Happy spring, fellow travelers. This week we’re back to basics with the good stuff. Physical books supplied by physical people are bringing us lots of joy. And when the pages don’t compel, we’re moving our bodies around.

In the wake of #AIBooksellerGate, our own Drew Broussard put out a live bookseller’s call for recommendation requests. This BlueSky post now has up to 400 responses (and counting)—and our hero plans to answer at least half of these with bespoke suggestions.

These range so far from contemporary page-turners like Julia Armfield’s Private Rites to César Aira’s “‘flight forward” B-sides. “Just nice to see people genuinely responding to human curation,” says the architect.

James Folta is also enjoying real interactions with homo sapiens this week. He rolls into the weekend recommending a cumbia dance class taken at a friend’s wedding, as well as a beloved Austin bookstore. James spent a nice few hours “poking around and having a coffee” at the iconic First Light Books, a neighborhood hub.

I, Brittany Allen, spent some time loading up in another indie bookstore across the pond: Livraria Snob, of Lisbon. This wonderfully fusty stop, with its apt-but-in-on-it name, sent me plane-ward with a fat stack of Pessoa novels and a renewed appreciation for the flâneuse. (Because Pessoa, sure, but also because it was a real hike to find this store, in the winding hills of an old city.)

Now I’m rolling into the weekend pondering what’s so very literary about walking down unfamiliar streets. And like Drew’s followers, I seek recommendations. If you have a favorite flâneur novel, please advise below.

If we’re not perambulating, happily aimless, we’re digging up old joy. Molly Odintz belatedly discovered this SNL weekend update sketch, in which Bowen Yang plays Truman Capote commenting on Women’s History Day. I was glad to revisit this one, too. It’s exactly the kind of niche content that only one, specific, mad human could pull off.

Wishing you all a weekend of long walks, deep laughs, and surprising reading.

Another big week in book news, with new releases and faux releases. Don’t get caught unaware if anyone asks you what you thought of Tidewater Dreams by Isabel Allende or The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir.

Have a great long weekend!

According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the third year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:

Jessi Jesewska Stevens, “Honeymoon”

This sly short from one of my favorite collections last year—Jessi Jesewska Stevens’ Ghost Pains—has a simple enough set-up. We follow one half of a couple on her Tuscan honeymoon, and watch as the bride’s chipper internal monologue starts to vacillate between wistfulness and exasperation. Stevens’ voice is the hook here. Our narrator is erudite, fussy, charming, and impressively articulate about her own (sometimes contradictory) desires. Every-so-slyly, her asides start to capture the paradoxes inherent to permanent partnership, tourism, and ceremonial rites of passage. The room with the view may be beautiful. The honeymoon and the man wonderful. (On paper, at least.) But sometimes you yearn for the familiar alone.

If you groove with Elaine Dundy, Barbara Trapido, or Marlow Granados, I think you’ll like this one.

The story begins:

For our honeymoon we went to Tuscany. This got a big sigh from me. I love my job, this city, my life. At home, in our apartment, the kitchen tiles are a deep maroon, a chessboard for girls. I was sitting on them, like a squat little knight, unwrapping a casserole dish, when my husband wheeled a suitcase into the room. One of the most difficult things about being married, I find, is that those thoughts you choose not to say out loud don’t register at all. No one reads your mind. He gently snapped two fingers near my face.

Read it here.

*If you hit a paywall, we recommend trying with a different/private/incognito browser (but listen, you didn’t hear it from us).

• “Whenever I walk to the queer bars in the West Village (places I, a happy-hour connoisseur, frequent often), I pass by the building where Muñoz’s office was located.” Marcos Gonsalez takes a stroll through Jose Esteban Muñoz’s New York City. | Lit Hub Biography
• Elizabeth Costello considers desire, death, and socially aware subtext in James Tiptree Jr.’s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Richard Russon on Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty” and the significance of the sequence of words. | Lit Hub Craft
• Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow, Alison Bechdel’s Spent, and Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? all feature among the best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
• “The truth, as it often is, turns out to be both simpler and more profound than our imaginations.” Arvind Ethan David explores the surprising connection between Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse. | Lit Hub Criticism
• Martha Park recommends apocalyptic nonfiction by Mark O’Connell, Emily Raboteau, Jeff Sharlet and more. | Lit Hub Reading Lists
• T.J. Martinson examines the role of sight on the page and in real life: “What we see and how we see it shapes who we are—or at least, who we believe ourselves to be—by constructing, distorting, and defining our reality.” | Lit Hub Craft
• “It was raining heavily and there was a darkness that hung over the city like a moral eclipse.” Read from Juan José Millás’s novel Only Smoke, translated by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn. | Lit Hub Fiction
• Joel Suarez considers education’s “fraught relationship to both elitism and democracy.” | n+1
• Translator Ann Goldstein recommends books with “solid English rhythms, English idioms, English locutions, English sounds—the things that I like to have somewhere in my mind, though not necessarily consciously, when I’m working.” | The New Yorker
• “Her debut novel…was far more daring for its time than any of the recent literary trends that have had everyone blushing and gasping and scribbling.” Namwali Serpell revisits Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales.| New York Review of Books
• Lora Kelley on Martin Amis as “one of our last great literary celebrities.” | The Paris Review
• James Dubinsky explores the lessons we can learn about honoring the dead from poetry written by veterans. | JSTOR Daily
• Richard Ovenden on Elyse Graham’s Book and Dagger and the librarians who were spies. | Public Books

A weekly behind-the-scenes dive into everything interesting, dynamic, strange, and wonderful happening in literary culture—featuring Lit Hub staff, columnists, and special guests! Hosted by Drew Broussard.

My father, who is 78 and lives in Malaysia, has lunch once a week with a group of his high school classmates. I’m in awe, and not a little envious, that he has a group of friends who are so committed to each other that they convene weekly, six decades after they first met.

My father’s group reminds me of the legendary collection of British novelists and critics—Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie et al—who had a standing Soho lunch for many years. There were of course some points of difference between these two groups, not least that my father is teetotal and the writers by most accounts drank as much as they ate… What it must have been to sit at that table—and to stagger out afterwards.

The most productive literary lunch of all time was actually a dinner, and it took place in the Langham Hotel in London in 1889, when the publisher J.M. Stoddart invited two young writers he was courting to create something original for his magazine, Lippincott’s Monthly.

The writers invited were Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle and, by the end of what one can only imagine was a pretty fabulous meal, Wilde had promised to write The Picture of Dorian Gray and Conan Doyle had committed to penning The Sign of the Four, featuring one Sherlock Holmes, for the magazine. One hopes nobody queried Stoddart’s expense claim.

Often I find myself dreaming of being invited to one of these lunches, or of perhaps being present in that motel room in Miami one warm night in February 1964 when Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke drank and talked through to the morning after Ali’s victory over Sonny Liston. I find it unbearably romantic, this idea of a group of great historical figures who are also friends, who lunch and achieve greatness together and who remain each other’s best critics and wisest counsellors throughout their lives.

I find it unbearably romantic, this idea of a group of great historical figures who are also friends, who lunch and achieve greatness together and who remain each other’s best critics and wisest counsellors throughout their lives.

I suspect that I’m obsessed with stories of this type because with my career zig zagging between books, theatre, TV, and film, I’ve never settled down in one discipline long enough to acquire a tightly knit peer group of my own.

Whilst I’m lucky to count many writers of distinction amongst my friendship group, and even luckier to have collaborated with many of them, few of my closest creative relationships could strictly be called peers.

From Douglas Adams (who I first met when I was 18) and David Baddiel to Lenny Henry and Sanjeev Bhaskar, I seem to always surround myself with mentor-collaborators, a decade or two my senior, and rather more famous than me.

Those last three constitute a coterie of multi-ethnic trailblazing National Treasures, who I admired as a teenager, and have inexplicably ended up collaborating with as an adult. On the upside, I have learnt so much from these greats that whatever I might lose in peer-feeling, I gain in expertise.

Also, they usually pay for lunch.

Lately, I seem to be taking this tendency of mine to extremes, seeking mentorship not only from the talented living, but also from the great dead. Over the last year I’ve been immersed in adapting two of the finest prose stylists of the 20th century: P.G.Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler.

Wodehouse, comic chronicler of the British aristocracy and creator of Jeeves & Bertie Wooster, Lord Emsworth and the inimitable Psmith, is the undisputed king of the English country-house farce; Chandler, creator of the iconic P.I. Philip Marlowe, is rightly acknowledged as the writer who elevated the detective story to the realms of literature.

Asked by their respective estates to adapt their work for stage and screen, I find myself in the terrifying position of having to write dialogue that can sit comfortably aside their original perfect sentences.

Consider the following:

‘It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.’

‘She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when’.’

‘He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.‘

‘He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.‘

‘From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.’

‘She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.’

Hang on. What’s going on here, you might ask? Half of those lines are Wodehouse and half are Chandler. Yet, if you can correctly match the right sentence with the right author on all the above , without resorting to the internet, a) you’re lying and b) I’d like to hire you as a script editor.

It started to become clear to me that these two apparently very different writers have, on the level of the sentence at least, quite a lot in common. Both are masters of the unexpected simile and the heroic metaphor, and both wield transferred epithets with snake-like accuracy: their writings are full of meditative cigarettes, thoughtful forkfuls, lonely breakfasts and feet that take steps in the right direction but don’t go far enough. They share a deep feeling for the rhythm of dialogue, the musicality of words, and neither is afraid of a compound sentence, full of parenthetical phrases and subordinate clauses that zig from high thought to low gag.

As I got deeper into their work, it became clear that they shared another similarity: they each wrote what are essentially variations on a constant theme.

In every Chandler story you have an (invariably blond) femme fatale, a corrupt millionaire, a blackmailing low-life, a mobster who despite being ruthless also is capable of a kind of love, an unreliable client, a missing loved one and the square-jawed detective to sort it all out.

In each of Wodehouse’s adventures one finds some combination of: an inept bachelor, an alluring blond (or brunette, or redhead), an overbearing aunt, a case of mistaken identity and a highly effective Butler/Secretary/Uncle/Godfather/Best Friend to sort it all out.

Some critics assert that their repeated and strict use of formula makes them lesser artists. This is shallow, nonsensical thinking. Austen and Shakespeare adhered to strict formulas; as of course did Bach and the Beatles—as Douglas Adams put it, in an essay about Wodehouse:

‘It matters not one whit that he writes endless variations on a theme… . He is the greatest musician of the English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day.’

To put it another way: a chessboard always has the same set of pieces on it and they each obey strict rules, but that in no way limits the endless variety, beauty and appeal of the endless games waiting to be played, and Wodehouse and Chandler were both grandmasters.

So how did it come to be that these two writers, working in very different genres on different sides of the Atlantic, have such overlap in style and form? This was the mystery I set about solving. Fortunately, no hard streets needed to be traversed, nor tough-guys interrogated. Google gave me my answer in seconds: Chandler and Wodehouse were contemporaries at Dulwich College in South London. They were schoolmates.

So how did it come to be that these two writers, working in very different genres on different sides of the Atlantic, have such overlap in style and form?

That news, as you might imagine, played happily into my fantasies. They were childhood friends! Of course they were; perhaps like my father and his pals or like Amis & Co. they had spent the subsequent decades meeting over lunch and exchanging manuscripts. If so, they were the platonic ideal of my dream, a duo ascending from the school yard to literary dominion, together.

Further research and reality quickly intruded: it turns out that the two only overlapped for one brief term, in 1900. There is no account of them meeting or even being aware of each other either at school or in their later lives. So much for my fantasy.

I kept digging, though. The truth, as it often is, turns out to be both simpler and more profound than our imaginations. These two great masters may not have learnt from each other—but they were both taught by the same teachers.

At Dulwich, seven years apart, they were instructed in Latin and Greek by the Classics teacher Phillip Hope and by the Headmaster, A.H. Gilkes, both men of fearsome scholarship and linguistic felicity. By ‘instructed’ read, immersed. Under Gilkes and Hope, the boys copied Virgil and Livy out by the yard, memorized pages of verse and free-translated, under the threat of the ruler, until they could each compose as fluently in Latin and Greek as they did in English.

In later life, as pointed out by the classicist Kathleen Riley, both writers acknowledge this debt explicitly; Chandler saying: ‘it would seem that a classical education might be a rather poor basis for writing novels in a hardboiled vernacular. I happen to think otherwise,’ whilst Wodehouse was clear that his schooling ‘on the Classical side… was the best form of education I could have had as a writer.’

As a writer myself who has benefited, from the school yard to this day, from great teachers and mentors, the unearthing of this story is better than fantasy. Teachers, it turns out, matter.

(That Nigel Farage also attended Dulwich, we will regard as the exception that proves the rule. He will be lost and forgotten whilst Marlowe and Jeeves live immortal.)

And yet… the romantic in me wants to discover that Plum and Ray were friends after all, that they read each other’s work and swapped similes and reminisced about the production of Aristophanes’ Frogs in which they played Tadpole 1 and Tadpole 2. Alas, other than the hallucinations of ChatGPT, no such evidence seems to exist, but then I remembered Wodehouse’s own description of his books and where they sat in the spectrum of literature:

‘I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.’

Two ways of writing novels, says Wodehouse. My way and Chandler’s way. Maybe the two old masters knew each other after all.

____________________________

Seeing isn’t passive. What we see and how we see it shapes who we are—or at least, who we believe ourselves to be—by constructing, distorting, and defining our reality. Fiction knows this well, how our perception is filtered through the eyes we’re given, or the ones we wish we had. But this dynamic isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a psychological reality, and a narrative one, shaping how stories are told, understood, and even lived.

The best and most necessary example is Toni Morrison’s debut, The Bluest Eye, in which Pecola Breedlove desires to have blue eyes, just like the happy, blond-haired, and white-skinned children in the storybooks she reads. Pecola’s longing follows a heart-breakingly innocent logic: blue eyes will make her beautiful, and beauty will make her loved, protected, and seen. But it also reflects her beliefs in the power of perception. As another character observes, “Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty…A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.” For Pecola, sight dictates perception, and perception dictates identity, such that she believes changing how she sees might also change how she is seen.

Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists might agree, to a point. Theories of visual perception emphasize not just how sight fails us, but how those failures shape our sense of reality—and of self. Take for instance “change blindness,” or the well-documented phenomenon whereby individuals fail to notice unexpected changes in their visual field. In one study, an interviewer asking questions is covertly swapped with someone else in the middle of the interaction, often without detection. The brain is so focused on the content of the question that it fails to register a visual change. Magicians owe their careers, such as they are, to change blindness.

Similarly, the theory of “predictive processing” suggests that what we see is largely determined by what we expect to see based on what we have seen. Imagine a smallish object darts past your window. In reality, it was a mutant cicada. But your brain, drawing from past experience and probability, sees a robin because robins are more likely to be darting past your window than a freakish insect.

Taken together, these theories suggest that sight is less about taking in raw visual data and more about the brain filling in the gaps based on context and prior knowledge. The resulting perception will shape the way you see things going forward because, like narrative, vision is shaped by expectation—by what’s likely to happen next, based on what’s come before. The world we “see” is a subconscious construction, a story our brain builds around us using the raw materials of experience, memory, and beliefs. A construction that, in turn, molds our sense of self.

Returning to The Bluest Eye, we might then hypothesize that what we, as readers, see—a young girl suffering trauma, internalized racism, and mental illness—is not what Pecola sees. Her afflictions shape the very architecture of her perception. And yet, if we can stomach an additional layer of tragedy, she seems painfully aware of that distortion. She wants to start over with new eyes, eyes that might allow her to perceive and be perceived differently. Eyes that might give her a new life.

*

My new novel, Her New Eyes, is very interested in the dynamic between sight and identity. Susan, a sixty-eight-year-old woman living in Indiana, receives new eyes. Soon after, she experiences visions of the life of Marilyn Monroe—and gradually, inexplicably, transforms into her. At first, Susan dismisses the changes, but as Monroe begins appearing not just in dreams but in the mirror, the transformation deepens. Her body, her consciousness, and her entire life starts to shift. She becomes someone else. What she sees is what she gets.

Whereas Pecola of The Bluest Eye prays that new eyes will lead to a better life, Susan’s new eyes disrupt a life she was already happy living. In writing Her New Eyes, I continually found myself returning to the same question: what does it mean to see the world differently—and to be seen differently as a result? It’s a question I believe to be at the heart of storytelling.

In literature, sight isn’t just a motif. It’s foundational to how we tell and understand stories. The creative writing dogma of “show don’t tell” is an obvious example, but it isn’t specific to the sense of sight itself. Consider instead dramatic irony: in Othello, we watch Othello unravel because he believes in what he sees—a handkerchief, a glance— but cannot see what we, the audience, already know. The tragedy lies in that visual gap, the disconnect between perception and reality, between self and truth. We could apply a similar reasoning to literary representations of visual impairments or blindness. Stripped of strictly visual input, the blind men scattered across Cormac McCarthy’s desolate novels construct for themselves a world grounded in metaphor, abstraction, and mystical introspection. And more often than not, they are seen by those around them as crazed, further emphasizing how the spectrum of sight reflects a spectrum of realities.

Beyond classical tragedy and brooding cowboys, fiction itself relies deeply on sight—what characters know, what they miss, and what we as readers are allowed to see according to the story’s point of view, a term that makes explicit the relationship between storytelling and sight. For example, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first-person narrators are often shaped by their blinkered perception of the world. (To avoid spoilers, I’ll say only that Never Let Me Go is a masterclass in a character slowly understanding their own reality by piecing together what they’ve always seen, but never fully recognized). Even in limited third-person narration, as in Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, the narrator hugs the protagonist so tightly that the narrator’s perception—and thus their voice—becomes nearly indistinguishable from the character’s own. In second-person, the illusion is even tighter: the reader is conscripted into a specific way of seeing the world, a specific self.

If seeing is believing, then literature is an engine for belief—for constructing and deconstructing how we see the world. Much has been made of the claim that reading promotes empathy. But that always feels like an underwhelming justification. After all, even sock puppets promote empathy. Reading goes further. It allows us to inhabit a consciousness not our own. It reconfigures our senses. We try on new eyes to better understand our own—only rarely do we turn into Marilyn Monroe along the way.

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Her New Eyes by T.J. Martinson is available from Clash Books.

As a child, I grew up singing a song in church which ended with the lines, “As it was in the beginning / is now and ever shall be / world without end / amen, amen.” I loved the way the song sounded like a hope, a plea—not like something promised or certain. My new book’s title, World Without End, comes from this song.

The essays in World Without End explore a range of apocalypses: from the evangelical Christian vision of apocalypse as a God-sent end of the world, to the secular apocalypses unfolding all around us—whether through the climate crisis and mass extinction events, or the degradations of capitalism and extractive industry, or the growing influence of Christian fundamentalism on American civic life—to quiet, private apocalypses, like the bewilderment that accompanies a personal loss of faith.

I have always been drawn to books that grapple with—and seek to undermine, complicate, and create new meanings from—visions of apocalypse. Here are some to consider.

*

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O’Connell

Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse begins, “It was the end of the world, and I was sitting on the couch watching cartoons with my son.” The following chapters explore myriad apocalyptic visions. On prepping, O’Connell writes that survivalists offer “not so much a prediction of the future as a deeply political interpretation of the present.” At a former army munitions facility in the Black Hills of South Dakota recently purchased by a real estate mogul specializing in luxury bunkers (“a fever dream from the depths of the libertarian lizard-brain”), O’Connell writes, “All of this was a logical extension of the gated community. It was a logical extension of capitalism itself.”

In New Zealand, where tech billionaires like Peter Thiel are purchasing vast acreage for personal apocalyptic retreats, O’Connell writes, “[Thiel] was pure symbol: less an actual person than a shell company for a diversified portfolio of anxieties about the future”. In a chapter exploring Elon Musk’s fantasies of colonizing Mars, O’Connell recalls a conversation he had with his five-year-old son at a science museum: “‘I don’t want to go to Mars,’ he had said. ‘It doesn’t look nice.’ He was right, I thought. It looked like a total shithole.”

I didn’t know a book about apocalypse could be so funny. And though I never manage to read the book’s final chapter, about parenting, without crying, O’Connell’s humor largely transforms what could be an otherwise bleak book into a deeply pleasurable and moving exploration of the ways our fantasies and fears about the end(s) of the world might be instructive for the futures we are creating and living into with each passing day.

Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” by Emily Raboteau

In Lessons for Survival, Emily Raboteau chronicles overlapping crises: pollution and white supremacy, extreme heat and flooding, gun violence and gentrification and the pandemic, her father’s dementia and death. Losses on scales both global and intimate, as they always are.

The structure of the book, itself, is a form of resistance to apocalypse. Essays are dated, but do not appear chronologically. Many of the essays are fragmented in some way—they are made up of short entries, or are broken up by the author’s photographs. As a mother to two small children, I love the way fragmented forms conjure the interruptions of caregiving, creating layers of time which overlap onto the present haphazardly. And any resistance to chronological time—any disruption of it—is also a resistance to apocalyptic thinking, which relies on a neat chronology of beginning, middle, and end.

In one of her final essays, as she grieves the death of her father, Raboteau lists forms of ambiguous loss: “incarceration, migration, divorce, displacement, miscarriage, terrorism, addiction, pandemic, climate chaos, or dementia, like my dad’s.” Raboteau reminds the reader of the way we care for ourselves and others weathering ambiguous loss: “The therapeutic guidance for such trauma,” she writes, “is toward building resilience.”

In a coastal Alaskan village, Raboteau attends worship in a Catholic church perched on stilts. After the service ends, the Yu’pik church members tell her of their own losses: the river is dirty, and too warm; homes have been lost to erosion; there are fewer fish, which means less community fishing; fewer beluga whales; less permafrost. When she asks the church deacon how he reconciles “the need for justice with the need for forgiveness,” he smiles, and his answer echoes Raboteau’s own answer for weathering loss and change. “That’s easy,” the deacon replies. “We take care of each other.”

The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

The least optimistic book in the list, but the most clear-eyed and clarifying excavation of the Far Right and its spiritual deprivations, from the vacuity of “hipster Christendom” to the red-pilled, “great phallic oversoul” of the manosphere; the conspiratorial gnosticism of Trump devotees and the perverse prosperity gospel of Trump’s rallies where, Sharlet writes, it is as if “loss itself, the very concept of grief, had been disappeared.”

I read The Undertow a couple years ago and there are specific images I have never been able to shake: an emaciated moose covered in glistening ticks, a family cat lying amid a massive pile of guns, a three-year-old child lying on his belly, shooting an automatic rifle. The heaviness is punctuated by Sharlet’s photography, his hysterically funny observations, as well as painfully beautiful meditations on the prophetic imagination of Harry Belafonte and Occupy Wall Street protestors—who Sharlet describes as fools “in the holy tradition, the one that speaks not truth to power but imagination to things as they are.”

Sharlet writes from “the aftermath,” peering into the deepest darkest reaches of a world wrought by the entangled forces of white Christian nationalism, fascism, and authoritarianism. Still, Sharlet draws us forward: “We will need new songs if we are to make it through what is to come—what is already here. I am not the one to write them. My hope is less than that: only that this book may reveal fault lines within our fears, in which others will find better words our children may one day sing.”

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

The book that was my personal gateway drug to apocalyptic nonfiction, The Mushroom at the End of the World is an innovative, layered book that evokes a present world marked by environmental degradation and capitalism, as well as a wide range of possible futures expressed through stories of the matsutake—a highly valuable edible mushroom—and the communities of matsutake pickers Lowenhaupt Tsing encounters in Oregon, China, and Finland.

Short chapters meditating on resurgence, disturbance, notions of progress, and the smell of the matsutake mushroom are broken up by the author’s own tiny line drawings of mushrooms and spores; black and white photographs of Japanese chefs, pickers armed with rifles, and Finnish reindeer; and wide-ranging epigraphs quoting Laotian mushroom buyers, John Cage’s translations of Basho’s poetry, and Samuel Beckett.

An expression of contingency, improvisation, and collaboration, The Mushroom at the End of the World always reshapes my own conceptions of what books can be like, and what stories can do and include, and how life can and will change in the face of catastrophe. “Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival,” Lowenhaupt Tsing writes. “It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations.”

Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells

Early in Believers, Lisa Wells writes, “If we imagine that our civilization is already in collapse, the question we are faced with is this: How, then, shall we live?” This question, lifted from scripture, becomes the animating question of the book as Wells meets with an eccentric cast of characters looking for alternate ways of life that contribute to the flourishing of all creatures.

Wells encounters an “itinerant outlaw” devoted to sowing the desert with edible wildflowers; she meets with intentional communities of “rewilding” Christians working to rehabilitate and decolonize their inherited faith; she learns the art of tracking from one of the best trackers alive. The accumulation of stories gives voice to the multiplicity of solutions to the myriad crises we face. Throughout, Wells’ perspective threads a needle, springing from lost idealism but “beyond cynicism or despair.”

Believers is a book of generative, apocalyptic imagination: in the face of the necessary collapse of many oppressive and unsustainable empires, Wells invites us to imagine new ways of living—new ways of being—in the world. “Another world is coming, one we can’t yet see,” she writes. “This threshold asks that we imagine it anyway.”

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World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After by Martha Park is available from Hub City Press.

In her biography of James Tiptree Jr., Julie Phillips shares stories of Tiptree’s adventures in Africa as a child. Tiptree was one of the noms de plume employed by Alice Bradley Sheldon, who, in the 1920s, joined her parents on expeditions seeking specimens for the American Museum of Natural History. On her first such trip, the adults killed five gorillas, including a four-year-old. Six-year-old Alice slept with the dead child gorilla, preserved in formaldehyde, under her camp bed.

Presumably this arrangement had to do with available space in the camp, but as I read and admire Tiptree’s stories, I can’t help but return to this image of a child lying awake with another child, who has been hunted, killed, and preserved, under her bed. In many of Tiptree’s award-winning stories, a controlling, technologically advanced society provides thin cover for acts of violence and cruelty.

Beginning in 1967, Sheldon wrote as Tiptree for more than a decade, crafting a mysterious persona as well as award-winning science fiction that many critics and readers believed could not have been written by a woman. Whoever thinks that a woman can’t manifest grit, social anxiety, and technical expertise—both as a wordsmith in general and as a creator of “hard” science fictions—has a lot of reading to do. They could start with the story collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, which is jam packed with brilliant works that reveal something that no writer in any genre has ever disproven: the throughline of human experience is hubris.

We see what we want to see and are frequently unaware of how our desires shape our vision. Tiptree’s socially anxious fictions masterfully depict the irrational pull of desire. A Tiptree character might get on the road toward what they want, but they will not survive the trip with their presumed identity intact. In “And I Have Come Upon this Place by Lost Ways” and in another story I’ll discuss here, “A Momentary Sense of Being,” human beings are revealed to be ignorant not only of the planets they visit, but of their own motivations, which are rooted in desires that cannot be reduced to zeroes and ones.

In “And I have Come Upon this Place by Lost Ways,” Evan Dilwyn, an “anthrosyke” assigned to a ship that is touring the galaxy to gather data, keeps telling himself that “the computer has freed man’s brain.” The phrase is italicized, it is clearly something he has been told his whole life, a foundational assumption of the society he lives in. But like many of Tiptree’s characters, Evan has doubts about the wisdom he’s been told to receive. He is in an argument with himself—he can’t stop rejecting the tenets of his society, which has been so technologically successful that it no longer needs to be curious. He is wrestling with petty concerns about his position, when through the ship’s portal a mountain calls to him like some Siren drawing ships to their doom:

“On the far side of the bay where the ship had landed a vast presence rose into the sunset clouds. The many-shouldered Clivorn, playing with its unending cloud-veils, oblivious of the alien ship at its feet. An’druinn the Mountain of Leaving, the natives called it.”

The many-shouldered Clivorn! What is this creature, playing with its cloud veils, revealing and obscuring itself like a dancing Scheherazade? With a deft defamiliarization, Tiptree dispenses with postcard scenery, the mountain is first an autonomous being immune to our frames and lenses. There is another shift in perspective in this paragraph—a reader is reminded that Evan and all the scientists he travels with are the aliens here. They do not know what they do not know. They certainly do not know the meaning of the Mountain of Leaving.

Evan wants to touch the mountain, the Clivorn. He wants to use his “feeble human senses,” to feel it with his hands. When he learns that the ship is scheduled to depart the next day, his desire begins to overcome his societal programming. He is also undeniably inspired by Foster, the previous anthrosyke, who left his role under a cloud. At one point he hears a recording of Foster referring to the “Computer of Mankind” to which all the Star Ships send their findings, as “a planetary turd of redundant data.”

At a dinner under soft lights, Evan’s superiors make fun of Foster, while admiring the crystal “soul boxes” he extracted on a previous planetary visit. Foster had bought the boxes from the “newtwomen” who seem, to the sophisticated scientists, not to have understood rudimentary commerce. They joke about the decontamination job that was required after the newtwomen clawed at Foster, trying to get him to take them along as he returned to the ship. But they were their soul boxes, Evan insists, they were fighting for their souls.

The ship is a glamorous place where scientists from different planets dine on delicious foods and amuse themselves with games that are described in terms both light and menacing. In this story and in many others, Tiptree writes abuses of power into the social fabric. Walking through the ship after being chastised by a superior, Evan passes “three scared-looking Recreation youngsters waiting outside the gameroom for their nightly duty. As he passed, Evan could hear the grunting of the senior Scientists in final duel.” Tiptree never says what, exactly, goes on in the gameroom, but gives this reader feeling of uncomfortable complicity in a system that would make young people fear their nightly duty. The grunts salt the point home.

As an “anthrosyke,” Evan is at a bottom rung of the top section of the social ladder. To input his research into the program of the Computer of Mankind, he must use the program’s language, which allows him twenty-six nouns to describe his cultural/linguistic/social/psychological findings on other worlds. His colleagues in the hard sciences, such as the biologist who found the enzyme considered to be the only thing of value on the Clivorn’s planet, have more than five hundred nouns at their disposal. The language of the system that employs Evan is inherently exclusive—there are simply no such things as those outside its parameters.

As in our own society, decisions about language reflect and create systems of social control. People in power aim to stay that way by choosing what is and isn’t named. In Evan’s world, Science suffocates curiosity. As his superior Deputy Pontgreve says, “Science must not, will not betray itself back into phenomenology and impressionistic speculation.”

If Evan wants to learn more about the Clivorn and the mysterious line he sees near its summit, he will have to pay for an additional scan. The society he lives in claims science as its highest value, but its social and economic hierarchies crush creativity. Evan argues with himself, why can’t he be like the others who “never went out of seal, they collected by probes and robots or—very rarely—a trip by sealed bubble sled.” The Clivorn beckons to him through the portal, its clouds revealing and occluding the line that seems to cut across it near the summit. It seems to him to be something built, something, in his understanding, outside the technical capacity of the planet’s indigenous people. He spends the last of his available credit to buy a deeper scan of the area, a risk that he can take at his rank, but one that, if he’s wrong, will ruin his career. It does. The scan returns nothing, but the stakes become clear to him. He wonders if he is “even alive, locked in this sealed ship.”

Before he can be punished for following his “impressionistic speculation,” Evan takes a bubble sled and goes to the planet. When his superior demands that he return, he sends the sled back on autopilot, knowing full well that none of his colleagues will follow him. Walking into the village he meets the members of the local tribe who live at the foot of the mountain, engaging them with the few awkward phrases of their language that he has learned. Unlike him, they are a people tied to a place. As he goes up the mountain, they call after him, and one throws a spear at his leg. Whether they are warning or attacking him remains unclear—Tiptree keeps the action ambiguous. Evan himself does not understand what is happening. The language of the story changes, giving over to lyric and dream logic “There rose in him an infinite joy, carrying on it like a cork his rational conviction that he was delirious.” He comes face to face with a tiny flower, he discovers that the line he saw is real, it is the boundary of an energy field that can be approached by “Only a living man, stupid enough to wonder, to drudge for knowledge on his knees.”

Written in 1972, this story is resonant in our current days of data-enchantment, our delusion that data itself, devoid of context and purpose, can be a portal rather than a mirror. We are living in a many-mirrored age, in which we have so many ways to comfort and confuse ourselves with images. Tiptree and other writers of speculative fiction are well positioned to spool out scenarios that go beyond the personal and peer into the mechanisms of our oblivion. Evan runs towards his not-being but does not regret his choice to give up the cozy comforts, to trade the screen for a window, to open the window and crawl out on a wind-blasted ledge.

Weighing in at roughly eighty pages, “A Momentary Sense of Being” is a long and occasionally messy story that begins and ends with a dream. In the opening sequence a “parsecs long phallus throbs…under intolerable pressure from within…In grief it bulges, seeking relief.” We begin with desire so big it fills parsecs, but Tiptree tells us that grief underlies the great drive to make. The dreamer is Dr. Aaron Kaye, a physician and psychologist on the Centaur, a ship that has been away from Earth for ten years seeking another habitable planet. With characteristic indirection, Tiptree gives us an intermittent flow of detail about what has become of Earth—it’s not good, even for those at the top of the hierarchy. As Aaron presses the button to get himself a cup of “brew,” he wonders “What are they eating there now, each other?”

When the story begins, Aaron’s sister Lory, who is also a scientist, but one who focuses on plants rather than people, is being interviewed by the ship’s leaders regarding her recent return from a planet brimming with plant life. I’ve read that Tiptree/Sheldon was a fan of Star Trek, but her fiction refuses the temptation to simplify barriers such as time and space with the-future-will-solve-it tech such as a transporter beam. Tiptree gives us the mechanical grit—the movement of turbines, the spin of the ship, the direct experience of different levels of gravity, the challenges of growing food in space.

After leaving the other members of the scout ship crew behind on the unnamed planet, Lory had to travel alone for a year to return to the Centaur. The landing crew is unable to communicate directly with the ship. When the Centaur decides to signal to Earth’s inhabitants to pack up and move to the supposed Eden Lory has found, the transmission will take four years. Such impediments serve the plot—the crew of the Centaur can’t see what’s happening on the surface of the planet in real time. They are in the dark about their past, the story of life on Earth that has continued to unfurl without them, and, based on the poor results of ten years of habitable planet searching, their future has seemed nonexistent. The new planet, throbbing with bioluminescent plant life and breathable air, seems a dream come true.

The story is told in a close third person, we see the world of the ship through Dr. Aaron Kaye. “Here we are,” Aaron muses, “Tiny blobs of life millions and millions of miles from the speck that spawned us, hanging out here in the dark wastes, preparing with such complex pains to encounter a different mode of life.”

Tiptree’s life as Alice Sheldon included earning a Ph.D. in psychology and a stint in the CIA, background that surely informs the clinical authority of Aaron’s descriptions of his fellow crew members’ moods and facial expressions. He seems to be able to see himself and the others on the Centaur with a measure of dispassion, even recalling and admitting to himself his incestuous relationship with Lory when they were adolescents.

Yet he remains attuned to Lory’s presence in a way that seems inextricable from their shared sexual experience. When she is being interrogated by the ship’s leadership he equates their aggressive questioning with rape—a reader learns later that he “ended both their virginities” when she was thirteen and he was fifteen. He is also attuned to the presence of the specimen Lory has brought back from the planet and begins to believe that the “sessile plant-thing. Like a cauliflower, like a big bunch of grapes” is causing him to have nightmares.

As a precaution, the “bunch of grapes” is at first kept in the scout ship, which is tethered outside of, rather than docked in, the Centaur. As he walks through the ship, Aaron feels the presence of the specimen through the metal skin of the ship. He is aware of the specimen in a way that feels menacing but is akin to the way you might be aware of someone you desire—you want to be cool, but you feel them enter the room. Your peripheral awareness catches their movement. He wants to remain aloof, to follow all the protocols.

Throughout the story he will try to maintain this distance from the desire that the specimen will soon unleash in his colleagues, causing them to abandon any semblance of rationality as they become part of a much larger mechanism of reproduction than they previously understood existed. Unlike Evan Dilwyn, Aaron Kaye stays in the struggle until the end of the story, becoming the lonely recorder of what might be humankind’s last ejaculation into the galaxy. In a recording he is making for the potential interest of science, he admits that he no longer dreams.

In “A Momentary Taste of Being” as in “And I Have Come Upon this Place by Lost Ways” desire and death are twins. The former draws us toward unfamiliar places, the latter remains forever under the bed, the unchangeable end of our changing organic bodies. As Tiptree, Alice Bradley Sheldon calls us out as the animals we are, despite our shiny thin metal skins of rationality and order and belief in our own technological prowess. In these stories and others in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, Tiptree offers us a more potent and troubling mirror than the ones we might craft for ourselves. Unless, of course, we want to consider the vastness of space, the relentlessness of nature, and the baroque interplay of our lust and our controlling, problem-solving minds.

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The Good War by Elizabeth Costello is available from Regal House Publishing.

More than a decade after his death, Jose Esteban Muñoz’s faculty page is still up on NYU’s website. It lists his former office address, 721 Broadway, 6FL, marking an absence that is now someone else’s presence. Office space in downtown Manhattan, where NYU is located, is too expensive to let the fear of a haunting keep space unused. The website also lists his research interests: “Latino studies; queer theory; critical race theory; global mass cultures; performance art; film and video.” The catchwords seem too simple, too reductive, to speak to the nature of his expansive, unsummarizable theorizing. His email in the corner of the page: jose.munoz@nyu.edu. A lure for epistolary desiring. Cold emails beyond the grave.

*

Whenever I walk to the queer bars in the West Village (places I, a happy-hour connoisseur, frequent often), I pass by the building where Muñoz’s office was located. It’s an unimpressive structure, right on Broadway. The purple NYU Tisch flag waves out front. I stare up at the sixth floor, not knowing which exact window would have been his. The window in the photo of him working in his office could be any of these. Each a windowpane a portal to the sliver of an office inside. I search for an outline akin to Muñoz’s in the office photo: a bigger body, slightly hunched over, in a sweater and glasses. I look for the ghost of him in his former office. Hoping for one of the signs from the dead that my Puerto Rican grandmother believed in so passionately—the departed manifesting in a place they had frequented in life, reaching out, communicating, imparting a message. I stand on the bustling sidewalk, staring into the offices above, fantasizing the outline of the theorist at work, a glimpse of him tap-tapping at his desktop computer, concentrated, laser focused on his next book or article, finessing a new concept, developing upon an old idea, toiling away on his next project, which we will never read and never know. My reverie is cut short by practicality: Why would anyone want to haunt, reside in perpetuity, in their former place of employment?

I was thirty years old when I got my own office for the first time. Before then, privacy had been at a minimum; spaces in which to work and think in were difficult to attain. In high school, my bedroom wasn’t large enough to even hold a desk, so I did my homework and reading on my bed or at the kitchen table. As an undergrad I was fortunate enough to have a desk in my series of cramped dorm rooms, but the hubbub of roommates and college life made the space unideal for writing and thinking. Grad school was the first time in my adult life when my housing had a private bedroom where I could work on my own terms. Because grad school centered on independent studying and writing, I could often work from home rather than go to campus. I quickly realized, however, that working, resting, and sleeping all in the same space wasn’t such a good idea. My body could not distinguish between the time meant for work, the time for unwinding, and the time for sleep.

It wasn’t until after grad school, when I began receiving a salary from my first tenure-track job, that I was able to afford an apartment with an extra room for an office. I have never thought so clearly as when I’ve been inside my own office. A room solely dedicated to reading, working, and thinking, where no one can disrupt my concentration by shuffling in or out. I’ve filled my office with ceiling-height bookcases, with a filing cabinet storing all kinds of documents (museum tickets, playbills, syllabi, exhibition handouts, unpaid bills, unsent postcards), with art. My office is a room of intellective possibility. The first place I have been able to get fully lost in thought, where thought and inquiry are nurtured, where I can play around with ideas. Maintaining this office—and by maintain, I mean continuing to earn enough in order to afford the space—is the difficult part. Twenty-first-century capitalism has commodified every last inch of space, particularly those in cities, making it impossible for anyone not making six figures, or those who don’t have a multiple-income household, to secure decent living arrangements.

We all deserve to have a space to think in, even those of us who aren’t writers, artists, or academics. A designated room in which to reflect and contemplate, apart from the routines of the kitchen, the sanctum of the bedroom, the noise and activity of the living room. A room to be alone in. An office really isn’t a luxury, and when we think of it as so—when we agree that having multiple rooms is a privilege that only some can afford—that’s when the bosses and the landlords win. The center can no longer hold. Why not fall through like Alice, curious about the rabbit hole’s end, and see what’s on the other side?

*

Muñoz lived in the New York City of the 1990s and 2000s, which was very different from the one I live in now. He lived in a network of artists and critics running about the city, high off cheap rents, cheap taxis, and cheaper living. He saw experimental theater flourish, saw performance artists of varying races and classes doing the most in the clubs. Later, he witnessed the “cleaning up” of Times Square, a process of gentrification set in motion by Mayor Rudy Giuliani, documented in Samuel R. Delany’s 1999 essay collection, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (a text Muñoz wrote about). He was here during 9/11 and its aftermath, as he wrote about in a pedagogy essay. He visited queer clubs in Manhattan and Queens spending time in those spaces so that he could later theorize upon them in his books, noting how one day the clubs were there and the next they were gone. This was the New York City that marks Muñoz’s entire body of work, making possible the artists he came in contact with and the analyses he produced.

Muñoz and I shared the same New York for three years—starting with my arrival in 2010, ending with his death in 2013—but that New York was already so different from the one he’d come to know in the 1990s, when he started his job at NYU. The New York that greeted me as a precocious eighteen-year-old was one of unaffordable rents and high prices. Splurging on a drunken night out and a cab ride home would mean a skipped dinner (or two) to make up for the costs of such opulence. I have watched the city expand its army of cops through the years, to harass children jumping the turnstiles and unhoused folks sleeping on subway platforms. At Rikers, the jail overstuffed with incarcerated humans, conditions have worsened year by year, inmates dying at alarming rates, the carceral state consolidating its power in order to make the wealthy few feel “safe” in the big city. The New York I have lived through is one where artists and critics can no longer afford to build a life as our elders did, those who came before us with no money to their name but still made it, Warhol, Ginsberg, Haring, their names now monetized by the same city officials and the bourgeoisie who are actively erasing the material conditions that gave rise to such innovators in the first place.

Under twenty-first-century capitalism, New York artists and intellectuals cannot create communities organized around experimenting with aesthetics, sexuality, ideas, gender expression, or forms of living. At least, not together in person. Perhaps social media and online forums will host the next great wave of the avant-garde. But I am not too sure about that either because no matter where we are in the world, capitalism still stifles, interjects. Even when you’re behind a computer screen or your phone, your rent is still too high, your credit card and student debt are through the roof, you’re working too much, your attention span is absolutely shot from the stress of it all. Internet prices continue to surge too, further hampering the prospect of your digital avant-garde! Where and when can art and ideas still flourish, under the global conditions we all must endure? There has never been a utopia in New York. No true utopia can blossom on stolen land whose keepers refuse to return it—who refuse, even, to admit that a violence has taken place, refuse to atone materially or structurally for all the enslaved and exploited who were forced to build a society, brick by brick. The New York of the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s was by no means even close to utopia, especially for folks of color. But there were glimmers of possibility that we can mine for a politics of the utopic. A utopia we have yet to see, that may require revolutionary gusto, a demolition-like impulse that isn’t afraid of a world entirely strange to this one. We may not have Wilde’s map, but we can work to draw it.

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Excerpted from In Theory, Darling: Searching for José Esteban Muñoz and the Queer Imagination by Marcos Gonsalez (Beacon Press, 2025). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.