Articles
Why the Broiler Chicken Is the True Symbol of the Anthropocene
Mostly hidden from our daily view, the machinery for making white meat—a chemical and metabolic system of planetary scope—will be a lingering trace of human presence in the annals of Earth history. The broiler chicken will be an indelible geological signature of humanity, calling out to future eons, like graffiti scratched into a diner table, that we were here once, and we feasted.
Lesbian Simulators and an AI Thatcher: Notes from TIFF
All of this is just the apparatus surrounding the festival. But then there is the question of navigating it. Aside from Wavelengths and Midnight Madness, whose identities are at least legible (avant-garde cinema and late-night horror respectively), TIFF’s programming sections can feel like random taxonomy.
Riley Sager and Tom Ryan on coincidentally writing thrillers with the same premise
It was inspired by a trip to Lake Champlain I took in 2024 to see that year’s solar eclipse. We witnessed the eclipse from a boat in the middle of the lake, very close to the Canadian border. Along the way, we passed several very small islands that contained only one or two structures. They struck me as a very good place to set a creepy book, especially with the mainland being visible yet also just out of reach.
The State of Women-Centered Literary Adaptations
Historically, media made almost exclusively for women has been discounted and written off, not receiving the same resources and care as media made for men. Even more than other genres, romance novels and movies aren’t given the same respect as their more masculine counterparts—the most expensive movies ever made are almost all comic book or action movies, which are just genre films marketed towards men.
Leigh Bardugo on 50 Years of Interview with the Vampire and the Immortality of Anne Rice’s Lestat
In the past I’ve described grief as a dirty fighter, the foe you think you’ve bested who pops back up with a sucker punch. But the vampire may be a better analogy: a creature who cannot accept death, who lives on and on, sustained by the love and loss we feel and keep feeling. Living with loss means discovering that time does not, in fact, heal all wounds, because time is itself the wound.
Review of Diavola
Through it all, the growing danger reflects the existing family dynamics. Surely it has to be Anna who threw furniture around the villa, or who is holding doors shut and trapping her family in their rooms—as Anna’s twin brother, Benny, says to her: “This place only ever feels haunted when you’re around.” Nicole, her sister, rewrites events to paint Anna as the villain. Her father buries his head in the sand. And the whole family tries to shelter their mother from it all to spare her feelings.
Katherine Reay on the Enduring Popularity of Golden-Age British Mysteries
A distraction was needed at the end of World War II—a solvable puzzle, an intellectual escape, a sense of right prevailing over wrong, along with a happy ending as the final victim is saved, the culprit brought to justice, and the estranged couple (who, granted, spent the greater portion of play pointing fingers at one another) is reconciled.
Only Annalee Newitz would send a sentient slime mold to Pompeii
I wanted to explore how humans could communicate certain things that the People couldn’t, and vice versa. There are things that Murtis can understand about Gardenpath’s past that none of their slime mold friends can. But as you note, humans can’t merge with each other in a restorative way. Gardenpath is really perplexed by this aspect of human life, which seems to be the product of a profound and unhealthy aloneness.
Fortress Besieged: A Great Literary Classic
The new edition of Fortress Besieged is newly released by New Directions with a foreword by the inimitable Yiyun Li and was originally written in the 1940s during the height of the eight-year Sino-Japanese War.
Love is in the Eyre: China turns to classic English novel to teach teens about romance
But reading the story of Jane Eyre –– an orphan girl who finds her independence while suffering a series of hardships and eventually falls in love with her wealthy employer –– will help China’s 14-year-olds “develop sounder values,” said Beijing Daily.
Long Live Dolly Parton, Giver of Books
The books themselves were carefully curated and calibrated with my child’s age. Some were classics and some were new to me. The children were representative of children in this country, meaning they were white and Black and brown and Asian. The pictures were well illustrated and the stories were inspired. It was always an event in our home when one showed up in our mailbox. And on my daughter’s fifth birthday, waiting for me in my email inbox, was a message from Dolly.
The Demystification of the Giant Monster: A Brief History of Giant Fictional Behemoths
Others, perhaps crueler but certainly wiser, see the danger for what it is: a lifeform with no understanding of society and its rules. A gluttonous fiend that will not pay for the cows it consumes or the buildings it obliterates. A bottomless pit of food and weapons and sacrifices that threatens to upend all the neat streets and urban promenades our species has spent millennia building.
Our most anticipated books of fall 2026
Autumn’s annual bounty of new reads awaits! Our most anticipated reads of the season include Min Jin Lee’s follow-up to her magnificent Pachinko, Marlon James’ latest searing epic, Sarah J. Maas’ reclaiming of her romantasy throne and more.
Americans Are Afraid of Americans Too: a review of Dawn Turner’s “Majestic Hills”
The novel is peppered with soulful music spanning generations of American history, snippets of heroes like Frederick Douglass, and forgotten history. The shifting ground beneath the new development—which, we’re told, was “built on a lie,” threatens to erode it all into oblivion. An imaginary pipeline connects the residents of the new development to the trailer park down the river, and an actual proposed pipeline strains neighborhood relations and threatens to send the flood water through easements and PVC.
No Reason to Hide It
Over the past few years, a new trend has been growing in independent trade publishing, one that might serve as a healthy antidote to this explosion of market-oriented books. A coterie of small publishers—McNally Editions, Hagfish Books, Hub City Press—has stepped up to join the likes of New York Review Books, Dalkey Archive Press, and Semiotext(e) in reissuing out-of-print books. In January, writer Emmeline Clein put forward the argument in Cultured that publishing houses that focus on such reissues are “the hottest new thing in lit.” But the act of reissuing itself is, of course, not new. It may be tempting to view the publishing world of the past through rose-colored glasses, but aesthetically oriented, risk-taking books have always struggled.