I didn\u2019t fall in love with Joan the way you’re thinking, or maybe it\u2019s exactly the way you’re thinking. I fell the way you fall for someone who shows you, without meaning to, what you’ve been missing for decades.<\/p>\n
I began to bring her other books. I presented Roman Civilization<\/em>, Volumes I & II and my annotated Fagles and Fitzgerald Odysseys<\/em>: the spines cracked and pages dog-eared by some younger version of myself who had once cared enough to underline, write in the margins, highlight. I brought them like offerings. I didn’t know yet that’s what they were.<\/p>\n Joan is the mother of a dear friend. She is nearing the end of her days\u2014her words, not mine\u2014and she had decided to spend whatever time she had left trying to understand where everything came from. She had lived through the Beat poets, postmodernism, the entire arc of twentieth-century literature. She chose instead to go backward.<\/p>\n Joan spends four to five hours every day reading Homer and Virgil and Sophocles in their original languages. I asked her why. Why not something alive and evolving? Clutching the books, she said flatly: “Everything comes from this. Western civilization, our ideas about beauty and morality and what it means to be human. It all starts here.” She said it the way you state something obvious with no need for performance or persuasion, only with certainty arrived at through years of sitting with difficult, ancient things.<\/p>\n What would it feel like to love something the way Joan loves Ancient Greek and Latin poetry? To wake up with that hunger. To have your voice lift like that when you try to explain what moves you.<\/p>\n Her hands, reddened and veiny, moved through the pages as she spoke. The hands of someone who has spent years reading and writing, who knew how to rotate a pencil to keep it sharp, and how to flip it to erase. She wore an oversized scoop-necked blouse, sleeves billowing when she gestured. Her earlobes long-weighted by gold bangled earrings that swayed as she talked.<\/p>\n When she described Agamemnon<\/em>, pausing to find the right phrase, her face transformed into something younger, incandescent. “Very difficult,” she said. “But amazing poetry.” Later, I would have to Google Aeschylus, the playwright who wrote it. Joan spoke about him like an old friend. She described the characters\u2014Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Iphigenia\u2014the way you speak about people you know, people whose choices and suffering matter to you. These weren’t just stories.<\/p>\n She mentioned, almost apologetically, that she leads two reading groups, as if it were excessive, though her posture straightened as she went on. One has been working through The Aeneid<\/em> for three years. The other is translating Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis<\/em> in Ancient Greek, learning along the way.<\/p>\n “It all connects,” she said. “The hymn tells how Aphrodite seduced the mortal Anchises and became pregnant with Aeneas, and we’re reading about Aeneas in The Aeneid<\/em>! Then in Iphigenia<\/em> we see young Clytemnestra, before she becomes the woman who murders Agamemnon.\u201d All of it, she went on, part of the vast web these ancient writers wove together.<\/p>\n She explained how Emperor Augustus, rising to power after Julius Caesar\u2019s assassination, commissioned Virgil to create a Roman epic connecting Rome’s origins to the defeated but magnificent Trojans. She said commissioned<\/em> with weight, as if she could feel the pressure on Virgil creating art under imperial patronage.<\/p>\n “Augustus wanted propaganda,” she said, leaning forward, her eyes locked on mine. “Virgil gave him art.”<\/p>\n “At this rate, we’ll finish The Aeneid<\/em> eventually.” She smiled. “And then maybe we’ll read it again.”<\/p>\n I asked why she didn’t write about what she was discovering, share her insights with a broader audience. She looked genuinely surprised, as if the question had never occurred to her.<\/p>\n “Oh, I’m not a scholar. I’m just a student. I’m learning for the wonder of it. It’s like touching something sacred.”<\/p>\n She continued to slowly move through the pages, her fingers finding annotations penned by that younger version of myself that felt very far away. And further back than that\u2014the child my mother still describes, devouring books one after another, genre irrelevant. I hadn’t thought about either of those boys in years.<\/p>\n Reading through my annotated books, she made appreciative sounds as she turned the pages, studied the Post-its, traced the underlines with her fingers. She held each book the way I had brought them to her. Like something worth holding.<\/p>\n Watching her face as she talked, following her hands as they moved in the air, her eyes glassy when she tried to describe to me what moved her, I felt something. Not romantic, not familial, but the love you feel for someone who shows you what’s possible. Someone who sits on your couch and transforms the space around her just by speaking about her passion. Someone generous enough to invite anyone in who wants to witness it alongside her. I didn’t want the conversation to end. I wanted to stay there with her.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Around us, the abundance of Thanksgiving filled every room. Endless football, someone raving about artichoke dip, young parents discussing nap schedules. Normal, beautiful, purposeful noise. And Joan, still, in the middle of all of it, inside her small halo of wonder.<\/p>\n Would I like the Zoom link for Thursday nights? Would I like her weekly letters to the Latin group? Did I want to join? Initially, I said yes to everything. I walked away from that couch knowing something had shifted. I just didn’t know yet whether I was brave enough to let it.<\/p>\n An email arrived a few days later. She had been reflecting on our conversation, elaborating on Virgil and Augustus, on the Trojans’ reputation, on Livy’s power of description. She described herself as someone who had always considered herself a dilettante, who never thought she’d be able to concentrate on anything in such depth.<\/p>\n I replied, eventually. I told her how jealous I was of her passion, asked what I might find that could match it. I declined the Zoom calls. Work, obligations, not enough time. But I asked for the weekly letter. The lower-commitment option. And then, almost without thinking, I included a link to my own published work. Yes. I sent an eighty-five-year-old woman who reads Virgil for the wonder of it a link to my writing.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n My whole life has been organized around stakes. The right college so I could get the right job. The right career moves to support my family. Writing that might get published, read, acknowledged. Even my reading serves purposes now: research, keeping up with cultural conversations, gathering material. Not to mention my work as an attorney on which it all rides. Everything in service of something else. Those two boys\u2014the one who penciled in the margins and the one who devoured book after book before he knew what stakes even were\u2014would not recognize any of it. And maybe that’s the hole. Not the absence of reading, but the absence of reading for love.<\/p>\n Even reaching out to her, I could not stop performing. That link I included, that I sent almost without thinking, was reflex in its purest form. What would it take to change that? Is it courage, the willingness to devote yourself to something with no payoff? Is it patience, the ability to stay with difficulty without needing to show anything for it? Or is it something simpler: the ability to quiet the voice that asks what’s the point?<\/em><\/p>\n I’m fifty-four years old, the same age at which Joan started her serious study of the Ancients. I’ve been sitting with that symmetry for weeks, the universe arranging itself to show me something I’m not sure I’m prepared to see.<\/p>\n What would it feel like to love something the way Joan loves Ancient Greek and Latin poetry? To wake up with that hunger. To have your voice lift like that when you try to explain what moves you. To cry, at eighty-five, over lines written two thousand years ago, and feel it as joy rather than loss.<\/p>\n Joan’s email arrives regularly now. The Latinists, she calls the group. Last month’s letter was about a Greek warrior who finally understood that conquest wasn’t worth the effort. That victory extracts a debt. I read it at my desk at work, between emailscallszooms, and thought about that for a long time.<\/p>\n I also keep thinking about her hands on my books. The way her voice was so close but far far away when she talked about things dead for two thousand years as if they were alive right in front of her. As if time were something you could simply step across, if you loved something enough to stay.<\/p>\n I fell in love with Joan that Thanksgiving, but not in any way that needs a name. The love you feel for someone who shows you what’s still possible. She sat on my couch in the middle of all that beautiful, purposeful noise and created, just by speaking carefully about what she loves, a small halo of wonder and offered to make room in it for anyone who wants to witness it alongside her. Even me.<\/p>\n I want to find my way inside one of those halos. I will. Joan started at fifty-four.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Joan is eighty-five years old, and I fell a little in love with her on Thanksgiving. She was sitting on our couch reading a copy of The Aeneid that she had plucked from the bookshelves that line our family room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31492,"featured_media":275421,"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":[43069,6,43070,43103,43092],"tags":[1564,34824,106314,12283,212,111611,28003,12278,2466],"class_list":["post-275267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-memoir","category-newsandculture","tag-aging","tag-ancient-greek","tag-classic","tag-latin","tag-poetry","tag-seth-kaplan","tag-the-aeneid","tag-the-odyssey","tag-virgil"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19BN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/The-Odyssey.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275267","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\/31492"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275378,"date":"2026-08-06T05:08:42","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T09:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275378"},"modified":"2026-08-05T14:53:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T18:53:25","slug":"5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-16\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week"},"content":{"rendered":" Our mixum gatherum of marvelous reviews this week includes Rachel Vorona Cote on Paul Yoon\u2019s\u00a0Etna<\/em>, Anahid Nersessian on Jorie Graham\u2019s\u00a0Killing Spree<\/em>, Daniel Felsenthal on Molly Crabapple\u2019s\u00a0Here Where We Live Is Our Country<\/em>, Walton Muyumba on on Claudia Rankine\u2019s\u00a0Triage<\/em>, and Hermione Hoby on Gwendoline Reilly\u2019s\u00a0The Palm House<\/em>.<\/p>\n Brought to you by\u00a0Book Marks<\/a>, Lit Hub\u2019s home for book reviews.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u201cEtna<\/i>,\u00a0Paul Yoon\u2019s\u00a0third novel, is the latest addition to the modern animal-in-peril narrative: the story of a military dog named Etna who is snatched up and discarded in the course of a human war. Like\u00a0Open Throat<\/i>,\u00a0Etna<\/i>\u00a0excels as a keenly wrought hypothesis about not only how its chosen creature would perceive the world and its dangers, but also how those perceptions can be adapted to fiction. Although\u00a0Etna\u00a0<\/i>tempers the exacting moral judgments at the core of\u00a0Open Throat<\/i>\u00a0with a plot that bends toward empathy, Yoon\u2019s critiques of humanity are just as pointed as [Henry] Hoke\u2019s, and they emerge from a similarly textured philosophy that acknowledges the fraught business of living, whether one walks on two feet or four. Like all weary, uprooted creatures, Etna longs for home, but unlike so many of the humans who commandeer his world, he possesses far less agency when it comes to finding his way back there. And yet there are compensations. Etna may lack the privilege of human sovereignty and the benefits of advanced intelligence, but he is free of the hubristic delusions that underwrite so much human-produced wreckage. As he observes to a fellow dog, \u2018There\u2019s no other place but here.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cFor all its compactness,\u00a0Etna<\/i>\u00a0has the shape of an epic. The story draws explicit comparisons to Homer\u2019s\u00a0The<\/i>\u00a0Odyssey<\/i>: Its titular character tries to return to the farm where he was born after surviving a ravaging war. (The book also features a minor Greek character named Achilles.) An animal story set in motion by the basest human impulses\u2014though also distinguished by some of our best\u2014the novel is tied deeply into both ancient literary tradition and tragically perennial concerns.<\/p>\n Etna\u00a0<\/i>prompts readers to imagine an experience of the world unbound from human social convention, but it is no less interested in the slippery distinctions between human and nonhuman desires for belonging, intimacy, and home. Yoon drew extensively on these themes in his earlier works\u2014most recently in the novel\u00a0Run Me to Earth<\/i>\u00a0and the Story Prize\u2013<\/i>winning collection\u00a0The Hive and the Honey<\/i>\u2014and his oeuvre depicts war\u2019s psychological and material calamities. He understands that one of the most violent disruptions a living being can sustain is sudden estrangement from their environment. And yet, in Yoon\u2019s hands, a character\u2019s suffering never overwhelms their capacity for tenderness. The author always insists on the enduring humanity of his displaced subject\u2014even when they aren\u2019t human.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cThis is, at times, a wrenching novel, strewn with broken bodies, but its atrocities never overwhelm its faith in creaturely communion, and in grief and longing that clarify, rather than obscure, one\u2019s desires and selfhood. \u2018What do you know about creatures?\u2019 Etna wonders to himself, about a group of missionaries he encounters on his journey. He might well ask his readers the same thing. In real life, our dogs cannot tell us what they make of the disasters we humans have wrought, nor can their fidelity absolve us. But we can see by their perked ears and wagging tails that they are waiting to see what happens next.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Rachel Vorona Cote on Paul Yoon\u2019s\u00a0Etna<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cIn\u00a0Killing Spree<\/i>, her latest collection, Graham\u2019s notes change to tragic. Her laments are now laced with fury, as genocidal wars and murderous technologies join global warming in the twenty-first century\u2019s third decade. Most appalling to Graham is our collective inertia, not to say apathy. The world \u2018didn\u2019t change much\/at first,\u2019 she writes in the book\u2019s first poem, and neither did we. \u2018Where is everyone,\u2019 she asks, before being met by a terrifying stillness, at once the silence of mass death (\u2018Only just heard\/no one survived\u2019) and the stupefaction or indifference of those who feel, for now, untouched by mounting crises. For all its characteristic restraint and formal diligence,\u00a0Killing Spree<\/i>\u00a0is a book that wants to make noise, to cut through the dead air with cries of grief and rage, undoing our own savage torpor. Graham knows that it might make no difference; poetry, as we are often reminded, makes nothing happen. But she also knows that a difference\u2014even just a minor variation in what we notice and how\u2014is the only thing a poem can make.<\/p>\n All this is to say that Graham is a poet who consistently confounds her own self-representation, withdrawing from testimony even when she lays herself bare. Not for her the torrential unbosoming of so much contemporary lyric, with its mawkish self-regard and biographical appetites. Dramatizing the experience of one\u2019s consciousness is only worthwhile (or, to use Wordsworth\u2019s phrase, \u2018really important\u2019) if that consciousness is capable of understanding itself as operating within a shared historical condition, independent and idiosyncratic but nonetheless irreducibly in dialogue with other minds or essences. The broken line, the hard scar of the dash\u2014these are gestures toward the uncertain and intractable distance between self and other, presence and absence, \u2018awareness\u2019 and its loss.<\/p>\n Graham\u2019s language hovers at a breaking point. It is erudite and self-assured, but it has an underlying fragility that suggests someone trying to hold back a tide of chaos and disintegration. Like Paul Celan, Graham wants to know what it sounds like when meaning gives way to the malignant jabber of history, or when it is so overcome by its own futility that it sinks into silence.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cGraham\u2019s poems grieve not from within the passivity of despair but with the intention of upholding the value both of lives lost and of lives that have not been lived so much as survived.\u00a0Killing Spree<\/i>\u00a0puts into words what many of Graham\u2019s fellow Americans have yet to understand, namely that the condition of being\u00a0ungrievable<\/i>\u2014precarious, disposable\u2014in the eyes of those who wield the drones and the jets and the hypersonic missiles might at any moment be shared by those who now feel well cushioned by privilege and security.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Anahid Nersessian on Jorie Graham\u2019s\u00a0Killing Spree<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The New York Review of Books<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cCrabapple is perhaps best known as a visual artist, the creator of striking illustrations and lithographs from the Occupy Wall Street protests. She\u2019s also a dogged reporter who has worked in combat zones. She sees a precedent for today\u2019s progressive firebrands in the example of Jewish freedom fighters who opposed prejudice, tyranny, and class stratification in their home countries, without seeking solutions in nationalism and the colonization of distant lands. Anyone, anywhere, she suggests, can tune themselves to the wavelength of revolution.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n Here Where We Live Is Our Country\u00a0<\/i>denies any narrative defined by victimhood, particularly one that suggests hopelessness as an essential theme of Jewish existence. This feels more surprising than it should. Crabapple proceeds from a refreshing assumption that Jews were agents of history and not mere casualties of its worst tendencies, that the footprint of anti-Zionists in the twentieth century was robust and central to Jewish history at large, and that exclusionary notions of Jewish identity were already outdated a century ago. In her book, Jewish forbears are models for anti-colonial fervor and action: staunch souls who, while fending off starvation, disease, overcrowding, and lethal violence in the Warsaw Ghetto, found space and energy to support Gandhi and the cause of Indian independence. Isolated from the world, the Bundists sent telegrams praising Gandhi\u2019s Quit India campaign, a push for Indian self-determination that was sparked by the martial law that Britain instituted to maintain order while it fought the Nazis. No matter that the Brits, like the Bund, were battling Hitler\u2014the Bundists knew that their allies were the colonized, marginal, and exploited.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cWhat she does astonishingly well is reframe a decisive, often misconstrued period of European Jewish life, restoring a sense of diversity and complexity to the conversation. Bundist Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote an invaluable book about the resistance in 1945, which was not sold in Israel or published in Hebrew until 2001. It\u2019s no mystery why: The nation furnished a narrative that such a monumental insurrection was enacted nearly exclusively by Zionist youth militias. Crabapple reorients this tale toward the truth, gifting her readers a compass for their exploration of the past, and a rallying cry for battling the oppressors of now.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Daniel Felsenthal on Molly Crabapple\u2019s\u00a0Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The New Republic<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWhat is\u00a0Triage<\/em>, novel, memoir, work of criticism, or every form all at once? In emergency medicine, triage prioritizes care for the mortally wounded and injured first. What are this book\u2019s priorities? Outside of her published texts for stage,\u00a0Triage<\/em>\u00a0is the first of Rankine\u2019s books to arrive without a subtitle since her 2001 poetry collection, Plot. In a headnote, Rankine forewarns against reading\u00a0Triage<\/em>\u00a0as strictly nonfiction: \u2018Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Unless it isn\u2019t.\u2019 Does generic category matter any longer when approaching Rankine\u2019s books? As though borrowing from another Miles Davis aphorism, Rankine seems to say here, \u2018I\u2019ll play it and tell you what it is later.\u2019 Or not.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cLike\u00a0Don\u2019t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric<\/em>,\u00a0Citizen: An American Lyric<\/em>, and\u00a0Just Us: An American Conversation<\/em>,\u00a0Triage<\/em>\u00a0is colorfully, referentially, and intellectually dynamic. Citing 28 different theoretical, philosophical, and cinematic works, including Judith Butler\u2019s\u00a0Antigone\u2019s Claim<\/em>\u00a0(2000), Omar El Akkad\u2019s\u00a0One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This\u00a0<\/em>(2025), the late Lauren Berlant\u2019s\u00a0Cruel Optimism<\/em>\u201a and John Akomfrah\u2019s\u00a0The Stuart Hall Project<\/em>\u00a0(2013), Rankine adds ballast to the narrative\u2019s argumentative structure.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cBecause she controls the text, the narrator relays more about herself than the theorist. We access the theorist tangentially, only through the narrator\u2019s recollections and, perhaps, weak interpretations of their political philosophy. As the sexagenarian characters attempt reviving their faded connection, the narrator remarks, offhandedly, nearly surreptitiously, that she is Black and the theorist is from Ramallah.<\/p>\n Acknowledging this information, she deciphers her story newly. In her essay \u2018Recognizing the Stranger,\u2019 Palestinian British writer Isabella Hammad calls this re-cognition, or, following Socrates,\u00a0anagnorisis<\/i>.\u00a0Triage<\/em>\u00a0may also incite re-cognition: Antigone becomes contemporary, the stakes of the counterpointed definitions collapse, as theory and practice, rise and Rankine\u2019s new experimentation challenges and expands the focus of her recent works. Though the narrative\u2019s ending verges on negative abstraction, Rankine clearly demands that we confront our failure to prioritize Gazans and reckon the massive resultant losses, personal, ethical, and human alike.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Walton Muyumba on on Claudia Rankine\u2019s\u00a0Triage<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The Boston Globe<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cGwendoline Riley, the ferociously talented\u00a0forty-seven-year-old British novelist, is deeply and rightly admired\u2014by younger female readers in particular\u2014for a body of work that now comprises eight increasingly sophisticated novels, all of them short and lacerating. Riley\u2019s oeuvre, in other words, has become an object of widespread readerly love even as her books themselves can seem scoured of fondness. Fandom has been around since the advent of mass media, but with that old world dying and the new one (bluntly summarized, its main features are social media plus the tyranny of the algorithm) very much born, now is the time of fangirls. And fangirling\u2014loving a stranger madly and blindly\u2014essentially means voluntarily replacing your own vision with a pair of heart-eye emojis. The guarded, intelligent, and relentlessly scrutinizing female narrators of Riley\u2019s novels see through whatever the opposite of heart-eye emojis are; the astringent pleasure of her work comes from a sense that its author is vigilantly undeceived and would rather die than swoon over anyone or anything. In both the precision of its prose and in the sometimes cruel, often sordid human realities it depicts, a Gwendoline Riley novel is phobic of sentimentality. You can love Riley\u2019s work, you can certainly admire it, but I don\u2019t think you can fangirl over it.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cRiley\u2019s novels are preoccupied particularly with filial attachments and sexual relationships\u2014but just as notable is that successful love, that is to say mutually salutary and rewarding commitment, barely exists in her fictional universe. Her work belongs to a lineage of doggedly anti-romantic and disenchanted British writing, which includes the dyspeptic verse of Philip Larkin (a Riley narrator would likely roll her eyes at the staggering obviousness of the truth that \u2018they fuck you up, your mum and dad\u2019), the sour swagger of Amis\u00a0pater et filius<\/em>, or the crafty, incidental wickedness of Muriel Spark.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cThroughout Riley\u2019s work, specific archetypes recur, albeit differently shaded. In fact, while working on this essay, I found it necessary to write out a dramatis personae so as to distinguish each book\u2019s personnel from the others. After a while, the many variations of feckless American musician boyfriends, bullying dads who abruptly die, and cowed, pathetic mums trailing a series of hopeless partners all start to blend into one another. This is not the gripe it might sound like. Doing pretty much the same thing over and over needn\u2019t make for stultifying work, even if a shrink (rather than an admiring critic) might label it repetition compulsion. In the artist, unlike the neurotic personality, stuckness can be hard to distinguish from integrity. But now, with her eighth novel, Riley might finally have broken free of her phantoms. Or at least partially so. In the coolly observed and exquisitely controlled\u00a0The Palm House<\/em>, a new type of Riley character presents himself.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cI laughed when I read Riley quoted in a recent\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0profile. She\u2019s asked if she\u2019s seen\u00a0Hamnet<\/em>. \u2018I cannot imagine,\u2019 she responds acidly, magnificently, \u2018anything more ignominious than watching\u00a0Hamnet<\/em>.\u2019 The implication being that Chloe Zhao\u2019s acclaimed movie about the death of Shakespeare\u2019s young son is a work of such irredeemable mawkishness as to be beneath contempt. But my laugh was kind of sad.\u00a0Hamnet<\/em>\u00a0does indeed make one or two sentimental missteps, but it\u2019s mostly, and more importantly, a moving work of real cinematic beauty. Not everything can be exclusively grand monsteras and glossy ferns; most artworks come muddled with the tat of mirrors and whirligigs, too. Loving something enthusiastically\u2014a person, or an artist and their art\u2014always risks embarrassment and the loss of dignity. To indulge in sentimentality or blind devotion is to be self-deceived, but to pathologically gird oneself against the threat of sentimentality is its own form of deception\u2014it, too, can prevent a person from seeing properly. There are worse things in this world than lapses of taste. Isn\u2019t it better to risk the ignominy of mirrors and whirligigs so you don\u2019t miss out on the beauty of monsteras and ferns?\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013Hermione Hoby on Gwendoline Reilly\u2019s\u00a0The Palm House<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>(Bookforum<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our mixum gatherum of marvelous reviews this week includes Rachel Vorona Cote on Paul Yoon\u2019s\u00a0Etna, Anahid Nersessian on Jorie Graham\u2019s\u00a0Killing Spree, Daniel Felsenthal on Molly Crabapple\u2019s\u00a0Here Where We Live Is Our Country, Walton Muyumba on on Claudia Rankine\u2019s\u00a0Triage, and Hermione<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":275379,"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":[72612,15654,13821],"class_list":["post-275378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-5-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week","tag-book-marks","tag-book-reviews"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19DA","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/THe-Palm-House.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275378","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=275378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275077,"date":"2026-08-06T05:08:23","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T09:08:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275077"},"modified":"2026-08-01T21:10:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T01:10:33","slug":"considering-the-many-forms-a-family-can-take-in-japanese-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/considering-the-many-forms-a-family-can-take-in-japanese-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Considering the Many Forms a Family Can Take in Japanese Literature"},"content":{"rendered":" Growing up, my mother and I often joked that I was a thirty-year-old in a ten-year-old\u2019s skin. That happens when you\u2019re an only child with a tendency toward bookishness\u2014you spend all your time around adults, read much more than the average fourth-grader, and generally comport yourself with the same calm and poise you imagine adults have. For better or for worse, you spend a great deal of time making your own fun with an overactive imagination, taking care of yourself while your parents work, and picking up more responsibilities and self-recriminations than is probably healthy for a ten-year-old. Little do you know that adults, even the ones who seem put together, are just as messy as the children they\u2019re raising. Or at least, this was my experience. This is why when I started translating Maiko Seo\u2019s Someone to Cook For<\/i><\/a> (Europa Editions, 2026), I recognized a kindred spirit in the protagonist, Yuko Morimiya. She too is an old soul in a teenager\u2019s body, bearing a mantle of responsibilities and self-conscious habits like a well-worn and familiar coat.<\/p>\n My upbringing wasn\u2019t quite as colorful as Yuko\u2019s though. Unlike me, the poor girl had had five parents by the time she entered high school. Of course Yuko would balk at my calling her a \u201cpoor girl.\u201d Throughout Seo\u2019s novel, Yuko insists that her unusual childhood hasn\u2019t been the tragedy everyone seems to expect\u2014she\u2019s loved all her parents and all her parents have done their best by her, misguided though they sometimes are. At the same time, however, Yuko is aware that because she\u2019s moved households and changed names so often, there is an \u201cacute sense of distance\u201d between her and each new guardian. Where other teenagers are pulling away from their parents, chafing to become adults already, Yuko is constantly thinking about how she can cause her parents, new and old, the least amount of friction and worry.<\/p>\n [Yuko]\u00a0is acutely aware of her own ever-shifting identity and how it is interwoven with the people who come in and out of the revolving door of her life.<\/p>\n Yuko\u2019s sensitivity to her situation is partially built on the fact of blood relations, which remain a strong determining factor in family structures in Japan. As a toddler, Yuko loses her biological mother to a pedestrian hit-and-run incident, and her father, Sh\u016bhei Mito, remarries to a woman named Rika Tanaka when Yuko is in elementary school. However, at the age of ten, Sh\u016bhei announces that his company has transferred him to Brazil. Rather than follow him to the other side of the planet, Rika requests a divorce, and she and Sh\u016bhei put the question to Yuko: will you stay or will you go? For me, this is the moment Yuko goes from little girl to a little girl trying desperately to be an adult. Torn between her love for her father and her desire to remain in Japan, Yuko ultimately chooses Rika, and from that moment on, she never lives with a biological parent or relative again.<\/p>\n What this means legally speaking is that Yuko is removed from her father\u2019s family registry (koseki) and placed on Rika\u2019s\u2014she transforms from Yuko Mita to Yuko Tanaka, and as a result, she is no longer a legal member of either of her biological parents\u2019 family units. Until April 2026, Japan did not have any joint custody system in place; prior that change, children could not be listed on two family registries at once. Parents could, of course, negotiate visitation rights and child support in a more informal manner, but unlike many other wealthy countries, until 2026, these parental support systems were not obligatory; children could only ever legally be a member of one household, and the other household forfeited all rights and obligations to the child. For a ten-year-old like Yuko, however, the nitty gritty details of visitation and finances are less important than the very real fact of separation. It is evident in the novel that Sh\u016bhei loves Yuko very much, but his transfer to Brazil makes maintaining a strong relationship nearly impossible.<\/p>\n Over the course of a year, Yuko never hears from Sh\u016bhei at all and eventually gives up on their relationship. \u201cWe might have been father and daughter, but now we were apart\u2014our time was over. My own life was right there in front of me, and I needed to focus on the people around me.\u201d Yuko, old soul that she is, quickly learns that Rika\u2019s ability to manage household finances is atrocious, so she takes it upon herself to make sure she and Rika have food and can make the rent on time. Though she is the child, Yuko very much grows into a parent.<\/p>\n Rika, through a series of remarriages and divorces, shuffles Yuko along from family registry to family registry, and with each new household, Yuko again calibrates herself to the adults around her, a process she slowly comes to realize is not the norm in other families. She is baffled by the way her friends Moe and Fumina rail against their parents, especially when Yuko is always holding back at home, forever walking on eggshells. When she and S\u014dsuke Morimiya, her third father, have a fight, she\u2019s terrified of how to resolve the matter with him.<\/p>\n Maybe we should open up and talk about everything, explain to each other what we believed a father and daughter ought to be. The idea terrified me. I feared if we said everything we needed to say, we wouldn\u2019t be able to stand each other anymore\u2014neither of us actually knew what it was to be parent and child.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Though she would balk at my words, again I say \u201cpoor Yuko.\u201d Three fathers and two mothers deep, she is only ever unsure about what a parent looks like or how they are \u201csupposed\u201d to act. And because Yuko is so self-sufficient and has grown up so much faster than other teenagers, she never reaches out for help, even to those who raised her before. She is convinced that to do so would be an unnecessary burden on her former parents, especially when they no longer have any obligations to her.<\/p>\n Though she tries her best to go it alone, ultimately she learns she can lean on the people who care for her and listen to what they have to say about her character and her choices in life.<\/p>\n In the process of editing this translation, one of my editors came back to me with questions about why Yuko is so reluctant to maintain contact with the parents who are no longer in her life. There is, of course, the legal argument; with each divorce, Yuko becomes part of a new family and sheds the old. More importantly, however, whether Yuko is conscious of the bureaucracy and paperwork behind all these family ties binding and unbinding, she is acutely aware of her own ever-shifting identity and how it is interwoven with the people who come in and out of the revolving door of her life. Better to go it alone than reach out for someone who might be gone in a year, right Yuko? Again, I sense a kindred spirit in her; as my friends and family can attest, I also have a hard time asking for help, even from those who would happily give it. Luckily for both Yuko and I, very often help comes even when neither of us seek it.<\/p>\n In translating Someone to Cook For<\/i>, I can\u2019t add an entire paragraph or even a set of little notes here and there explaining the differences between Japan\u2019s divorce system when compared to those in the UK or the US. What I can do is concentrate on my empathy with Yuko, on the ways in which her thought processes mirror my own. I finished translating the first draft of this novel in June of 2025 and immediately burst into tears. My father had passed unexpectedly only a month prior, and the final scene of the book had touched that part of me that was still in mourning disbelief. Rika also reminded me a lot of him\u2014a little too focused on shopping over family finances, caring but impulsive. Unlike Yuko, my parents never divorced, but still I felt her same uncertainty when faced with my new fatherless place in the world, and I could bring that uncertainty to bear when I began editing and refining the translation.<\/p>\n Who are we when our parents are no longer there to serve as a guidepost for us? I think the common American mythos would have us go on a journey of self-discovery; we would strike out alone, traveling or starting a new business, trying to discover ourselves via \u201cbootstraps\u201d style independence. In Yuko\u2019s story however, she discovers herself not through stubborn independence, but instead through locating new family, new parental figures and mentors. Though she tries her best to go it alone, ultimately she learns she can lean on the people who care for her and listen to what they have to say about her character and her choices in life. I only hope I can be as lucky when it comes to finding new family in my future.<\/p>\n ______________________________<\/p>\n Someone to Cook For<\/a> by Maiko Seo, translated by Laurel Taylor, is available from Europa Editions.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Growing up, my mother and I often joked that I was a thirty-year-old in a ten-year-old\u2019s skin. That happens when you\u2019re an only child with a tendency toward bookishness\u2014you spend all your time around adults, read much more than the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31445,"featured_media":275298,"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":[43069,6,43070,43073],"tags":[63,1482,4543,10443,109171,8305,111511,111510,21825,1262],"class_list":["post-275077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-on-translation","tag-europa-editions","tag-family","tag-japan","tag-japanese-literature","tag-laurel-taylor","tag-literature-in-translation","tag-maiko-seo","tag-someone-to-cook-for","tag-translated-literature","tag-translation","story-type-japanese-literature"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19yJ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/someone-to-cook-for-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275077","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\/31445"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275107,"date":"2026-08-06T05:06:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T09:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275107"},"modified":"2026-08-01T21:11:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T01:11:31","slug":"writing-a-novel-and-hiking-a-mountain-are-pretty-similar-actually","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/writing-a-novel-and-hiking-a-mountain-are-pretty-similar-actually\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing a Novel and Hiking a Mountain Are Pretty Similar, Actually"},"content":{"rendered":" In July 2020 my twin sister Madelynn and I had decided we were tired of being apart, of quarantining alone in our homes\u2014mine in Syracuse, NY, where I was an MFA student drafting my first \u201cnovel\u201d and hers in East London\u2014rightfully cowering from a deadly pandemic whose end then seemed unfathomable. We decided we would overcome confinement by becoming hikers. Those were the kind of people we were. Not the kind who cowered from viruses and obsessed over death.<\/p>\n We had never summited anything beyond a modest hill, but we just knew hiking Big Slide Mountain would be easy. Yes, Big Slide\u2019s imposing height meant it had a place on the list of the Adirondack 46 High Peaks, a set of peaks in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. True, it had an elevation of 4,420 feet. And, sure, the AllTrails website alleged that the 9.4 mile ascent and descent would last eight hours, but we were pretty fast walkers. How hard could it be?<\/p>\n We bought hiking boots, rented a Corolla, and drove four hours east from Syracuse, NY to Lake Placid, NY. We drove to the trailhead at dawn and parked, the day\u2019s impending heat foreshadowed by mosquitos and humidity. I left the big water jug I had brought in the car because there was no way I would need it.<\/p>\n And I know writing a creative nonfiction essay like this one means mining life experiences and packaging them into meaningful lessons but truthfully, like mountains, I\u2019ve got little clue exactly how essays should be navigated.<\/p>\n Instead, I put a small water bottle in my backpack. Madelynn took pictures of me standing beside a sign nailed to a scaly tree. In yellow letters: TRAIL TO BIG SLIDE MT. 3.9 miles (Total ascent 2800 ft.). The July sun swung high above our heads, casting an orange glow around the canopy of trees. I smiled into Madelynn\u2019s iPhone. Behind her sat the cramped parking lot where weathered hikers limped to their cars. Pussies<\/i>, I thought. It\u2019s a two hour hike up a measly \u201cmountain.\u201d How hard could it be? After all, Madelynn and I had already survived homebound months, an ocean apart, consumed by insulating fear.<\/p>\n \u201cReady?\u201d Madelynn asked, steadying herself on the soggy woodchips of the path.<\/p>\n I knew hiking a mountain meant walking upward, but I didn\u2019t know how much water to bring, nor how to navigate moss-slickened rocks. And I know writing a creative nonfiction essay like this one means mining life experiences and packaging them into meaningful lessons but truthfully, like mountains, I\u2019ve got little clue exactly how essays should be navigated. I am a fiction writer, after all. And I was a fiction writer in July 2020, when we set out to conquer Big Slide. I was drafting a novel that at 200 pages in I still wasn\u2019t sure if I should just preemptively incinerate.<\/p>\n Unlike my poor knowledge of hiking, I was aware of how much I didn\u2019t know when it came to writing novels. I even felt the angst of writing in Lake Placid, hours from my laptop. Each day that I did not write that summer, I felt like a finger plugging an exploding tap. The novel seemed impossible to surmount, yet I could not kill the magnetic impulse to continue. It was a coming-of-age story about family dysfunction that I felt called to tell because I had so intimately lived it. Perhaps a similarly magnetic impulse lured Madelynn and me to Big Slide. After all, hiking felt like the thing we had the most control over; the thing that made us feel\u2014despite the prevalence of death\u2014like we could stay alive.<\/p>\n I clutched my damp backpack straps as Madelynn and I hiked up a woodchipped path. The air was sweet with tree bark and mosquito repellent and the leaves around us rustled like they were whispering secrets. For the first time in months, my eyes were not strained by pixels and my fingers were not cramped from typing. I felt a gentle breeze caress my cheeks and the dull crunch of foliage beneath my boots.<\/p>\n After twenty minutes of ascent, we heard voices and footsteps. Descending hikers approached us wearing grins caked with dirt and sweat, and offered dumbstruck proclamations, \u201cGet to the top,\u201d they playfully insisted. \u201cIt\u2019s so<\/i> worth the view.\u201d We smiled at them and I noticed both the exhaustion on their faces and the light in their eyes. We waved and they passed by us. They were so nice! This<\/i> was so nice. Hiking was amazing! Yes, I had already grown slightly winded, and the pathway seemed to steepen, but it was nice. Whatever struggles they had endured to reach the top had been worth the view. I listened to the whispering leaves.<\/p>\n Madelynn and I traded glances, our eyes flashing with a twin cocktail of apprehension and terror. Could we conquer this impenetrable wall?<\/p>\n Beneath the shade of crooked trees, and buoyed by the passing hikers, Madelynn and I hiked twenty more minutes up the wooded trail, our eyes pointed down into the rocks and dirt of the path as we did the silent, tricky math of navigating which step to take next. The goal was not to fall. As I navigated each slippery rock, I could not help but think about the arithmetic of writing a novel. Every sentence felt like a floundering leap of faith; I could either stick the landing or crash onto the ground. Much like hiking, writing was unpredictable. But as the pandemic raged, writing was the only thing anchoring me to life. It felt silly to be obsessing over writing while hiking, but as I stepped on each new rock without falling, I wondered if there was something intoxicating about navigating puzzling terrains.<\/p>\n Little by little, the shade waned and the sun glowed brighter. Madelynn followed behind as I stepped onto a flat rock and I briefly looked up, aiming to see further down the path. But the instant I glanced up from the ground, a massive wall of boulders blocked my view.<\/p>\n \u201cAre we going the right way,\u201d I asked Madelynn, whose dismayed face rivaled that of the passersby from earlier.<\/p>\n I studied the taupe surfaces of the imposing boulders mere inches from my face. I saw white dash markings of paint that curved upward over each boulder. Upon closer inspection, I noticed how the boulder contained grooves meant for gripping. Were we meant to climb <\/i>these things? Shakily, I craned my neck and up ahead saw the tiny, distant bodies of scrambling hikers.<\/p>\n \u201cIs there another way around?\u201d asked Madelynn.<\/p>\n We were hikers, not rock climbers. We were barely an hour into the hike, nowhere near the mountaintop, and already faced with such a daunting obstacle. I felt my heart erupt in my chest, consumed with the sun and the altitude. I suddenly wished I was back in Syracuse, writing. Instead, my trembling body was confronted by an impenetrable wall of rock. Madelynn and I traded glances, our eyes flashing with a twin cocktail of apprehension and terror. Could we conquer this impenetrable wall?<\/p>\n During the first COVID lockdown it was impossible to think beyond walls of uncertainty\u2014towering walls inscribed with infinite questions: How much longer would it last? Would the death toll climb infinitely? And as I felt entombed within the walls of my bedroom, writing my so-called novel, I mourned what I had lost. I moved to Syracuse to be in community with writers, not to write alone in a bedroom as the world disintegrated beyond its walls, which I could only study in futile attempts to decode its floral scrawls of wallpaper. But every time the blurry roses started to come into focus, my mind went blank.<\/p>\n Madelynn and I cowered before that insurmountable wall of rock. Frozen, we stood, backpacks heavy, breaths pumping, our minds blank.<\/p>\n \u201cShould we just go back?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n We stood in silence. My heart plunged into my stomach.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s just try,\u201d said Madelynn.<\/p>\n I approached the first boulder, twice my height, and stuck my slippery hands inside two grooves then lifted one foot, then another. I could see the top of the boulder a few feet ahead. I just needed to climb a bit more, then hoist my legs over the horizon halving rock and sky, then I\u2019d be at the top. I gripped as hard as I could and lifted my body. My legs dangled and reality bulldozed me; I was dangling from a boulder hundreds of feet in the air.<\/p>\n I swung my leg up, using all my might, and crash-landed on top of the boulder, totally winded. I leaned over the edge and gave Madelynn a hand, pulling her arm as she hoisted her body. We collapsed shuddering on the boulder, both dazed and astonished.<\/p>\n Knees wobbling, we stood and got a new point of view. We shielded our eyes from the sun and studied the sweeping vistas of forests and mountains. We saw birds fly coolly past us, appearing right at home in the sky. The trees we had seen while driving to the trailhead looked like blades of grass. We could see narrow roads bisecting plots of farmland and ant-sized cars speeding in the distance. I adjusted my hat and felt a fiery blend of pride and a churning sense of fear. What else would we have to surmount to reach that splendid, promised view at the top?<\/p>\n As we stood silently atop the boulders, still catching our breaths, my ears attuned to the sounds of whistling wind and periodic birdsong. I inhaled and studied the mountains and forests far in the distance. Then, a gust of wind floated past my ear, and I swore I heard two, sudden words: Keep going<\/i>. I jerked my head back, and eyed Madelynn, who didn\u2019t seem to hear what I\u2019d heard. It was a low, mystical whisper that seemed to come out of nowhere. It was a voice that did not seem real but was still undeniable. I had never heard voices or seen visions, just had the odd paranormal experience or two. I do not know where those two words came from\u2014if they were only flowing into my ears because even while hiking I was consumed with doubts about writing. Or if they originated from a fictional voice that I hallucinated thanks to thirst or disorientation. I just know that they settled like heavy seeds in my gut.<\/p>\n I did not know what lay ahead, but I kept going.<\/p>\n A great teacher of mine, writer Dana Spiotta, once said that writing a novel is like driving down a darkened highway with your headlights on. On Big Slide, I was driving, but my headlights were dim. After the boulders, I spent dim, monotonous hours stumbling through rocks, mud, streams, flies, and branches. When writing my book, the headlights were even dimmer. The Word document was like a trail swamped with mud after torrential rain. Another great teacher of mine, writer Chanelle Benz, said that editing a novel is like a sculptor chipping away at a slab of stone. As Madelynn and I trekked the forest trail, cautiously persisting with the hike, I recalled the boulders and thought: We are chipping away at stones, alright.<\/i><\/p>\n \u201cI just hope there aren\u2019t any more boulders,\u201d I said into Madelynn\u2019s back as she charged ahead. Or anything worse<\/i>, I thought. My little water bottle sloshed in my backpack, now half empty. We were not even close to the summit. I felt the panic of dwindling water, my throat already desiccated. We could not see the summit from where we stood but knew, among the trees, that we were in the thick of things.<\/p>\n \u201cCome on,\u201d said Madelynn. She continued into the winding forest.<\/p>\n I did not know what lay ahead, but I kept going.<\/p>\n After nine daunting hours of climbing and descending, as shadows replaced the sun, we finally exited the darkening trail and dizzily stumbled to our Corolla in the parking lot. For the final three waterless hours of the hike, I was so profoundly thirsty that I had resolved to drink my spit. I ripped open the car door and guzzled from the water jug I\u2019d left on my seat. Six years later, I can still taste the relief of that water, chugged in the car, scorching yet sublime. I collapsed in the driver\u2019s seat and mentally prepared to drive the 20 minutes to our motel. I opened the vanity mirror and saw my face, tanned and streaked with dirt. My eyes contained the same, shell-shocked look as the passersby. I shut the mirror, closed my eyes, and recalled the smiling photo Madelynn had snapped of me at the trailhead. While that version of me was cuter and smelled a whole lot better than this current one, I thought that I preferred this new version.<\/p>\n When we drove back to Syracuse days later, I knew the next time I climbed a mountain I would do a little more research, probably bring a map, and bring some more goddamned water. I knew that if I could climb that godforsaken mountain, then I could finish that novel. Whenever I wanted to throw my laptop out of my bedroom window, I thought of the excruciating thirst, and the orgasmic relief of that jug of water. When I rewrote the book for the eleventh time, I thought of sitting on the summit, beside my sister, soaking in the glorious view. For the subsequent six years of writing, rewriting, and editing I always came back to those two, mystical words. I always came back to Big Slide.<\/p>\n What does it mean to persist despite the murkiness of the future, to continue a daunting writing project or climb a mountain even as our world seemed and still seems to crumble under the weight of illness and death? We often endure hard things and navigate unknowns just because we have to. But sometimes we endure and navigate hard things, like write books or climb mountains, because we want to\u2014because there is a reward at the end, like an arresting view or a sense of having crafted a story. Remember, I am a fiction writer, after all\u2014a lover of stories\u2014which means I\u2019m still not 100% sure if that message from the wind was just some story my mind made up because I was so uncertain about telling stories. Being a fiction writer also means that I live for drama, so I have left the best part of this story for the end.<\/p>\n Five hours into the hike, Madelynn and I finally reached the summit:<\/p>\n \u201cTRAIL TO \u2014> BIG SLIDE Mtn \u2014> 0.3 Miles\u201d<\/p>\n We were dazed with thirst but perked up once we saw this sign. Would the passersby\u2019s promise of a glorious view be realized? Would this challenge be worth it? Several people crowded the mountaintop. It was windy and few clouds painted the sky. We waited our turn to have a seat on a rock and drink it all in. We received a panoramic view of Keene Valley, known as the \u201cHome of the High Peaks.\u201d We saw an expanse of mountains that comprised the Adirondacks\u2019 Great Range. We sat side by side on the top, overlooking a green forest, and studied the distant, towering slopes. So, this <\/i>is what the passersby wanted us to see. More mountains. We took photos and embraced the pin-drop stillness of high altitude. We saw birds soaring and felt so divorced from the ground, over 4,000 feet below, where sat all our fears and obstacles and that terrible virus.<\/p>\n I had initially felt so guilty for hiking when I should have been writing but, I thought, as I studied the curves of distant green mountains, a break from writing\u2014this venturing out into the world\u2014is the thing I needed in order to keep writing. After all, writing is living. You must experience life in order to write about it. I didn\u2019t think I would have the experience of making it to the top, I thought the boulders and thirst would kill me. I thought random voices meant I was going insane.<\/p>\n Maybe<\/i>, I thought at the top, the wind was right<\/i>. I could really do this thing. Sometimes there are signs that you should persist: either nailed to trees or whispered in the wind. There is always uncertainty but there is often blind faith\u2014a profound belief in a view that you cannot quite yet see but just know will be worth it. I\u2019d say the summit view was worth it. We got to rest our bodies, and it was so serenely quiet. We got to trace each distant mountain from wide base to jagged peak. I got to see how far I had come and where else I might go.<\/p>\n __________________________________<\/p>\n Soft Spots<\/a>\u00a0by Leila Renee is available from Amistad.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In July 2020 my twin sister Madelynn and I had decided we were tired of being apart, of quarantining alone in our homes\u2014mine in Syracuse, NY, where I was an MFA student drafting my first \u201cnovel\u201d and hers in East<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31454,"featured_media":275110,"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":[43071,43069,6,43103,43092],"tags":[18482,50475,1149,26919,18581,111533,111532,1341],"class_list":["post-275107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-memoir","category-newsandculture","tag-amistad","tag-climbing","tag-craft","tag-harper-collins","tag-hiking","tag-leila-renee","tag-soft-spots","tag-writing"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19zd","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/mountain-top.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275107","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\/31454"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275414,"date":"2026-08-06T04:55:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T08:55:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275414"},"modified":"2026-08-05T14:40:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T18:40:14","slug":"the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-fiction-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-fiction-29\/","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) _________________________________________<\/p>\n 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":[108629,111687,113],"class_list":["post-275414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-independent-press-bestsellers","tag-ipc-bestsellers","tag-novels"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ea","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\/275414","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=275414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275414\/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=275414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275418,"date":"2026-08-06T04:55:30","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T08:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275418"},"modified":"2026-08-05T14:40:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T18:40:37","slug":"the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-nonfiction-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-nonfiction-29\/","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)![\"Etna\"](\"https:\/\/s26162.pcdn.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/07\/f1534a236c575d626508ef0ee43afc51-194x300.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/s26162.pcdn.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/08\/Killing-Spree-239x300.avif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/s26162.pcdn.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/08\/Here-Where-We-Live-199x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Triage](\"https:\/\/s26162.pcdn.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/07\/476339c28d619ab33e925bfea626626e-200x300.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/s26162.pcdn.co\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/07\/The-Palm-House-203x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/someone-to-cook-for-193x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/soft-spots-197x300.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
\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 Iliad<\/em><\/a> by Homer, Emily Wilson (Transl.) (W.W. Norton)<\/span>
\n7. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 1<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n8. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 2<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n9. On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)<\/em><\/a> by Solvej Balle, Barbara J. Haveland (Transl.) (New Directions)
\n<\/span>10. Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel<\/em><\/a> by Shuang-zi Yang (Graywolf Press)
\n11. Stoner<\/em><\/a> by John Williams (NYRB Classics)
\n12. Small Things Like These<\/em><\/a> by Claire Keegan (Grove Press)
\n13. I See You’ve Called in Dead<\/em><\/a> by John Kenney (Zibby Publishing)
\n14. Lights Out<\/em><\/a> (Into Darkness Series #1) by Navessa Allen (Slowburn)
\n<\/span>15. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 3<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n16. Harvest Season<\/em><\/a> (The Seasons of Carnage Trilogy #2) by Brynne Weaver (Slowburn)
\n17. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 4<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n<\/span>18. We Were Forbidden<\/em><\/a> by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit)
\n19. Victorian Psycho: A Novel<\/em><\/a> by Virginia Feito (Liveright)
\n20. Game On<\/em><\/a> by Navessa Allen (Slowburn)
\n21. Writers & Lovers<\/em><\/a> by Lily King (Grove Press)
\n<\/span>22. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 5<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n<\/span>23. The Odyssey<\/em><\/a> by Homer (University of Chicago Press)
\n24. The Employees<\/em><\/a> by Olga Ravn (New Directions)
\n<\/span>25. Culpability<\/em><\/a> by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel & Grau)
\n26. The Berry Pickers<\/em><\/a> by Amanda Peters (Catapult)
\n<\/span>27. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 6<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n28. Foster<\/em><\/a> by Claire Keegan (Grove Press)
\n<\/span>29. The Very Definition of Love<\/em><\/a> (The Bancroft Sisters) by Sophia Benoit (Slowburn)
\n30. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 7<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n<\/span>31. The Summer Book<\/em><\/a> by Tove Jansson (NYRB)
\n32. Orbital<\/em><\/a> by Samantha Harvey (Grove)
\n33. Kindred<\/em><\/a> by Octavia E. Butler (Beacon Press)
\n<\/span>34. My Brilliant Friend<\/em><\/a> by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions)
\n35. Witch Hat Atelier 1<\/em><\/a> by Kamome Shirahama (Kodansha Comics)
\n36. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 8<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n<\/span>37. The Covenant of Water<\/em><\/a> by Abraham Verghese (Grove)
\n38. The King in Yellow, Deluxe Edition<\/em><\/a> by Robert W. Chambers (Pushkin Press)
\n39. The Overstory<\/em><\/a> by Richard Powers (Norton)
\n40. Three Bags Full<\/em><\/a> (A Sheep Detective Story) by Leonie Swann (Soho Crime)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Untitled-design-2-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n2. This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy<\/em><\/a> by Ben Wikler (W. W. Norton)
\n3. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald<\/em><\/a> by John U. Bacon (Liveright)
\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. A Resistance History of the United States<\/em><\/a> by Tad Stoermer (Steerforth)
\n7. Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature<\/em><\/a> by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (Spiegel & Grau)
\n<\/span>8. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate\u2014Discoveries from a Secret World<\/em><\/a> by Peter Wohlleben (Greystone Books)
\n9. Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old<\/em><\/a> by Mary Beard (University of Chicago Press)
\n<\/span>10. Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences<\/em><\/a> by Anton J\u00e4ger (Verso)
\n11. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)<\/em><\/a> by Dean Spade\u00a0(Verso)
\n12. The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary<\/em><\/a> by Terry Tempest Williams (Grove Press)
\n<\/span>13. A Philosophy of Walking<\/em><\/a> by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Gros, John Howe (Transl.)\u00a0(Verso)
\n<\/span>14. S.P.Q.R.: A History of Ancient Rome<\/em><\/a> by Mary Beard (Liveright)
\n<\/span>15. 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. Man’s Search for Meaning<\/em><\/a> by Viktor E. Frankl (Beacon Press)<\/span>
\n17. We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution<\/em><\/a> by Jill Lepore (Liveright)
\n18. Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground<\/em><\/a> by Zayd Ayers Dohrn (W. W. Norton)
\n19. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats<\/em><\/a> by Ursula K. Le Guin (Library of America)
\n20.