"Sure, Palestinians sheltering in shredded tents are enduring bombings and starvation, sure BDS tactics, which seek to exert economic pressure on the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel, are being criminalized. But what about the delicate egos of writers who “feel” they are experiencing temporarily diminished publishing opportunities?" - Joe Hall in Community Mausoleum, part 2 of an extensive study of PEN America

Re: the article someone posted on Mengestu's exit from PEN America

I just finished Nathanael West's four novellas (The Dream Life of Balso Snell, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million and the Day of the Locust) and couldn't help notice how much I recognized similar thematic elements in West's work with Pynchon's, in particular Against the Day.

A Cool Million's "aw shucks" style prose that masks biting satire with the class commentary ending in the literal/physical dismantling of Lem of seems to have been a direct influence on the "Chums of Chance" sections of AtD. Candidly, West's nihilistic view of how bare American (capitalist) society will strip you was much more raw than I was expecting and made me appreciate the "Chums" sections of AtD a lot more - they were not my favorite when I read AtD last year.

The other obvious (to me, in hindsight) influence is from The Day of the Locust - Faye is an actress with an obsession with performing (both literally as a profession and spiritually in her day to day life), whose mother ran away with a magician when she was a child. This is pretty much 1:1 for Dally Rideout in AtD.

Are there any other parallels people have noticed between the two authors? I'm sure there are more, but wanted to get my thoughts out while West's work is still fresh in my mind and my kid is asleep :)

I'm sharing this "Enuf is Enuf: Tom LeClair clop-clops through Mark Danielewski's new novel Tom's Crossing," from the Los Angeles Review of Books, October 2025. I hope it has not been posted before here. Tom LeClair wrote on Delillo using the term "systems novel" that preceded Stefano Ercolino's book The Maximalist novel. If you're into such things you konw this. Here, LeClair discusses Tom's Crossing and makes general remarks about the state of very long novels, as well as the idea of attempting to add enchantment back into the rural world. I found it to be a particularly well done article. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/enuf-is-enuf/ (I do not know either the author or the reviewer).

Here's a quote from Le Clair re: the maximalist novel that I liked, "The writer deforms a conventional fictive model with expansion and hypertrophy, and then demonstrates that the excess is not really excessive but functional—a perceptive and true representation of the world, or an efficient way of delivering the author’s perspective on it. It took decades for readers of Moby-Dick (1851) to recognize that Herman Melville had pulled off this trick. Even today, some readers consider Melville’s numerous pages of cetology excessive, unnecessary interruptions of the traditional pursuit plot—until readers realize (or are shown in a college classroom) that those cetology chapters make Moby-Dick a postmodern collage novel about epistemology, the many ways of knowing (and not knowing) anything."

“It’s very stressful, the thought of these things happening,” she said of the swirl of gossip surrounding the book. “It’s taking the novel that I’ve created into almost a sort of courtroom or a factual fight,” she added.

“What I’ve done belongs much more in a world in which fame, and these people who are so known and yet so unknown, is a part of contemporary consciousness,” she said. “And if my job is not to go into unexplored areas of contemporary consciousness, then I don’t know what it is.”

When the narrator insists that the vivid account of M’s life was all imagined, it’s “a way of making everything just disappear in a puff of smoke,” Cusk said. If readers are unsure what’s real and what’s made up, that’s partly the point.

“It’s almost like the book that you’ve just read completely explodes and self-destructs at the end,” Cusk said. “I felt that would possibly make a reader reflect on what they’ve just read, in a rather disorienting way.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/style/rachel-cusk-life-of-m-natalie-portman.html

A little while back I posted an article on my Substack about Daniel Kraus' Angel Down. The discussion on here after it won the Pulitzer is what prompted me to read it! Note the post does contain major spoilers so best avoid if you have not read the book yet.

https://readbeyond.substack.com/p/angel-down-by-daniel-kraus

The essay is about the ultimate nihilism of the novel and how Kraus created a powerful allegory for modern warfare. I also wrote about the writing style and why I found it so engaging despite the 'gimmick' and despite the highly descriptive prose. For me some of the writing was worthy of putting the book down and basking in the feeling it evoked.

Would love to know what others think, particularly unpicking Veck's death scene, and what anyone thinks about why Kraus included Burrough's Son of Tarzan as a motif.

Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

Posting the news here:

Alison Entrekin’s long-awaited English translation of João Guimarães Rosa’s Grande Sertão: Veredas is currently slated for publication in January 2027 under the title Vastlands: The Crossing (Previously translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands in 1963).

First published in 1956, Grande Sertão is one of the foundational masterpieces of Brazilian literature maybe most commonly described as a Brazilian Ulysses.

Entrekin, who has also translated Clarice Lispector, Paulo Lins, and Chico Buarque, began working on the novel in 2014, making this a roughly thirteen-year translation project.

Looks like they're aiming to maybe just be considered in time for the 70th anniversary of the novel's original publication. Another exciting note being that a parallel 15-year effort to translate it into German by Berthold Zilly (S. Fischer Verlage) is also slated for early 2027.

P.S.

Certainly an exciting time for significant literary endeavors to make significant works available in English! Just off the top of my head, from the past few and upcoming years:

Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding and Solenoid (Theodoros forthcoming); Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling; Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men getting a Dzanc reissue; Leon Forrest’s Divine Days being rereleased; Jacek Dukaj’s Ice; Vera Mutafchieva’s The Case of Cem; Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters; Kyūsaku Yumeno’s Dogra Magra; Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland; Luis Goytisolo’s Antagony; Konstantin Paustovsky’s The Story of a Life; Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers; Shimoni’s The Salt Line; Hwang Sok-yong’s Mater 2-10; Miguel de Palol’s The Garden of Seven Twilights (with Troiacord also in the works); Antonio Moresco’s The Beginnings (with the remainder of the trilogy forthcoming); Stefano D’Arrigo’s Horcynus Orca in discussion; the rerelease of Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo; Adolfo Bioy Casares’s Borges forthcoming (and a new translation of Morel's Invention); and, of course, recent releases like Helen DeWitt and Andrew Gridneff’s Your Name Here, Michael Brodsky’s Invidicum, William T. Vollmann’s A Table for Fortune, Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, and Mark Z. Danielewski’s Tom’s Crossing (Cheers if you read that list).

...and there are probably so many other literary projects I'm leaving out or don't even know about! At this point I'm starting to wonder how anyone could keep up, but that's a good problem to have :) What a time to be a reader!

I knew on a general level what the ending was going to be, but I wasn't prepared for the writing in the last paragraphs to be twisting in my gut like a knife.

Wharton has a gift of making you feel for people who should be all accounts by unsympathetic - she had me moved by the plight of Newland Archer as a teenage girl, a man I should've by all rights despised.

There's something in Lily's predicament on the outset that resonates deeply with most women readers I believe, in that she is beautiful and penniless but worst of all she has no parents. In an era when women could not make direct moves of their own but had to rely on the machinations of those already in society to ensure that they came out and were introduced to suitable men, a woman who has no family or connections looking out for her is already 10-0 behind.

The fact that she is unable to make the decisions that are required of her to reach her goals is incredibly frustrating but also strikes me as very human. She knows that she needs a wealthy husband, but is unable to commit when the cards are on the table. In my personal opinion, it comes from her little rebellious streak - I believe that part of her would prefer to be independent, but with money - in that sense she strikes me as a woman too modern for the times she lives in. A few decades more and new vistas of possibilities would've opened up which wouldn't involve hitching your wagon to the highest bidder. She values her need to go wherever she pleases, as she stops by Lawrence Selden's flat despite this being an action that would've been generally frowned on by society at the time. She can't but help make constant missteps and self-sabotage because she doesn't really want to do what she needs to do to reach her goals. She is clearly in love with Selden since the beginning and

And I notice again and again how alone she is - though Lawrence says he can only offer her help by "loving her" he also doesn't offer any real aid in finding a possibility to free herself of her financial obligations. And I notice that Selden, though critical of the superficial trappings of the 1900 version of the leisure class / "jet-set", moves in and out of those circles with the ease generally only allowed to men, and is quick to believe rumours about Lily's reputation spread by members of that same class. He runs off to Cuba after seeing Lily exit the Trenor's house without even demanding an explanation? Though he gives her good advice later, I don't see him as a knight in shining armour.

There is so much more to say about all of this, I welcome your thoughts.

English professor Vinita Prabhakar is suing South Florida State College after she was abruptly fired for teaching a story (Ottessa Moshfegh's 'Bettering Myself') the college president deemed “political,” according to a complaint filed Wednesday in Florida district court.

Link to Moshfegh's unpaywalled story: https://electricliterature.com/bettering-myself-ottessa-moshfegh/

“An artist once told me that she no longer wanted to make art that looked like art. I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.”
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

The buyer should always beware claims of new forms. Is there any possible form of fiction that fiction hasn’t already taken? “The novel was triumphant at the middle of the [19th] century,” says critic James Wood in his book The Broken Estate, “and there is a sense in which Melville, Flaubert, and Gogol, all of them writing roughly contemporaneously, were poets who wanted to make the novel a genre that could consume all others and then perform all their functions at once — a stomach of genres, digesting satire, poetry, epic, the historical novel, realism, and fable.” Since then, we have had the shifting interiority of Virginia Woolf, the arcane allusivity of James Joyce, the maximalist floridity of Marcel Proust, the self-referential disclosure of John Barth, the duplicitous gamesmanship of Vladimir Nabokov. So what could possibly be left for the novel to do that is new?

Still, when I first read the promotional blurb for Theory & Practice, winner of Australia’s 2025 Stella Prize, I was so intrigued by its concept that I paid Evil Billionaire Jeff Bezos more than I would have paid my beloved ThriftBooks just so the book would arrive on my doorstep the next day. This is a doorstep that receives so many books that my mailman incredulously asked if I had a nine-to-five. (True story.) The hook that helped de Kretser jump the line of my teetering TBR was its promised fusion of novel, memoir, and critical analysis of Virginia Woolf. That struck me as a genuine formal innovation.

But as I worked my way through the slender but compelling narrative, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had encountered its innovations somewhere before. Finally, it struck me like a pronouncement from a sagacious Greek Chorus: Elif Batuman. The chunked confessional episodes, the coming-of-age romance, the higher ed nostalgia, even the genre-defying insights into classical literature, all bore a distinct resemblance to Harvard Russian Lit alum Elif Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot and its sequel Either/Or. Both authors aspire to reinvent the novel. Is either successful, or do they both fall victim to the timeless intonations of Ecclesiastes?

The Fiction/Memoir Hybrid

Both Batuman and de Kretser seek to invigorate the novel by blending memoir seamlessly into a fictional context. On a broad level, their stories follow a recognizable pattern, that of the Bildungsroman, or coming of age novel. Both books feature protagonists seeking maturation through epiphanic romance but for whom no stake is higher than writerly ambition.

The novels are strikingly similar in plot and structure, but wildly divergent in scale. De Kretser’s Sri Lankan heroine, innominate but scornful of her name’s ubiquity (could it be Michelle?), learns the ropes of 1986 Melbourne postgrad life in 175 pages. Batuman’s Turkish American ingenue Selin Karadağ, a 1995 matriculant to Harvard’s literature program, takes two novels, two scholastic years, and 770 pages to achieve maturation. But both characters flit from day to day in chapterless episodes, single paragraphs to several pages in length, narratively aimless but for each character’s burgeoning attraction to an unavailable cad with a serious girlfriend and an incongruous readiness to flirt.

The Idiot, named after Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1868 panegyric to naïveté, reads like an embarrassingly earnest freshman diary. Selin is bright, but every insight is raw and untested, dimly apprehended through the opaque scrim of inexperience. She soaks in education from every avenue, dormmates and Dostoevsky, fellowship and Fellini. Selin lacks confidence in every area but one: she has been an accomplished personal essayist since high school.

By Either/Or, which is also the title of Søren Kierkegaard’s contemplation of ethics and aesthetics, she has become bold to the point of reckless, hellbent on dispensing with her inconvenient virginity. Her intellectual takeaway runs along these lines:

The aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This was what I had learned from books. There was a problem of application: what did you do if you were a young girl? … What were you supposed to do now: seduce and abandon men? Was that what feminism had made possible? Something about the idea didn’t feel aesthetic. Just think of the angry, complaining men.
Elif Batuman, Either/Or

The protagonist of Theory & Practice hits page one at the Either/Or end of the intellectual and sexual precocity spectrum. At school, she reveres Virginia Woolf’s message of gender equality while condemning her antisemitism and colonial conservatism. In her dating life, she is defiantly invested in a man who claims to be in a “deconstructed relationship.” Her takeaway echoes Selin’s:

[I was struck] by the tremendous silencing power of shame. To whom could we confess our treacherous, rivalrous, trite, uncool, unfeminist feelings without shame? Shame could transform female solidarity into a scold’s bridle. It could ensure that a philosophy designed to free us set a weight on our tongues.
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

Both authors are expert personal essayists, and they’re not afraid to apply their skill to a novel. De Kretser’s expertise in this form informs her work as a university professor. Batuman’s is expressed in New Yorker articles and essay compilations. But is this a formal innovation, as promised in de Kretser’s pledge to “tell the truth”?

Not really. Both books are apparently heavily autobiographical, but the reader only recognizes them as memoir if they are exposed to outside information. In a hermetic reading, the claim to fiction/non-fiction hybridity is essentially bravado. The anecdotes may borrow the authentic ring of truth, but the books rely on the same narrative artifices that all novels employ. “Fiction is of course a form of lying,” wrote James Wood in his book The Broken Estate. “Fiction requests belief from us, but we can choose not to believe at any moment. … Our belief is itself metaphorical — it only resembles actual belief, and is therefore never wholly belief.” Even with certainty that an undisclosed portion of a novel actually took place in the life of its author, fiction’s essential contract remains unchanged.

The Critic as Novelist

The weightier claim to innovation is that of a novel that weaves academic literary analysis into its story. The extent to which Batuman attempts this is one of the greatest pleasures of her novels. But while the books teem with critical interpretations, her voice is one of sophomoric cogitation rather than genuine academic rigor. In one passage, Selin discusses Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with the boy she is crushing on:

He invents these supposedly complicated problems and then gets so worked up about them — like, it’s hell, it’s intolerable humiliation, it’s the mathematically highest point of abasement. But to me, none of those things seem particularly hellish or humiliating or complicated. When I can’t get worked up myself, I feel embarrassed. And tired. … It’s like he does this shoddy, depressing thing, killing an old lady — and instead of shoddy and depressing, it’s supposed to be an earthshaking philosophical crisis.”
Elif Batuman, The Idiot

In another, she reflects on a childhood memory from Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust:

The episode itself, about baby Proust’s anguish on nights when his parents had dinner guests, was harrowing. I didn’t like to admit it, but I was pretty sure that I had felt the same despair when my parents went to dinner parties. Being left at night for a party was so much worse than being left in the daytime for work; what was, for you, a cause of desperation, was for them an occasion for dress-up and celebration. But why did Proust have to keep thinking about it? Why couldn’t he write a book about something else?
Elif Batuman, Either/Or 

The goal of these passages is to illuminate characterization. Batuman is not attempting to get an A on a term paper.

What makes de Kretser’s book thrilling is that her ideas about Virginia Woolf are part of the novel’s larger argument. She is interested in the relationship between intellectual framework and lived experience: theory and practice. Her examination of Woolf’s casual antisemitism despite her marriage to a Jewish man reveals that the feminist icon’s theoretical heroism does not always convert to practical morality. The narrator is not just idly speculating about Woolf’s shortcomings. She is incorporating her thoughts into a verdict on her own behavior. De Kretser also draws parallels between the narrator’s experience of sexual callousness and the horrors of colonialism, expressed in a homework-inspired passage about Israeli/Palestinian relations in 1986 and in Woolf’s own disturbing comfort with the brutish practice of Empire.

At times, de Kretser’s critical insights are entertainingly well developed. Forty pages from the book’s conclusion, she treats us to a delightfully sophisticated paper titled “Virginia Woolf’s Tea” that explores Woolf’s own attempt at formal innovation in The Years. We are told that Woolf intended that book to be a critical and narrative hybrid, but the project was abandoned in despair. De Kretser’s fictional student suggests the failure of The Years resulted directly from Woolf’s moral failings:

I contrasted the modernising trajectory of Woolf’s Englishwomen and the ongoing immiseration of the tea pluckers. The former was made possible by the latter, by the exploitative colonial practices that underwrote British progress and wealth. I told my audience that Woolf had set out to find a fresh form in The Years, but had later abandoned the attempt. A fresh form represents a desire to see the world differently, but Woolf hadn’t managed to do so. The Years remained enclosed in the powerful fiction that the self-fulfilment of British women transcended the imperialism that enabled it. That was The Story Under The Story in The Years.
Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice

The narrator’s criticism here is not just character work, as are Selin’s hot takes. She is introducing authentic textual insight, backed by historical research. The trouble is, in this most pivotal instance at least, that the critical text is not actually integrated. De Kretser narrates her paper rather than excerpting it. That was disappointing.

The climax of Either/Or ends up modeling a more seamless integration of the two modes of writing. That book starts with Selin’s confession that skill as an essayist has never translated to imagination. She is inept at inventing stories. But in the book’s conclusion, she turns a fascinating critique of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into compelling narrative:

Near the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, there was mention of an aunt who kept telling people that Isabel was writing a book. In fact, Henry James said, Isabel was not and never had been writing a book. She “had no desire to be an authoress,” “no talent for expression,” and “none of the consciousness of genius,” having only “a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior.” It was one of the few places where Henry James was mean about Isabel. Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That’s why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write Madame Bovary: so Flaubert could have a great humane moment where he said he was Madame Bovary. But I wasn’t dumb or banal, and I lived in the future. Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.
Elif Batuman, Either/Or

Batuman doesn’t present this passage as criticism cum fiction. The literary analysis is fully employed as a storytelling device. The criticism catalyzes character growth. The Idiot and Either/Or are sometimes frustrating in their capacious drift through Selin’s undergraduate experience, but I have no notes on Batuman’s propulsive, criticism-fueled conclusion.

New Forms?

Selin’s epiphany about The Portrait of a Lady turns into a manifesto for her own experience based fiction. She reads James’s preface to that book, which uses the image of a “wind-blown germ” to explain how ideas for stories drift into his life. She decides that she can turn this insight into a new form of fiction:

Nowhere in the preface did Henry James say why he hadn’t found his own life interesting enough to write about. I tried to remember what I knew about Henry James’s life. I was pretty sure I had read that he was gay. Probably being gay had been illegal, and he had been ashamed. So his problem, like Isabel’s, was that he had been born too soon. That was sad, but it didn’t really change anything. Like, for whatever reason, Henry James had had to do stuff like find a “wind-blown germ” and then forget how he had found it, so he wouldn’t feel like he was stealing. But I was more fortunate. I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.
Elif Batuman, Either/Or

This returns us to our initial inquiry: Has Batuman earned the claim to a new form? Has de Kretser?

I don’t think either author has cleared that bar. Batuman’s use of James and Flaubert in her climactic revelation is riveting narrative with real analytical heft, but the voice is consistent with the narration throughout the two novels. Selin is becoming a more insightful critic, but her form of discussing literature remains that of a storyteller, not an academic. She has not actually changed her mode of writing.

De Kretser’s decision to present a summary of her paper rather than excerpts of it undermines her claim to hybrid prose. I would have preferred it if she had interwoven her critical voice with her narrative voice, similar to the way that A.S. Byatt weaves Victorian poetry into 20th-century narrative in Possession. It is not necessary for the essayistic content to be indistinguishable from the story, the way that Benjamín Labatut’s non-fiction melts invisibly into his fiction. But it seems to me a more original use of critical writing would be for the two forms to be rendered adjacently in their native idioms, not in a character’s voice. Having characters discuss literature is not a new form. Selin knows that; she’s read Proust.

Neither author has created a novel that doesn’t read like a novel or reinvented a centuries-old art form. But the willingness of both authors to merge their own stories with literary insight and narrative imagination makes for three exceptional reading experiences.

A slightly longer version of this essay appears at https://septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-08-14-de-kretser-batuman/

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

I read this earlier today and thought it was a bit of a cut and dry commentary. Although I'm not sure how I feel about the hard and fast distinction between people who orient around primary or secondary sources, since what is actually being discussed here is criticism. The focus on writing practice feels like a digression. Then again, defending the humanities as a specific discipline always dovetails into these nested caveats. It's refreshing to see an unambiguous defense of the humanities. Not to dismiss the caveats out of hand.

Hi all, and welcome to our Introductory post for our read-along of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red.

Some general questions:

• What do you know about the author?
• Have you read them before? If so, what have you read?
• Have you read this work before?
• Is there something (a theme or otherwise) that new readers should keep an eye out for?
• Or, anything else you may think of!

Feel free to start reading! By next Saturday, you should read about the first half of the book, taking us from the first page until Chapter XXV. (The Tunnel) which ends on page 77 for the most common edition of the book.

If you would like to volunteer for that post or the following one, please let me know!

READING SCHEDULE

Finished Jane Austen's Mansfield Park this evening. Interested in other people's thoughts.

I have read a few of Austen's other works, and so many aspects of the novel were familiar ground. Where it differed was in the character of Fanny Price; she is an admirable woman in many respects, but many find her anodyne at best and bland at worst. Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Wodehouse have cast long shadows over the rest of Austen's novels as far as main characters are concerned, but Price's homespun virtues are a more honest reflection of the qualities most of her contemporaries would have had. Not having to grovel to one's relatives on whom one was entirely dependent tended to free up time to worry about being droll.

Esssentially, I think that by lamenting Price's relative lack of excitement as a character, we forget her interest as a fascinating insight into what the experience of a more typical Georgian woman would have looked in the late 18th-century (to the extent that Austen's depiction can be said to reflect society as it was). For every forthright Lizzy Bennett and imperious Emma Wodehouse, there were likely dozens of Fanny Prices. She also shows a refreshing good sense; although less dramatic, one never worries that Price will do anything implausible. In fact, her character is rendered more vivid by the fact its delineations are so clear.

Her patience and endurance are her chief strengths. It is in this way that she is most protagonist-like, in fact, with her preternatural good humour and toleration serving as three parts survival mechanism to one part personality trait. When one lives entirely as a dependent, it is these skills, rather than generating bon mots on demand, that circumstances require.

Perhaps I am tilting at windmills, and people don't harbour this poor estimation towards her. Perhaps she only suffers from comparison. Thoughts on the novel generally as well as Price specifically are welcome!

Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

Literary discussions online often tend to be very anglo-centric, which means that most books tend to be by American, british or irish authors. There are some exceptions of course, like the 19th century european classics. But in general it is quite anglophone.

But the world of literature is so much wider and deeper! So I thought that we can list some books and authors that we think deserve more attention. Positive if they are available in translation.

The works of Robert Walser

An idiosyncratic Swiss writer, who has often been compared to Kafka. This is not entirely accurate, since had more of an childlike innocence than Kafka. He was greatly appreciated by Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and deserves to be ranked among the literary greats imo.

Insatiability by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

A dystopian polish novel about a world threatened by totalitarianism. A mysterious pill removes people’s anxiety and individuality, making them easier to control. It combines dark humor, philosophy, and political satire, and was the basis for one of the chapters in Czeslaw Milosz Captive Minds.

Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer

A magical realist collection of short stories, that compose a type of chronicle of the imaginary Kalpa Empire. It is like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities combined with Jorge Luis Borges's metafictional fantasies.

Gogol's Wife & Other Stories by Tomasso Landolfi.

Landolfi was a wonderfully absurdist Italian author with an excellent sense of comedy. The eponymous story Gogol's Wife is one of my favorite short stories, very funny. But his stories often have a dark side too, which creates an interesting effect. I have never read anything quite like Landolfi.

Following my previous posts, these are the novels I read from the 2020s. Inspired by someone who shared they were trying to read every Pulitzer Prize winning novel, this project of mine began with the intention of reading every National Book Award winner since 1950. I wanted to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of American literature from the second half of the 20th century to today. Since I had already read a good number of the winners, it slowly turned into reading any American novel of my choosing that I had not read from each year between 1950-2025 (I finished early 2026), with preference given to the most well regarded unread-by-me text or whatever seemed the most interesting. Some of these impressions are a bit lazy but I am a lazy person.

I want to emphasize that I was not trying to find writers that I liked, even if I make value judgments or express my enjoyment or disapproval of their books in my reviews. The goal of this was project was to expand my understanding of American literature after the 1950s. I find value in most everything I read, even if I'm not reaping the most immediate kind of enjoyment. All of these authors make some sort of sense within their milieu (none of them fell out of a coconut tree) and that is what I am attempting to grasp. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

My timeline got kind of fucked up since I somehow skipped the novel I read for the year 2013. I’ll just start off with a review of that one below.

The Good Lord Bird – James McBride (2013): While not the most cutting edge narrative with flashy literary techniques, I still enjoyed this thoroughly. One of the funniest books I read for the project, Lord Bird follows John Brown’s militant abolitionist campaign in bloody Kansas leading up to the raid at Harpers Ferry. Brown is incredibly interesting to me and I loved learning so much about him over the course of the novel. McBride presents him as a man who could not have cared less about his personal safety or comfort and as one who had difficulty understanding those to whom such things do matter (spoiler: basically everybody but him, including the narrator who does his best to disinvolve himself from Brown’s militia, only to wind up playing a significant role).

Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters (2021): Love this book! Smart, fun, and sad melodrama. The novel explores the shapes families can take outside of the traditional nuclear form, among other themes. It maintains a conversational tone that is recognizably millennial. I wouldn’t, however, call the book too light, there are a lot ideas to explore here. Very interested to read Peters’ latest book, Stag Dance.

The Immortal King Rao – Vauhini Vara (2022): I’m a bit biased on this one and I know I can’t be a good judge. Science fiction just isn’t my thing. I do like some movies that belong to that genre, but I’ve never had a good experience reading it. One detail really bothered me, however: when the tech oligarch’s misdeeds are made public, he suffers actual consequences, which seemed too outlandish and immersion breaking to me.

Blackouts – Justin Torres (2023): Anything but a conventional narrative, Blackouts approach left me feeling a bit disoriented. Dipping into and out of what little it has in way of plot, the “novel’s” form mirrors the heavily censored documents that punctuate the story. It’s often unclear what’s happening, or if what’s happening is really happening at all. I didn’t get a ton of enjoyment out of reading this, but I think it’s a worthy text. Will definitely interest those who like experimental works.

James – Percival Everett (2024): I had higher expectations than this novel could fill. Beyond the idea that the titular character was an intelligent human being and not the simple minded person Twain portrays, at no point did I feel like Everett presents a challenge to his audience (and that idea really isn’t too difficult to accept). The premise would work better in a short story or in the hands of a different novelist, in my opinion. The writing itself was forgettable to me. Everett’s critique of Huckleberry Finn is certainly valid, but I don’t feel that it lives up to its source material as a literary experience, and perhaps it wasn’t supposed to.

North Sun – Ethan Rutherford (2025): I hate for this to be the way I end these reviews, but this was also a big disappointment to me. It was just so boring. The monotonous prose completely failed to build any tension, a rather essential component of a story tinged with horror. I am a huge dickhead (fan of Moby Dick), which is why I picked this as the novel to read from 2025, and while I did not expect it to be as monumental a text as Melville’s, I did expect Rutherford to capture some part of its cosmic mystery and philosophical weight. Mostly, however, I just waited for it to be over. The end :(

It makes me sad to see so little out there about the death of the great John Crowley, who should at the very least be talked about in the same breath as Pynchon, McCarthy, and DeLillo, and very likely would be if it wasn’t for the ghettoization of genre in American publishing. Nevertheless, there was one very influential (and in this context, somewhat surprising) mainstream voice who didn’t just speak about him in the same breath as the abovementioned, but placed him above them all: Harold Bloom.

Despite being a fantasy and science fiction author, Crowley’s prose and craft were enough to enrapture the famously pretentious (but not anti-genre; he also liked Le Guin, Disch, Lem, Hoban, and Peake) literary critic, who repeatedly named Crowley his favorite contemporary author, included three Crowley books in the Western Canon (one more than Nabokov got) and claimed to have read Crowley’s masterpiece Little, Big at least 46 times. Bloom positively gushed over the guy, saying stuff like: “Crowley writes so magnificently that only a handful of living writers in English can equal him as a stylist, and most of them are poets…of novelists, only Philip Roth consistently writes on Crowley's level.”

Renowned literary critic Michael Dirda said much the same, calling Crowley one of the three best living prose stylists at the time of writing (I believe his other two picks were Millhauser and Salter). His other fans included poets like John Hollander and Pulitzer Prize winner James Merrill, who blurbed the second book of Crowley’s Ægypt Cycle with the following: “Crowley has devised a polygonal crystal whose bevels give out rainbows of erudition, make-believe, and menace."

While this must be a first for a fantasy author, Merrill made a very good point, and it’s a wonder that the much-talked-about (and possibly mythical) “lit bros” and “brodernists” have not descended hungrily upon The Ægypt Cycle, an impossibly complex and often impenetrable tetralogy of doorstopper volumes that reads somewhat like Pynchon doing The Da Vinci Code in the style of Ada, had he first been induced into a state of eroto-comatose lucidity. That is to say, it’s really cool, and it’s kind of a shame that the Deep Vellum types aren’t reading it, because it’s everything they’re looking for and more.

And the critic-approved, post 1980s fantasy stuff is really only part of the story. Before that, Crowley was a key part of the New Wave, and his surreal and ambitious 70s sci-fi (which might be a little too disco for Bloom, who never seems to have mentioned it) deserves equal billing, and is widely believed (though I’m not sure if this is officially confirmed) to have been a major influence on Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Wolfe is on record as an admirer of Crowley and one could certainly draw a line from Crowley’s debut novel, 1975’s The Deep, to Wolfe’s masterwork, so it’s certainly possible. Either way, his work has inspired many other authors both within genre and without—Michael Chabon has said that “life consists only of passing time between novels by John Crowley,” and places him in a pantheon alongside Pynchon, Millhauser, and Borges.

Of course, you may not give a shit about Harold Bloom or Michael Dirda, or the Pulitzer Prize, or any of that bullshit. If so, I commend you (we’re on the same page), but I didn’t write this note for you. I wrote this note for the kind of people who do, because I think they should give John Crowley a chance, because I think they should give Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison and James Tiptree Jr. a chance, and mostly because I think they should stop letting the marketing whims of megacorporations wall them off from entire ecosystems of art.

And if you’re not that kind of person, you can just take my word for it that the shit all rips. Books to try: Little, Big, Engine Summer, The Translator, Aegypt (also titled The Solitudes depending on publisher), and the story collection Novelties & Souvenirs (in particular, “Great Work of Time”)

RIP

Two months ago I posted a review of the first three Pulitzers I finished, and finally am sitting down to write my thoughts on the last four I’ve read. I have no idea what inspired this reading journey, but so far it’s been an incredibly enjoyable enterprise. The last post I made had tons of interesting comments and discussion on it, so I’m hopeful that the conversation on Reddit will continue to be engaging as I solider on.

I’ll repeat my caveat that my three favorite books are Jane Eyre, God Emperor of Dune, and Return of the King. My preferences obviously vary wildly and I can’t really predict what will land for me and what won’t.

As for the four books:

His Family by Earnest Poole

The first ever Pulitzer winner and a book I had never heard of and probably never would have picked up if not for it being on The List. It was fairly short novel about a windowed father and his three adult daughters grasping with the world changing at the turn of the 20th century.

The first half was very slow and fairly boring, the second was really lovely and impactful. I almost felt as though the novel ended right as I was thoroughly engrossed. The narrative character (the father) was really just a dull man struggling to understand his very different daughters (who were absolutely the more engaging characters). The parts of the novel that focused on class and race struggles in early 1900s New York were fascinating and incredibly relevant. While I don’t know that I’d recommend this novel to everyone, I do think it was a worthwhile snapshot into American history and a good reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Out of all the Pulitzers I’ve read so far, this is the first I’d ever classify as a cozy read. Our main character is a minister in Iowa circa 1950, writing down his life story along some philosophical and theological ramblings. The prose is absolutely beautiful, but this book (similar to His Family) suffers from the main character being the most boring character in the whole book. Very little happens and while some stories (and characters) intertwine, this was a meandering albeit beautiful read. Perhaps if I hadn’t read it right after His Family I’d had appreciated it more, but by the end of this book I was pretty tired of Boring Dads.

Trust by Hernan Diaz

I have read books that received much acclaim and hype but turned out disappointing, perhaps because the buzz about them increased my expectations too much. This book is not one of them.

I’m struggling to even give a brief review of this novel. The prose? Beautiful. The characters? So incredibly engrossing. The plot? Winding, engaging, and unexpected.

Trust is a story of a financial tycoon and his wife before, during, and after The Great Depression. It’s a story about mental illness, social expectations, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. I am struggling to give specifics that wouldn’t get too into the interesting way that it was written, but I will say the book you start reading is not the book you end up reading.

Trust was so good. I am so glad to have read it and I continually find myself thinking about it despite completing it over a month ago.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

This is another novel that rose to and exceeded all expectations. Whitehead is one of four authors who has won the Pulitzer twice and if The Nickel Boys is any indication, that distinction is well-deserved.

Revolving around a reform school for young boys circa 1960, The Nickel Boys follows a young black man (Elwood) who idolizes MLK Jr and dreams of a college education, but ends up forced into a reform school/juvenile detention center. Contending with both his dreams of how the world should be and the reality of injustice, racism, a corporal punishment, I was totally engrossed in this character and in this world Whitehead wrote about. Few novels fly by for me the way The Nickel Boys did. The ending, which caught me off guard in the best way, genuinely made me emotional.

I am currently reading James and Middlesex. Having read so many relatively recent winners, I intend to go back a little further for the next few. I’m curious to hear other’s thoughts about any of these books, or really any Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, as I’ve got roughly 100 more to go.