This week’s news in Venn diagrams.

By James Folta

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July 3, 2025, 12:16pm

Happy July 4th eve! Even if you’re not feeling so rah-rah on the American experiment these days, there’s still a lot to celebrate tomorrow. In addition to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the fourth is also when New York State abolished slavery in 1827 and when the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published in 1855. It’s Nathaniel Hawthorne and Lionel Trilling’s birthday, too.

Whatever you’re celebrating, I hope you’re doing it with friends! Have a good long weekend and don’t forget to reapply sunscreen.

Here’s everything that made us happy this week.

By Brittany Allen

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July 3, 2025, 12:04pm

This week, our happiness came in a binary. We took pleasure indoors and outdoors. Some of us got jollies in nature, beholding birds and helming summer picnics. While the vampires among us took solace inside, where we listened to moody tunes and applauded oddballs.

Drew Broussard has spent the week looking forward to an unusual Fourth of July ritual—holing up in the bedroom with his wife and “very nervous dog” to keep the latter company during the fireworks. Calming techniques to include singing, blasting Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, and a rom-com marathon. I’ll be stealing this itinerary, too.

Molly Odintz has a glorious hack, also for the indoor kids: watch a Virginia O’Brien number from one of these 40s MGM musicals and try to count how many times she blinks.

According to Molly, O’Brien, who started her acting career paralyzed by stage fright but went on to specialize in an eerie deadpan delivery, “blinks less than a real estate agent. Less than Patrick Bateman.” But that’s just the tip of her strange charm. Anyway, here’s a clip to get you started. Start it at 0.50.

McKayla Coyle also caught joy from music. Specifically a band called Moody Joody. The Nashville-based pop-synth outfit makes exactly the kind of music they’ve been looking for. “El Camino High” is a pure bop.

And now, for the sun bunnies out there. Oliver Scialdone got joy playing pass the shovel. “Pass the shovel is a game where my partner’s baby niece hands you a plastic sand shovel, takes it back, then hands it to you again, over and over forever.” I can also attest that this game is pure joy when played with almost any human under three, especially provided the older party is willing to lose.

In at least two cases this week, man bested nature. Two of Lit Hub’s best Dads actually built things outside. Dan Sheehan set up hummingbird feeders on his balcony, and is now inundated with broad-tailed hummingbirds whose “striking iridescent pink throat feathers” taunt the dog. For any inspired to tease pets of their own, most of these will run you less than $25, and fit on a fire escape.

On the East Coast, editor in chief Jonny Diamond erected a swing set for his little one. Which would be happy-making enough—but extra joy comes after bedtime, when he and his wife sit on the swings “and drink beer like suburban teens.”

And speaking of summer nights, Jessie Gaynor has been spending a lot of time at the local pool—”which is staffed by teens who have over-30 face blindness,” a fact she finds “strangely comforting.” Water’s made a refuge from the rough Virginia heat. But the real headline? Jessie’s kid just learned to swim!

Two chefs in our stable got joy in the kitchen. Emily Firetog highly recommends a watermelon, feta, mint leaves and pickled red onion summer salad, which she claims will be perfect for your next picnic or dinner party. If you favor math in the kitchen, this Serious Eats recipe has got you covered.

And speaking of serious snacks, James Folta also recommends a fridge companion, suitable for summer days. This tortilla española recipe is solid, and has a nice video explaining the flipping technique—which James claims isn’t as scary as it seems. “Cooled off in the fridge, this is great on a little sandwich with some cheese and a little extra salt, or on a plate with some hot sauce. Or even eaten by the slice, by hand, while pacing your apartment and wondering if you’ll ever stop sweating.”

Whatever your druthers this dubious holiday weekend, we wish you cool breeze, quality time with the little creatures you love, and finger-licking bites. In and out of doors.

10 Canadian poetry books to expand your mind.

By Dawn Macdonald

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July 1, 2025, 10:00am

Canadian poetry—not actually written in maple syrup! Not entirely about beavers! (Although I have certainly written about beavers.) Canada is a complicated place, living in the shadow of the U.S., proudly multicultural but aware of its assimilationist history, reckoning with colonial harms done to Indigenous peoples and called to the work of reconciliation. Canadian poetry is polyphonic, exploratory, and urgent.

Sharon Thesen, ed., The New Long Poem Anthology (2nd edition)

Is it cheating to start with an anthology? This one gives ample space to encounter literary luminaries like Anne Carson, Robert Kroetsch, bpNichol, Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, and more.

rob mclennan, ed., Groundwork: The best of the third decade of above/ground press: 2013-2023

Chapbooks are a vital layer of the poetry ecosystem, where fresh ideas percolate and germinate. The legendary above/ground press has produced hundreds over the past 30-some years, operating out of a basement in Ottawa.

Dany Laferrière, translated from the French by David Homel, The Return

Montréal-based poet Dany Laferrière returns his father’s body to Haiti for burial. Madness ensues.

Kayla Czaga, Midway

Victoria-based poet Kayla Czaga lost both her parents, but she didn’t lose her sense of humor. Canadian humor is weird, at times off-putting. Here it’s mixed with the purest grief.

Zane Koss, Country Music

Reaching back to his origins in interior British Columbia, Zane Koss movingly captures the poetry in the voices of rural and blue-collar oldtimers and bullshitters, and how it feels to have left that way of life.

Wayde Compton, Performance Bond

Wayde Compton is a Vancouver-based poet of mixed Black and European heritage, working a space of encounter and uncertainty. Plus this book comes with a CD! I also need to plug his prose volume Toward an Anti-racist Poetics. It’s short, incisive, and essential.

Liz Howard, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos

This wide-ranging collection shines cosmic light on loss and resilience, through the dual lenses of European and Anishinaabe science.

Jaspreet Singh, Dreams of the Epoch & the Rock

Like all of us, Singh is living in the Anthropocene. Unlike many of us, he finds delight in its absurdities and solace in its interconnections.

R. Kolewe, The Absence of Zero

Through a single book-length poem, Kolowe mines Misner, Thorne and Wheeler’s classic general relativity textbook Gravitation alongside T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and years of his own notebooks. The result is fluid, meditative, and singular.

Karen Solie, Pigeon

There’s newer work from this Ontario-based, Saskatchewan-grown poet, but Pigeon was the first one I read and it sets the bar for brilliance. Karen Solie looks at the most mundane details of the commercialized landscape and, with a few twists, turns them to gold.

Claire Jia! Maris Kreizman! Neeli Cherkovski! 21 new books out today.

By Gabrielle Bellot

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July 1, 2025, 7:22am

I hope you’re all safe and well, Dear Readers, as safe and well as anyone can be in this unsettling moment in a seemingly unending frieze of unsettling moments. No matter what happens, art remains important, both art that helps us heal and feel safe and the art that itself unsettles, and you’ll find both below, all of which I hope helps you make it through these head-shaking times.

Below, you’ll find twenty-one new options to consider in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including a history of the word “like”; a stirring collection of essays from Maris Kreizman on holding America accountable; a roving posthumous collection from the poet Neeli Cherkovski; a look at the good, the bad, and the oh-so-ugly of Clint Eastwood’s complex life and career; Benedict Nguyễn with a timely and delightfully titled new queer and trans volleyball novel; a new international fictional sensation from Francesca Giannone; a fresh look at the divisive figure of Thomas More; and much, much more (but not much more More, just the one, if you catch my meaning).

I hope these bring you some light in all this strangedark. Add these to your lists—it’s worth it.

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Nishant Batsha, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart
(Ecco)

“Loosely based upon the real-life romance of Mexican Communist Party founder M.N. Roy and his first wife, journalist Evelyn Trent, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart chronicles the interior and exterior lives of a couple under siege….Despite being set over a hundred years ago, many of the novel’s themes are strikingly contemporary…provides a glimpse into a fascinating and largely unknown chapter in America’s past.”
–BookPage

Benedict Nguyễn, Hot Girls with Balls
(Catapult)

“Benedict Nguyễn’s Hot Girls with Balls is literal genius: nailbiter sports fiction meets Kathy Acker on EMDR meets our shiny screentime moment, with all the desire & denial & overwhelm & the queer Asian trans girls at the heart of everything that matters. I love this book! It’s so observant & emotionally intelligent & moving & shot through with clarity. SO SO GOOD! & I like volleyball now.”
–Andrea Lawlor

Geovani Martins, Via Ápia (trans. Julia Sanches)
(FSG)

“Geovani Martins has written a funny, tender, kinetic, often brutal debut novel. Via Ápia cracks open a favela—built on a hill whose slope suggests both aspiration and danger—revealing a teeming, vivid motion that can only be found by observing real life without pity or fear. Martins’s eye is sharp, his ear true. Julia Sanches’s translation is hip and contemporary. This book is the beginning of something big.”
–Vinson Cunningham

Maris Kreizman, I Want to Burn This Place Down: Essays
(Ecco)

“What happens when we move from admitting America is no longer working to actively holding it accountable? I Want to Burn This Place Down is Maris Kreizman’s smart, humane and utterly reasonable response to a country that has refused to care for the majority of its citizens—even the ones we are told it favors…timely…a poignant testimonial to her own disillusionment and a powerful indictment of the capitalist cruelty that has brought us to this point.”
–Mira Jacob

Megan C. Reynolds, Like: A History of, Like, the World’s Most Hated and, Like, Misunderstood Word
(HarperOne)

“Valuable books have been written about ‘ain’t,’ ‘okay,’ ‘bullshit,’ and, as the title of Jesse Sheidlower’s classic puts it, ‘the F-word.’ We can add to that list Megan Reynold’s Like, a witty, informative, and thankfully non-judgmental deep dive into that beleaguered but extremely useful word.”
–Ben Yagoda

Joanne Paul, Thomas More: A Life
(Pegasus Books)

“A work of proper scholarly history as well as a wonderful narrative read. More is so often seen as either a saint, i.e. ‘The Man For All Seasons’ or the misogynistic bigot we see in Wolf Hall. In this superb biography, Joanne Paul goes back to the words More wrote himself, to try and get at More before fame and the accusations against him took hold. I so enjoyed the result.”
–Susannah Lipscomb

Marissa Davis, End of Empire
(Penguin Books/Penguin Poets)

“A rich, sprawling work that nods toward biblical and mythological references, history, and rural landscapes….Davis deploys her innovative approach to language and inquiry….The poems look closely at politics, a Kentucky childhood, the Black body, and human resilience with a skill that maps the interconnectedness of people, place, and consequence across time….One is encouraged to return for repeated and close examinations of a truly beautiful work.”
–Booklist

Neeli Cherkovski, The Portrait Gallery Called Existence
(City Lights Books)

“Neeli Cherkovski was a natural born poet. With every portal open to everything and each moment, he breathed poesy from the moment of his birth to his passing. For this last collection, as if to summarize his entire life, he curated a portraiture exhibition of his poetic, creative and biological ‘family’ including his own self-portrait. Here, we see his lineage and the vision ever so clearly.”
–Yuko Otomo

Claire Jia, Wanting
(Tin House)

“Wanting vividly traces the arc of adolescent friendship and love into adult hunger and hope. Whether for a wealthy immigrant YouTuber or the lonely strivers of the world she leaves behind, Claire Jia’s attention to her characters is at once compassionate and unflinching. This is a dazzling portrait of both modern China and the unrelenting ambitions of the human heart.”
–Belinda Huijuan Tang

Kathy Wang, The Satisfaction Café
(Scribner)

“Reading Kathy Wang is like talking to your best friend. The Satisfaction Café evokes the narrative power of classic Anne Tyler, tracing the journey of a Chinese-American woman with Wang’s signature humor, warmth and wisdom. I want to share this novel with everyone.”
–Janice Y. K. Lee

Francesca Giannone, The Letter Carrier (trans. Elettra Pauletto)
(Crown)

“Francesca Giannone brings the sun-soaked vineyards of southern Italy to life in this transportive and poignant novel. The Letter Carrier, set in the difficult decades before and after WWII, is a lush diorama of a village in flux. At the beating heart of it all is Anna, the rule-breaking, bighearted letter carrier, a woman ahead of her time and drawn movingly from the author’s own great-grandmother’s story. An arresting read by an important rising author.”
–Juliet Grames

Shawn Levy, Clint: The Man and the Movies
(Mariner Books)

“Film critic Levy (King of Comedy) argues in this sharp biography that Clint Eastwood is ‘an inkblot in whom we see a variety of opposing ideas at once’….Levy has a knack for memorable phrasing….It makes for a solid account of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the life of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.”
–Publishers Weekly

Nathalia Holt, The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda
(Atria/One Signal)

“Valuable, revelatory, and contagiously page-turning: Holt has reconstructed a 1929 Himalayan expedition in new, immersive detail to show how proving the existence of the giant panda changed the lives of the two eldest sons of the original Teddy Bear, President Theodore Roosevelt, and forever altered the course of wildlife conservation.”
–David Michaelis

Molly Beer, Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution
(Norton)

“n this rich and generous biography, Molly Beer uses an extra-large canvas to paint a portrait of one of the most notable women of the Revolutionary era. In following the course of her remarkable life, Beer fills in the backgrounds of the places she called home, from the very Dutch Albany of the 1750s to New York, London, and Paris. Along the way, we see a nation come into being as one of its founding women adroitly negotiates the social and political landscape.”
–Russell Shorto

Meg Waite Clayton, Typewriter Beach
(Harper)

“Nothing beats Grace Kelly on the Riviera, as seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. But Clayton’s portrait of an aspiring Hitchcock blonde has intrigue to spare. Fledgling star Isabella Giori’s rise is cut short when she gets pregnant, after which she makes a fateful friendship with a blacklisted screenwriter while the McCarthy hearings rage on. Fans of Hollywood’s golden age will fall in love.”
–Publishers Weekly

Rose Keating, Oddbody: Stories
(Simon & Schuster)

“Ten lurid stories of magic, metamorphosis, and real-world longing…Keating builds a macabre world in which her characters are utterly free even within their various compulsions, constraints, and grotesque circumstances. Compassionate, gross, deeply compelling. A must-read.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Nell Stevens, The Original
(Norton)

“What a bewitching book this is. A sinuous, thrilling meditation on fakes and forgers, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters and an audacity that is totally original to Nell Stevens herself.”
–Olivia Laing

Zara Anishanslin, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution
(Harvard University Press)

“We know the American Revolution was fought with words and with arms. But with art? In her creative new book, Zara Anishanslin highlights how painting and sculpture could be surprisingly effective tools in the fight for freedom. No less importantly, she shows how artists of every stripe—men and women, the exiled and the enslaved—were passionately committed to the cause of American liberty.”
–Serena Zabin

Michael Grunwald, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
(Simon & Schuster)

“The quest to feed humanity’s voracious appetites is consuming ever more land around the world. We Are Eating the Earth is an indispensable guide to the thorniest problem in global economics and environmental policy—an issue that most advocates ignore, but that we urgently need to face if we want to have any hope of solving it.”
–Matthew Yglesias

Andrew R. Gallimore, Death by Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug
(St. Martin’s Press)

“Compulsively readable and impossible to put down, Death by Astonishment is a page-turning odyssey into the enigmatic history of the world’s strangest drug. Bringing together many of the most pivotal stories in psychedelic history, Gallimore not only connects the dots but also fills in the missing pieces, shedding new light on the mysteries of this extraordinary molecule.”
–David Jay Brown

Morgan Pager, The Art of Vanishing
(Ballantine Books)

“With irrepressible whimsy and a premise so original it enchants you instantly, The Art of Vanishing is a magical debut. Part love story, part heist, Morgan Pager’s novel is the perfect portal fantasy for anyone who has ever wandered a museum and wondered about the worlds, works, and lives on display. I flew through the pages and fell hard for this imaginative jewel.”
—Katy Hays

The Supreme Court just approved anti-LGBT book bans.

By James Folta

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June 27, 2025, 2:41pm

On the last day of its term, America’s highest court gave legal backing to bigoted attempts to ban books and to erase queer people from public life.

In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court ruled that Montgomery County in Maryland must alert parents and provide a means for children to opt out of hearing books featuring gay and transgender characters.

The dissent from Justice Sotomayor is worth reading, as she makes clear that this is a broad and destructive ruling that “threatens the very essence of public education.” She makes the obvious connections that this will lead to more book bannings and more stigma:

Sotomayor, in dissent, correctly says that today's decision in Mahmoud will lead public schools to simply censor books featuring LGBTQ characters and themes, creating "chaos" and stigmatizing children with LGBTQ families. This decision will lead to book bans.www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p…

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) 2025-06-27T15:00:34.020Z

It’s simply not feasible for most schools to manage the logistics of providing opt-out spaces. It’s simpler to stop reading books the right could object to, which as Sotomayor writes, “hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices.”

To be clear, the books at the heart of this case are picture books like Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, about a gay character’s marriage, and Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, about a transgender kid. These are the things the right is working overtime to crush.

This case will no doubt be a boon to other attempts at book banning legislation. It’s bad, and this isn’t even addressing the Court’s other decisions today, which ended birthright citizenship and limited federal injunctions on executive orders.

The craven hypocrisy of all this no longer registers for the right. Republicans eagerly embrace censorship when it means they can force aside anything they don’t like, while cowering beneath the “freedom of the marketplace of ideas” when they are called out for their noxious beliefs. The right mocks safe spaces, while demanding their own at the expense of kids. They talk about “hardening classrooms for safety” by filling schools with weapons, while making classrooms actively hostile for any non-normative kid.

The right is savagely clear about who they are and what they want. Their cruelty is wielded without shame or restraint.

And Americans are clear about how they feel: we just witnessed some of the largest protests in American history against the Trump Administration and are seeing poll after poll showing that people overwhelming hate this, all of it.

Will any Democratic politician take meaningful action? Will anyone stand up for kids, for queer people, for books? Concern about technical illegality or a speech hand-waving at the wrong process—the liberal equivalent of “thoughts and prayers”—isn’t enough. This isn’t an episode of The West Wing.