screamed at him. She collected every toy she could find and dropped them into the can under her mother\u2019s kitchen sink, where of all places she found the totally rad troll doll, so Martin was all right again, which meant she could be all right again, and both boys climbed into the wagon. Martin had his troll and Teddy had his plastic dragon and Emma had made it all morning without hitting anyone. She had a clogged milk duct in her right breast, which had lately grown into an enormous veiny ball of cement. Nevertheless, she persisted in pulling her kids in the wagon all the way to the park.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you were fghting with Martin, two birds stopped singing,\u201d Teddy said, sailing his dragon over his head. The pain in Emma\u2019s breast made her dizzy. She wanted to go home. She hadn\u2019t wanted to go to the park in the frst place. She was here because of guilt. She was here because she was probably get\u00adting divorced. She was here because she was living temporarily in her mother\u2019s house. She was here because the central or\u00adganizing committee of Nation Awake, whose website said that its mission was to build identity, support community, and win local power, had chosen the town of Avalon, Ohio, for its frst annual White Family Picnic.<\/p>\n

At dinner the night before, Emma\u2019s mother had read the cov\u00aderage aloud from her phone. Nation Awake, as it turned out, had a local campus chapter right here in Avalon. It had grown from ten to thirty members in the past year alone, according to a student spokesperson, who, oppressed by endemic cul\u00adtural Marxism at the university, wished to remain anonymous. In fact, membership in white nationalist groups was up by at least ffty percent nationally, and growing. Nation Awake had invited organizations from Kentucky and West Virginia, from Pennsylvania and Maryland and Michigan. They were expect\u00ading picnickers in the hundreds.<\/p>\n

Why Avalon? Emma said. I\u2019d think we\u2019re too small to be noticed.<\/p>\n

Eloise held up her hand and kept reading. Appalachia is an obvious choice, the spokesperson said. The region is over\u00adwhelmingly European. Avalon, for example, has a population of twenty-four thousand. Twenty-two thousand of those people are white. We have been sneered at, made to feel bad about our\u00adselves in the name of diversity. But our pure Scots-Irish ancestry is a source of pride, not shame. Like the Avalon of legend, we will rise to defend the land and the people from darkness.<\/p>\n

Eloise put down her phone. Can you imagine, she said. In this year of our Lord 2017. Shameless. After what happened in Charlottesville this summer. And the media, my God. So voyeuristic and breathless.<\/p>\n

In Emma\u2019s opinion, Eloise sounded rather breathless her\u00adself. Emma rubbed her breast irritably.<\/p>\n

What happened in Charlottesville? Martin asked. Nothing, Emma said.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the Avalon of legend? asked Martin.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like Legend of the Star Dragon<\/em>, Teddy said, which was one of his audiobooks.<\/p>\n

No, it\u2019s not, Emma said.<\/p>\n

The counterprotest is at one p.m., Eloise said. We\u2019re trying to get numbers, but the mayor advised businesses to close and people to stay home.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s stay home, Emma said.<\/p>\n

Nonsense, Eloise said. White families need to say no. Which was how Emma knew she was being told to bring the kids.<\/p>\n

At the park, Emma navigated the side of the police barricade designated for people who were against the White Family Pic\u00adnic. The other side had no baskets, no blankets, no hot dogs, no ants, and no white families. Only a few League of the South guys in embarrassing breeches and suspenders. On Emma\u2019s side, the turnout was also sparse. She found her mother and her aunt Dev at the fountain handing out placards that read NO WHITE SUPREMACISTS ALLOWED. Emma parked the wagon next to them and lowered herself onto the steps. Her breast was a pulsing alien egg sac about to hatch. \u201cTeddy, I need you to nurse,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cTeddy doesn\u2019t want to nurse from your disgusting monster boob,\u201d Martin said and stuck his troll doll in his mouth.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as we get home you\u2019re getting a spanking,\u201d Emma said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou spank him too much,\u201d Eloise said.<\/p>\n

How much was too much? Once already this week. Twice the week before. The American Academy of Pediatrics was un\u00adequivocal on the matter. Not only was corporal punishment wrong, it also didn\u2019t work. Emma had scrolled through the whole useless statement. Of course it was wrong. Of course it didn\u2019t work. Yet, again and again, it was what she did. Emma loved Martin helplessly. Yet, just as helplessly, she wanted to hit him. The American Academy of Pediatrics had very little to say about what Emma typed into the search bar on sleepless nights. Violence. Instinct. Desire.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou spanked me,\u201d Emma said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never did,\u201d Eloise said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou hit me with a hairbrush,\u201d Emma said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a different time,\u201d Eloise said. \u201cBesides, reflexive vio\u00adlence is completely different from systemic violence.\u201d She gave a placard to a Happy Hills attendant whose hair was teased into a cotton candy bouffant.<\/p>\n

\u201cI still don\u2019t know what you mean when you say that,\u201d Emma said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would never have told you that later I was going to spank you,\u201d Eloise said. \u201cThat\u2019s cruel. It creates a system of pain, fear, and punishment. I simply physically expressed my natural feel\u00adings in the moment. No premeditation. No method. When it was over it was over. It was honest. Emotional.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could try the Discipline Caf\u00e9,\u201d Dev said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Discipline Caf\u00e9?\u201d Emma asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s at Mother Ginger\u2019s,\u201d Dev said. \u201cThe new childcare co\u00adoperative. You know, where the uncooperative hardware store used to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRight,\u201d Emma said, and didn\u2019t explain, even to herself, why she hadn\u2019t been there yet. If Dev was not Emma\u2019s actual aunt, there was no better word to describe her. Gadabout. Cool cus\u00adtomer. Eloise\u2019s best friend for nearly forty years. She wore her signature bleach-stained black T-shirt with a pocket for her chewing gum. She wore her signature mint-green Keds. She tossed Dum-Dums to Martin and Teddy, who nearly overturned the wagon diving for them.<\/p>\n

Eloise held up a placard. \u201cDid you get a look at these yet?\u201d she asked. \u201cWoody letterpressed them with the Multigraph I gave him. Impressive, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWoody didn\u2019t show up, huh?\u201d asked Emma.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s contributing in his own distinctive way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s using,\u201d Emma said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour brother needs your support, not your judgment,\u201d Elo\u00adise said. She offered the placard. \u201cBring one of these to Mother Ginger\u2019s when you go.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI never said I was going.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want them up in all the local businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, Mom, I don\u2019t know,\u201d Emma said. She put her hands in her pockets so she wouldn\u2019t have to take it.<\/p>\n

Her mother looked at Emma the way she\u2019d been looking at her since she was a baby, wondering if she would change. \u201cListen,\u201d she said. \u201cThat thing with the hairbrush\u2014hitting or whatever you called it\u2014I would never do that now. People change. At the molecular level, I\u2019m a completely different per\u00adson. That\u2019s scientifc.\u201d She slipped the placard into Emma\u2019s tote. Emma\u2019s breast punctuated into a sharp needle. She stretched out the collar of her T-shirt and looked down to see that a white scab had formed on her nipple. The American Academy of Pe\u00addiatrics had very little to say about breastfeeding your child beyond two years of age, but Teddy didn\u2019t want to stop and Emma didn\u2019t know how to stop him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m hungry,\u201d Martin said in his pterodactyl voice, per\u00adfectly pitched to make Emma want to escape her body. \u201cAnd Teddy\u2019s hungry too. We\u2019re both hungry.\u201d He began to kap his arms. \u201cHungry hungry hungry hungry hungry hungry hungry hungry.\u201d The American Academy of Pediatrics had very little to say about maternal instinct. Emma used to think it was a myth. Now she knew it was real. Before Martin, she\u2019d never felt that ache in her arm, that overpowering urge to swing out and make resounding contact. Now she couldn\u2019t ignore it.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

From <\/em>Avalon, Rise:<\/a>\u00a0A Novel. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Madeline ffitch. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The American Academy of Pediatrics could not explain why Martin, at seven years old, rolled around on the living room floor flapping his arms and cawing, while Teddy, who was not yet five, waited placidly on the front walk. Teddy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":276944,"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":[112257,6547,46501],"class_list":["post-276943","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-avalon-rise","tag-farrar-straus-and-giroux","tag-madeline-ffitch","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a2P","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/avalon-rise-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276943","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=276943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277376,"date":"2026-09-22T15:07:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T19:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277376"},"modified":"2026-09-22T15:07:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T19:07:00","slug":"heres-the-shortlist-for-the-2026-booker-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/heres-the-shortlist-for-the-2026-booker-prize\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s the shortlist for the 2026 Booker Prize."},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, the Booker Prize Foundation announced the six books on the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist, whittled down from the “Booker’s Dozen” announced in July<\/a>. The Booker is the UK\u2019s most prestigious literary prize, which celebrates longform fiction written in English and published in the UK and\/or Ireland (this year, between October 2025 and September 2026).\u202f\u202fEach of the below shortlisted authors will receive \u00a32,500; the winner will take home \u00a350,000, along with plenty of book sales and bragging rights.<\/p>\n

“We did not start out with a checklist of the\u202fdifferent types\u202fof\u202fbook\u202fwe wanted to see represented in the final six,\u202for the kinds of authors or subject matter,” said Mary Beard, Chair of the Booker Prize 2026 judges, in the announcement.<\/p>\n

But when we looked at the\u202flineup\u202fof our shortlist, neatly propped up against one another, almost glowing, we were happy that we had\u202fshowcased\u202fmany of the strengths of contemporary English language fiction. These novels range from the hilarious to the discomfiting, from the frighteningly strange to the alarmingly domestic, from the powerfully shocking to the intriguingly understated. In them, we meet characters from different\u202fcountries\u202fand different centuries, created by authors\u202f40 years\u202fapart,\u202fnew talent and well-known favourites.<\/p>\n

Here’s the shortlist:<\/p>\n

M. John Harrison, The End of Everything<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Marlon James, The Disappearers<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Luke Kennard, Black Bag<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Rebecca Perry, May We Feed the King<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say\u00a0<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Douglas Stuart, John of John<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

This year’s judges are Mary Beard (Chair),\u202fRaymond Antrobus, Jarvis Cocker,\u202fRebecca Liu, and Patricia Lockwood. The winner will be announced in a ceremony on November 9.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, the Booker Prize Foundation announced the six books on the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist, whittled down from the “Booker’s Dozen” announced in July. The Booker is the UK\u2019s most prestigious literary prize, which celebrates longform fiction written in English<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":277377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43201,43092,43646],"tags":[21196,5268],"class_list":["post-277376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-newsandculture","category-the-hub","tag-booker-prize","tag-shortlist"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a9O","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/BP2026_Shorlist_Group_30.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277376","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=277376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277358,"date":"2026-09-22T11:09:56","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T15:09:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277358"},"modified":"2026-09-22T11:09:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T15:09:56","slug":"singapore-is-paying-its-citizens-to-read-but-will-it-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/singapore-is-paying-its-citizens-to-read-but-will-it-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Singapore is paying its citizens to read. (But will it work?<\/em>)"},"content":{"rendered":"

On September 6, Singapore started paying its citizens to read.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

As The Guardian<\/em> reported<\/a>, this scheme represents the city-state’s latest attempts to quash doomscrolling and protect children from the harms of social media. The National Library Board (NLB)\u2014progenitor of the plan\u2014hopes its “gamification strategy…will improve concentration, critical thinking and the imagination of Singaporeans.” And, of course, fire up the national book club.<\/p>\n

The ReadSG<\/a> pilot program is currently slated to run for five years. Here’s how the plan works, according to The Guardian\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0Mark Saunokonoko<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Under the scheme, readers accrue points that can be redeemed for a few cents. People will have to log 50 daily reading sessions on a government website to earn S$1 (80c). A session of 15 minutes or more is rewarded with 20 virtual coins, with 1,000 coins needed for a dollar payment. One reading session is allowed daily.<\/p>\n

Not exactly Warbucks numbers, but you see the point.<\/p>\n

Singapore has previously incentivized healthy eating and exercise<\/a>, to evident success. NLB leaders have already compared this program to the widely successful 10,000 step challenge, which leapt across the pond from Japan to a Fitbit near you several years back.<\/p>\n

But will this pennies-for-pages plan result in a populace that genuinely likes<\/em> to read? Social scientists are split on the question<\/a>. Evidence suggests that a short-term reward system\u2014especially one that doesn’t pay\u00a0meaningfully<\/em>\u2014is unlikely to effect a sticky habit.<\/p>\n

But if that reward mimics the dopamine effect so many of us get from scrolling, it is possible that the reading scheme will lead to less social media. A net good.<\/p>\n

Katy Milkman, a professor at Penn’s Wharton business school, told The Guardian<\/em><\/a> that the program might be especially useful for delinquent or lapsed readers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf people are already intrinsically motivated to read,” Milkman said, “this may be enough to tip them over the edge to read a bit more.” If ye olde Goodreads list mania is anything to go by, this seems a safe bet.<\/p>\n

And if both personal pocket money and the sense of a job well done fail to motivate, the NLB has one more appeal: to altruism. A parallel program allows readers to apply their session-raised money to selected charities.<\/p>\n

Singapore aims to attract 150,000 users to the challenge by September 2027. Citizens? Your stacks want you<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On September 6, Singapore started paying its citizens to read.\u00a0 As The Guardian reported, this scheme represents the city-state’s latest attempts to quash doomscrolling and protect children from the harms of social media. The National Library Board (NLB)\u2014progenitor of the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17066,"featured_media":277362,"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":[43201,43105,43109,43092,43445,43646,43104],"tags":[112391,95774,108824,6651,112392,168,16847],"class_list":["post-277358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-bookstores-and-libraries","category-events","category-newsandculture","category-technology","category-the-hub","category-travel","tag-challenge","tag-doomscrolling","tag-gamified-reading","tag-literacy","tag-national-library-board","tag-reading","tag-singapore"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a9w","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Untitled-design-42.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277358","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=277358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277303,"date":"2026-09-22T06:30:46","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T10:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277303"},"modified":"2026-09-21T16:50:41","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T20:50:41","slug":"lit-hub-daily-september-22-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-september-22-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: September 22, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":" TODAY: In\u00a01922, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age<\/i> is published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York. <\/span>\n