Books
Story Stream
The Illusion of Rescue in 'Alice or The Wild Girl' September 30, 2025
Literature loves to celebrate rescue as salvation. From Greek myth and the Bible through medieval romance, saving someone is framed as heroic deliverance—Perseus unchains Andromeda, knights free maidens from dragons and wed them. Scripture promises s...
The West Needs To Rediscover Religion & Enchantment September 30, 2025
Rod Dreher has a gift for prognostication. Well before anyone could see the rise of populist conservatism in reaction to encroaching secularism and institutional decline, Dreher wrote The Benedict Option, which described this evolution. Published in ...
Which Big Fall Book Should You Read? September 30, 2025
Fall is the season of Big Books: the mega-hyped, the much-recommended, the written-by-celebrities, and the actually good. And despite the fact that the world is ending even more than usual this season, the books just keep on coming. So how can the di...
The Showers Will Continue September 30, 2025
I was showering the other morning and started thinking about prison showers. No, not because of that. But because I was in the process of reading and thinking deeply about John J. Lennon’s new book, The Tragedy of True Crime. I’m going to be in conve...
The New Political Religion—and How to Fight It September 30, 2025
To read Paul Gottfried is to engage in a kind of political archaeology, to sift through the semantic rubble of a civilization that no longer remembers what its own words mean. The occasion for this exercise is The Essential Paul Gottfried: Essays fro...
Lifting Weights September 29, 2025
Jordan Castro made his name in the US “alt lit” scene with The Novelist, a cult debut that follows an aspiring writer over the course of a distracted morning. Castro’s signature knack is in creating a realistic and funny rhythm of compulsivity, which...
Cormac McCarthy's Western Canon September 29, 2025
The death of the novelist Cormac McCarthy revealed a great American library to the public. As a recent essay in the Smithsonian Magazine details, the famously private writer was a hoarding reader of at least 20,000 books, which crowded the halls of h...
Wired In September 29, 2025
Every programmer’s journey begins with a greeting:print("Hello, World!")...
On Muscle Man September 29, 2025
It can be alarming when a novel is about a writer. We’re accustomed to the author, if he must appear in his own book, disguising himself. He’s a detective, a professor, a drug addict. The novel about a novelist can come off like a cheap trick, someth...
The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem September 29, 2025
In 1970, a New York publishing company put out a debut novel by an editor and former teacher from Ohio. The press, then known as Holt, Rinehart and Winston, had taken a chance on the book, which had been rejected by numerous other houses. The initial...
The Gods That Failed September 29, 2025
In the late 1980s, New York was a city on the brink.Wall Street boomed, and white-collar New York rejoiced; blue-collar New York, after decades of disinvestment, became an inferno, as the Black and Hispanic working class was pitted against white ethn...
The Manosphere’s Literary Muscle Men September 29, 2025
In a pivotal scene in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Travis Bickle works out in his filthy New York apartment....
The Author in the Age of Conglomeration September 26, 2025
“On the bad days, the days when another venerable house is neutron-bombed by the mindless conglomerate that enfolded it, or a Big Name in the Lit Biz has deserted his longtime publisher for a big fat check from Long Green and Gotrocks, or an agent ha...
At the SexStack Debate September 26, 2025
It often feels like digital life moves too fast for ten fingers to capture it on a keyboard. Only the thumbs, busily pounding at their smartphone, can keep pace. Online life is inherently short-form, a series of blurts, and long-form writing generall...
Matthew Gasda’s Latest Play Explores a Crisis in AI September 26, 2025
You could say that Matthew Gasda specialises in period pieces – that is, culture, politics, and technology have accelerated to such a fast pace that his contemporary plays have already entered the history books by the time they hit the stage. “You’re...
How In-Person Events Can Help Us Fight Loneliness September 25, 2025
In a world that is, technically speaking, more connected than ever before in human history, Americans find themselves isolated, atomized, and without a feeling of greater purpose.Like a fish without its school, humans have lost an integral protective...
A Soldier for Synthesis September 25, 2025
Frank S. Meyer was an extraordinary man, so it’s unsurprising that his life is full of colorful stories. Interesting people always seemed to want to know him; noteworthy things always seemed to be happening in his orbit. It’s hard to choose a favorit...
Emily Hunt Kivel Is Doing Things a Little Differently September 25, 2025
A couple of years ago I was interviewed by The Creative Independent about my novel Pure Cosmos Club. I said then that it’s important to write a first draft quickly — that working fast gives a book momentum — and that laboring over a manuscript for to...
The Bloody Love of Poe September 25, 2025
A flutter of raven feathers accompanies each recitation of the name: Edgar Allan Poe. He is the “Master of the Macabre.” If we need visual assistance to remember him, we can look at the “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype, which shows him gaunt, with his le...
We’re All Cooked September 24, 2025
Towards the end of Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, he reflects on his first trip to Mt Athos, the monastic republic off the coast of Greece which allows only men to enter so as to temper potential temptation and enable lives of deeper prayer. As a famous...
The Goldilocks of Bothsidesism September 24, 2025
IN HIS NEW BOOK Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, Thomas Chatterton Williams proposes a unified field theory—of elections, not electrons—in our wildly disunified society. He argues that leftist politics and c...
A New Pynchon Novel in a Pynchonesque America September 24, 2025
America, circa now. Things, most of which have been weird for a while, are getting distinctly weirder. The President of the United States is busy redecorating the White House and bent on buying Greenland. A new wonder drug is making people skinny. Do...
Absence September 24, 2025
Issa Quincy appears to have read a lot of W. G. Sebald. Across the six chapters of his debut novel, Absence, an unnamed narrator pores over fading photographs, letters, and tortured family histories; he walks in curiously depopulated landscapes and c...
You Have Been Conquered by the Machine September 24, 2025
If you’re not from New York and you walk through Greenwich Village without a map or a smartphone, there’s a decent chance you’ll get disoriented. The narrow streets of the neighborhood intersect at unexpected angles. Most have names, not numbers, and...
Cuck-Coded Zarathustra September 24, 2025
Cracking open Muscle Man, the sophomore novel by Jordan Castro, it is hard not to recall a passage in his debut, The Novelist, in which his narrator remarks, after opening a draft of his own book on his laptop, “I read the first few sentences while s...
