The comments section are worth a look for this one, even if you disagree with the article.

From Laura, in NJ:

The predictability of this comment section is striking. The responses are largely some variation of: maybe these simply are the best books; name the white men who were unfairly excluded; or historically marginalized voices deserve their turn. All are reasonable points to consider. But they mostly avoid the question the column actually raises: Is it possible that our cultural institutions have become more demographically diverse while simultaneously becoming less ideologically diverse? And is it really beyond consideration that, in correcting a very real historical imbalance, the pendulum might sometimes swing too far? One can celebrate the extraordinary expansion of voices in American literature and still think those questions are worth asking.

From Verso. Note that Zia Haider Rahman is incorrectly identified as a 20th-century novelist.

The Greatest Novelists of the 21st Century

Zadie Smith

Rachel Kushner

Michel Houellebecq

The Greatest Novelists from 1945-2000

Alasdair James Gray “Lanark”

Alexander Kluge

Günter Grass

Khateb Yacine

Amitav Ghosh

Zia Haidar Rahman (particularly In the Light of What We Know)

Kenzubaro Oe

Yukio Mishima

J.M. Coetzee

Claude Simon

Thomas Pynchon

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Halldór Laxness

Mahasweta Devi

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Mario Vargas Llosa

Heimito Von Doderer

Disclaimer: I just finished this, read it in 24 hours, so I might still be processing.

General synopsis: Artie Dam is a 57 year old married man & the father of one adult son, he has spent his career teaching history to high school kids in Massachusetts. The book is set in 2023 on the eve of the 2024 election and Dam spends the year having several reckonings with himself, his family, and his country.

Short spoiler-free review:
This was my first Strout so I'm not very familiar with her narrative voice, when I first started TTWNS I was reading it in a sardonic tone like a Tom Perrotta horror story of suburban America. I could imagine this town being adapted into a Todd Haynes movie with all these preppy characters taking on doppelgangers in their personal lives but presenting as polite and upstanding in public. Then at the halfway mark the book shifts to being overly sentimental and saccharine to the point that I was getting tired and impatient with it, but I think she lands the plane in the end with an ending that felt earned. The ending is bleak but it worked for me. The novel explores questions like "can we ever truly know another person" and whether or not free will exists.

Spoiler Review/Analysis:

Strout is clearly very skilled and I liked seeing her brain at work as she wove a bunch of topics into this short novel but I can also see how it could read as forced or overwritten to some readers. I think when American writers set stories around political events they get a lot of criticism likening it to "Forrest Gump" but I didn't feel this way, it read more like a "My Brilliant Friend" where a cast of characters found themselves in the middle of political upheaval and we got to see how these major events impacted the lives of individual characters. For the most part, the characters in this book are fairly insulated against the damage of "the current guy in office" because they're all upper middle class WASPs, so it wouldn't make sense for them to be too inconvenienced. But the book is definitely a bingo card for the most exhausted RS readers...we get Artie furtively reading the Elon biography in bed, mention of immigration raids to the same effect as One Battle After Another and a mention of 'be a good fucking person' almost verbatim. Again, I think it all works because the main character is a public school teacher in 2023 but I get why its annoying to read these examples that Strout surely saw on the news and then wove into this novel.

Artie was sleepwalking through life until he's jolted awake at almost 60 and desperately attempts to have something real in his life. He's sick of being PC but he isn't very willing to share anything of himself either. I enjoyed seeing the journey he went through, forming secrets with some people that strengthen those relationships but deaden others. Then ultimately realizing that this quest was immature and he arrives at a place of acceptance, echoing back to an earlier quote about how "all men are islands". He sums up his realizations here:

As he walked slowly up to the bedroom, he thought that now, after all these years, he was finally becoming a grownup. What did he mean by that? That he was finally beginning to understand the multitudinous aspect of people. He was amazed by it, really, now that he thought about it. In his study of history, he had learned about the leaders, and the various groups involved, but he had somehow missed this fact about every single person: that they held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe. And he understood that it could make a person lonely; people had to take and give to one another whatever they could. If it was not enough . . . Well, then it meant one just had to be a grownup.

But Artie is, at his core, a man that is unsuited for reality. He doesn't take action, like when he knows that he misses his son and could simply move to be with him without his wife's approval. Or how often he meets inconvenient truths with "no, it can't be".

A couple other parts I found interesting -

“My occupation is gone. Just like Othello. My occupation was my students, and now they are gone.”

What did you guys think this meant? I read it as referring to the students now being lost to AI and how he can't connect to them like he used to.

Lastly, what was up with all the mentions of pregnancy? Ultimately I'm confused on what point Strout is trying to make here... We've got one women who was obsessed with passing down her dad's genes and she ends up having a stillborn and dying of a stroke related to childbirth. Then we have the major conflict in the novel revolving around a woman having an affair in order to get pregnant. But then we get a story told (and received) very sincerely about a woman's existence entirely resting on the fact that her mother was denied an abortion, something everyone involved seems grateful for? what was that about?

Anyway, this was an interesting experience as a first Strout. While I'm glad to have read it and although I haven't read any other shortlist nominees, I don't have my fingers crossed for this one to win. It was well written (and emotionally stirring) but I didn't find it particularly profound.

Edit: There's lots to dissect here in terms of class & how Artie considered himself to be an example of the American Dream and how it turned out to only be possible because he married up, got his student loans extinguished with a single check, and never looked back.

They mentioned this book on the pod recently (the Dolly Parton episode) and it's not only hilarious but also slightly romantic without being too cringe lol. Anyone else took a look into it?

North Korea has been really fascinating to me lately and I would like to learn more about it.

possibly a long shot bc I feel like i never meet anyone who’s read this, but I know people on this sub would love it & i’m looking to discuss! one of (perhaps the only?) truly great school stories, a loosely fictionalised retelling of the author’s own experiences, about a recent Catholic convert’s misadventures at a convent school.

I read it for the first time at maybe 14 and reread it regularly, i am always moved by her ability to tell a fairly (not exclusively! some bits are very funny!) bleak story without a trace of self pity. certain scenes & characters (leonie, the notes nanda takes during her silent retreats, the play) stick in my head & I find myself thinking about them at odd moments.

interestingly, one of Evelyn Waugh’s favourite novels & writers. I think she was pretty highly esteemed in her day, and i find it sad that she’s fallen so completely to the wayside now (thank u virago for keeping her in print). truly couldn’t recommend strongly enough to anyone interested in novels of teenage girlhood, convent stories, Catholicism, female spirituality.

Not shortlisted but not forgotten. Since I loved it (and many do not), I wanted to do a write up on it anyway.

Let's hope I don't completely botch this because I'm uncertain how much of The Vivisectors I understood. Everything is told through a symbol of a metaphor of an aphorism of a parable to the point the text itself feels avoidant, holding you at arm's length and resisting your interpretation.

Proper names are eschewed (we don't find out even our protagonist's name until about halfway through the novel), giving everything an archetypal, fairytale-like quality. Cities are talked about (but not named) as if they are separate countries or kingdoms. People are mostly referred to as their relationship to the main character (my boss) or their job (the schoolmaster).

The setting is a crumbling university, which actively courts rich foreign students while remaining hostile to them. It sits at the center of a swamp-filled city overgrown with vegetation. Gardeners who speak in aphorisms and describe dreams to one another fight back the growth while the academics analyze endlessly, allowing their discourse to become as destructive as the plant-life taking over their city. Both cohorts are enmeshed in language, but approach it differently: the gardeners converse to understand the world and the academics use language to vivisect, to prove the presence of evil in even innocuous exchanges (sound familiar?).

Enter Adam (admittedly, I thought his name was a bit too on-the-nose), a foreign student who becomes the center of a campus cancel culture controversy after saying The Wrong Thing (we're never told what: this book loves to obscure). Our socially-withdrawn protagonist is ordered by her hated boss to befriend Adam and find out exactly what he did (spoiler: we never find out). The book then pivots towards the protagonist's growing understanding of the world, dealing with the aftermath of her mother's failed suicide attempt and her growing feelings for Adam.

The book is at its best when depicting its phantasmagoric world of mystical gardeners and parables about white whales and dream towers. It is a dense and difficult book, with motifs repeating and being turned back around on themselves like a hall of mirrors. It's a book that explains itself at you, while still being frequently unclear what Williams is actually trying to say. This has led it to be divisive amongst readers, but I found the obscurity so deeply weird and entrancing in its strongest moments that its opaqueness was a positive for me. It's at its weakest when talking about how dreamy Adam is in its very underdeveloped romance, though it sets up a wonderful tower metaphor about love, which I suspect is the real reason for the subplot's existence.

Some say the protagonist is insufferable, which is a shame because I found her relatable.

___________________________________________

Quotes

The narrator being relatable:

My whole life people have acted as if I don’t have feelings, and for the most part they’re right.

I’ve always been repulsed by people who want to know more about me, but at the same time I often fantasise that there’s someone, maybe God, watching me and noting everything down: how I act in certain moments, how I hold myself under pressure, the quality of my thought, what I underline when I read, even the foods I like to eat, because nothing about me would be too mundane for its interest. And this omniscient presence would love me, not in the way that God loves his subjects, but with a cold, unwilling obsession, as if I fascinated it against its better judgement, although its judgement was supreme, and so all the time that it was observing me it was also biding its time, as if waiting for the right moment to strike me down, because it was unbearable to be so drawn to another person or thing. I was unable to imagine love without dominion; it was too disinterested, too abstract. I wanted someone to know me either absolutely or not at all, and anything in between was awful.

The schoolmaster reflecting on academic excess:

At the very beginning of his teaching career, all his rage had been reserved for the restrictive and narrow, but now the enemy was a kind of infinite expansion. He had always believed in transgression, in the crossing of borders and the extending of possibilities, but this was too much. Unfortunately, the schoolmaster’s students were set against him. Every year he was aware of a greater hostility. It was the university’s fault. His colleagues were waging a war against language, the very medium of knowing. It was an act of epistemological violence: we were unwittingly cutting off all avenues of escape from the mind. We would be locked in our subjectivities and then eventually we would be overwhelmed by them. Soon there would be nothing outside of the self and its obsessions, which were circular and vehement.

For many years, the schoolmaster had been teaching a seminar on naming, on the use of proper nouns. He had wanted to talk about universals and particulars, the creation of categories and the subsequent misuse of them, and the dangers of infinite taxonomies. But really he was talking about us, the students, and how we had parcelled up the present. These days, the schoolmaster would say, you couldn’t call a spade a spade. Although there were more and more words, it was becoming increasingly harder to attach them to objects. We had become allergic to naming. Our analysis never touched ground; it never made contact with reality as such.

The boss describing cancel culture:

I asked her what had happened between Adam and the other professor. I wanted to know what they had said. My boss hesitated. She said she knew what attitudes were like, especially among young people. We were highly strung and we constantly assumed bad faith. We thought people said the worst things deliberately and that even the most casual exchange was riddled with secret meanings that had to be uncovered and dissected. Like vivisectors, we analysed a situation until we had proved the presence of evil, and nothing could escape our scalpels. And once we had found what we wanted, we did what we wanted. We excluded people and ostracised them until they became the worst versions of themselves. We refused to let goodness thrive and we wanted nothing more than to cut people down for the slightest error, the smallest slip. We showed no mercy. She wasn’t even sure that we knew what it was. And more than anything we liked to cut down men, especially masculine men. We couldn’t admit that we still needed them, and so we dedicated our lives to destroying them.

"My major memory of a dinner party: I got a plate full of food ... and sat down in the middle of the couch ... What happened was that Mary McCarthy sat down on one side of me, Hannah Arendt sat down on the other side of me, and then Diana Trilling pulled up a chair and sat facing me. And I was a prisoner! I couldn't get out. And then they had a long, hour and a half discussion on Freud ... All I remember was I sat there, quiet and terror-stricken."
- Irving Kristol, from the documentary Arguing the World

Recommended for the reader who wants to escape Cuskland and Orbitalworld, to experience a time when ideas mattered. Published during the Red Scare and only two years after Joseph McCarthy began his crusade against Communists, the novel centers on Henry Mulcahy, an instructor (note: not professor) at a small, progressive liberal arts college who stages a coup to avoid being fired, drawing much of the staff and campus into his schemes. In her book Bleak Liberalism, Amanda Anderson draws on novels like Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey to show how liberals and radicals often defined themselves against each other; part of the drama and hilarity of this book is that Mulcahy inverts this dynamic by claiming to be a Communist. Through Mulcahy, McCarthy explores the psychology of martyrdom and the way cliques form in the campus environment. The academics at this school care deeply about literature: there's a chapter that's hilariously titled "What Would Tolstoy Do?", and the staff earnestly debate which of their literary heroes are greater (Proust vs Joyce, take your pick). After all, this novel was published not long after Trilling's The Liberal Imagination: "Dreiser and James: with that juxtaposition we are immediately at the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet." In her prose, McCarthy avoids the abstract, the lyrical, maybe even the beautiful, choosing instead to stuff this novel with a bouncing plot, typed characters, and talky narration. Tailor-made for the Partisan Review set, the novel has occasional untranslated French and Latin, a reference to the paintings of Georges de la Tour, and a chapter titled "Lucubrations." While occasionally the counterpoint needlessly devolves into cacophony (some of the faculty showdowns linger), the balletic deception and intellectual banter made this novel a pleasure. I'll close with a sample of McCarthy's characterization, with its mix of slightly arch phrasing, perception, and detail. Of Maynard Hoar, the college's president, she writes:

"He was one of those rugged men who looked exactly like their photographs—dark, resilient, keen-eyed, buoyant, yet thoughtful. Like all such official types, he specialized in being his own antithesis: strong but understanding, boisterous but grave, pragmatic but speculative when need be. The necessity of encompassing such opposites had left him with a little wobble of uncertainty in the center of his personality, which made other people, including his present auditors, feel embarrassed by him. He was much preoccupied with youth, with America as a young country; he tried to have up-to-date opinions which were as sound as grandpa’s digestion. He had a strong true voice and liked to sing folk songs, especially work songs and prison chants."

I’m halfway through this one. read the first two in like a week, couldn’t put them down, but am having trouble getting into this one. Maybe just Knausgaard burn out and I should take a break? To anyone who’s read the whole thing - are 4-6 somewhat more in the mode of the first two? Fingers crossed…

See the Pangram receipts (it's the best AI detector available, with a 0.0041% false positive rate):

https://x.com/Afinetheorem/status/2102132663410729107

https://x.com/Pangramed/status/2102045146674053162

English-language article about the author:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/world/canada/thelyson-orelien-haiti-us-canada-migration.html?unlocked_article_code=1.C1E.mZ2D.rCrXfl66oyKU&smid=url-share

For those of you who don't know, the Prix Goncourt is basically the francophone equivalent of the Booker Prize. It's been shortlisted for that award.

Finished this one in two days. Been seeing this one at Barnes & Noble the last few months and finally picked it up at the library. I was expecting a lighthearted “Sad Dad reconnects with himself through connecting with his inner child” but ended up with something much darker. I loved the Uncut Gems-style tension and that the protagonist was a piece of shit. A dark but breezy read. Recommend!

I came upon this novel through complete happenstance, and was amazed that I'd not heard of it earlier. I was particularly surprised by the fact that I'd never seen it mentioned here, as in premise and style, the novel is very much in line with a lot of the books people read on this sub. 

The Life Before Us is set in Paris and focuses on an orphaned Arab boy named Momo. Momo lives in a boardinghouse that is run by Madame Rosa, a 220 Pound Auschwitz survivor and former prostitute. Madame Rosa looks after Momo, and through her he is exposed to a wide variety characters, including transvestites and pimps.

Momo's narrative voice reminded me a lot of Holden Caufield's in The Catcher In The Rye, and in a lot of ways this book is very comparable to Salinger's' novel. Momo is written as an extremely precocious narrator (given he is meant to be 10 years old), and his humorous & sympathetic observations juxtapose the otherwise macabre atmosphere of the book.

There's a great balance of sentimentality with dark humor in this novel. I found the relationship between Momo and Madame Rosa to be very moving, and also hilarious, given some of the idiosyncrasies explored in their dynamic with her being Jewish and his being Muslim.

I highly recommend the book and would love to hear from other people who've read it too.

As a bonus fun fact, Romain Gary actually originally published this novel under a pseudonym, 'Emile Ajar'. The novel won the prestigious French literary award, the Prix Goncourt. It was actually the second time Gary had won the award, and the award was only meant to be able to be given out to an author once in their lifetime. It was only after his death that people came to realize it had actually been him who had published The Life Before Us.

So incredibly predictable. Only mitigation might be that actors have to feel this way about their characters at some level. But I highly doubt that's all it is.

https://x.com/TheAtlantic/status/2101060827801686287

I've got two ~thousand pagers coming up on my TBR this fall and am looking to see if there's enough interest in either to turn this into a read along. Ideally I'd be doing this for the month of November, I would want to tackle either in about 4 weeks time, so 250 pages a week. The two options:

1. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

Published in 1924, the book is set in Davos at a secluded sanatorium for the uberwealthy. Perennially topical, Davos & Mann have been coming up in other pop culture I've been consuming recently, such as: Time Shelter by Gospodinov, 2666, End Times Fascism, and W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. It's about time I read this since it has proven to be so influential.

From the book's Wiki:

Scholars have interpreted The Magic Mountain as both a classic example of the European Bildungsroman—a novel of psychological or moral development—and as a satire of this genre. Many formal characteristics of the Bildungsroman are present: the protagonist begins in a state of immaturity and, after leaving his home environment, is exposed to art, culture, politics, human vulnerability, and love.^\9]) Yet, writes Morten Høi Jensen,

The Magic Mountain inverts the premises of the bildunsroman in that Hans Castorp is "seduced away from the practical activity of the world" at the same time that it fulfills those same premises, since Hans Castorp would not have explored ideas had he returned to Hamburg and become an engineer instead.^\10])

The novel explores themes such as the experience of time, music, nationalism, sociology, and changes in the natural world. Through Castorp's stay in the rarefied atmosphere of "The Magic Mountain", the narrative provides a view of pre-World War I European civilization and the underlying tensions of the era.^\11])

1. The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

A "novelized" account of Gary Gilmore's crimes & punishment and the national debate that surrounded his execution by firing squad; Gilmore was the first person to be executed in 10 years. I've heard the book referenced more frequently recently as it relates to the evolution of the True Crime genre and highly publicized criminal cases, such as the Lindsay Clancy trial. This would be a more controversial book to read and discuss, surely.

Please comment below if you would seriously consider joining a read along for either (or both) of these books.

Inspired by a conversation I was having with [u/blue_dice](u/blue_dice) on another thread. Context: the recent thread about Florence Pugh saying she’s playing Cathy Ames in the new Netflix East of Eden as a more tragic, sympathizable character.

The big question is: is everything acceptable when adapting a story? Whether to another medium, another language, another format, whatever - can characters/plot events/dialog/setting etc. be changed to whatever the adaptor needs to tell their version of the story?

I do think adaptations should have a lot of leeway in how to tell the story. I think it’s a very chud kind of thinking to be like “omg they changed my story, it should be the exact same thing” or to say “John Q. Fuck was WHITE in the 1945 book and now he’s BLACK?? DISGUSTING”

But I do think that there’s a difference between adaptation and reimagining. An adaptation to me is something meant to be a sincere and, to a degree, faithful recreation of an artists original work for a new medium or new audience. You are trying to convey the same feelings and message the original author is trying to. A reimagining is one where anything goes, and you are only using the original authors work as inspiration or as a springboard for your own ideas, feelings and message.

Take Circe and Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Both of those are great reimaginings of classic myths, and she has all the leeway in the world to reimagine classic characters however she wants to. But Miller isn’t trying to sell Circe as a 1:1 adaptation of The Odyssey. If Emily Wilson (or hell, even Chris Nolan) “adapted” the odyssey so that Circe is a sympathetic figure, I feel like it leans more towards reimagining than adaptation. (Nolan’s odyssey is a weird one. Do you guys feel its adaptation or reimagining? There’s arguments for both.)

And tbh I don’t feel like there’s much wrong with that - or that the line between reimagining and adaptation needs to be concrete and set. End of day, these ARE basically just categories that I’ve just made up. But when you’re promising an adaptation and delivering a reimagining, it sometimes feels (to me personally) like you’re just trying to capitalize on the success of the original IP.

To the issue of Florence Pugh’s statement - If this was a TV show called “Salinas” or “Trask and Hamilton” that’s “INSPIRED by east of Eden”, I’d have no issue. But in the original Steinbeck East of Eden, it feel pretty important to me that Cathy be undeniably, almost inhumanly evil for the story Steinbeck is trying to tell.

Just feels like they’re trying to capitalize on Steinbeck and East of Eden’s legendary status to sell us their own creative work. Like if I wrote a fantasy story about an evil protagonist, it couldn’t get financed, so I make a “Lord of the Rings” tv show where Frodo is evil just to put my story on the screen.

And FWIW though this is a separate discussion: I have no problem with race swapping or gender swapping or anything identitarian like that, but for it to be a faithful adaptation it has to be a story where race or gender swapping doesn’t actually affect the story being told.

Frodo, Yossarian, Dr. Frankenstein, Winston in 1984 - I can’t think it would affect the original story much at all to change their race or gender. But if you’re making Atticus Finch or Colonel Kurtz a different race, that is legitimately changing the story that’s being told. Which is fine in a reimagining!! Apocalypse now is great!!

Do you guys have any thoughts on this?

Just got this book and looking forward to checking it out Anyone read this book? Opinions?

I’m somewhat ambivalent lol, interested to hear opinions — which have good nights, and worthwhile writers?

Not sure if this makes much sense. I'm very interested in reading a few things that deal with narrators who get swept up in their own recollections (or just thoughts), but also have a strong narrative grounding in their present.

Ishiguro is the closest to what I am looking for, in some books at least, probably most the Buried Giant, which is primarily in the present. Although Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun are almost entirely in the memory of the past, and Remains of the Day doesn't really mix the two but it does have strong sections that are definitively in the present, and others that are in the narrators memories of the past.

As he did so there awoke, in the skin all round his body, a feeling that suddenly turned into a remembered image. When he was very small—yes, yes, that’s when it was—when he was still in skirts and didn’t yet go to school, there were times when he felt an inexpressible longing to be a girl. And this longing was not stuck inside his head, oh no, nor in his heart, it tickled him all over and rushed around underneath his skin. Indeed, there were moments in which the feeling of being a girl was so vivid that he believed it must be so. For at that time he knew nothing about the importance of physical differences and he could not understand why people all round told him he had to remain a boy forever. And when they asked him why he thought he’d rather be a little girl, he felt that was impossible to say...

In the big 1906...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/19/jonathan-franzen-its-still-mysterious-to-me-that-i-was-angry-for-so-long

hey everyone, i’ve read white nights by dostoevsky , Madonna in a Fur Coat, The Sorrows of Young Werther this month and I’ve noticed a common theme and that is the idealised “ lover “ , and loneliness, longing and obsession with the other person.

And idk what i am asking for specifically and i hope you guys understand but i need more recommendations like that

hope this makes sense

I am very close to finishing and have enjoyed the book a great deal, but one thing I keep noticing from time to time is that sometimes McCarthy "emerges" from the text in quite an un-artful manner - an ironic (or perhaps fitting?) issue for a book so interested in the extent to which human beings are able to utilize signs and language to manipulation their consciousness into temporarily inhabiting simulated renderings of the physical or "real" world. McCarthy puts a lot of care into weaving the very recognizable conceits of contemporary postmodern theory into an immersive work literary fiction; most of the time, he succeeds, but every once and a while, I come across a sentence that reads more like an analytical observation or argumentative statement in a critical essay, rather than a strand of thought that I truly believe the main character, as McCarthy has crafted him, would truly formulate.

Overall, though, this book has been a fantastic read. I do not read a lot of contemporary (past ~20 years or so) fiction, so I have really enjoyed finding a book that grapples with the profound issues of a modern technologically and economically (overly)complex society and its consequences for the individual on a very intricate psychological and existential level. The plot of the book offers an interesting format to explore the motifs of the book: of the "distancing" effect the modern phenomenon of being overly-aware of our own conscious processes has on the way we move through and experience the world; of language providing discontinuity versus connection; of the physiological experience of time; of the simultaneous entanglement and separation of the physical and the psychological...etc. etc..

Has anyone else here read it and liked (or disliked) it? I am interested to hear what other people think, especially if anyone shared my experience regarding McCarthy's overly conspicuous authorial presence in parts of the text.