September 25, 2026  ·  1 comment

A Drop of Corruption.

Robert Jackson Bennett won the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novel with his fantasy/mystery mashup The Tainted Cup, which introduced the world to Ana and Din, an eccentric (to put it very mildly) detective duo who operate in a world that combines medieval trappings with an alternate science built around biohacking and the exploitation of massive and deadly sea creatures called leviathans. The story was solid, if a little more convoluted than that of the typical mystery novel, while the two main characters were the novel’s biggest strength, and the setting was innovative and curious enough to make me want to spend more time within it.

Bennett has written two more novels in the series already, the second of which, 2025’s A Drop of Corruption, was nominated for this year’s Hugo, losing out to The Everlasting. As in the first book, we have Ana and Din working to solve a murder that is hard to fathom and that will ultimately expose a broader conspiracy of graft, betrayal, and, of course, corruption. Set in the neighboring kingdom of Yarrow, which Ana and Din’s native empire Khanum will be taking over in an arrangement that sounds similar to the transfer of power in Hong Kong, the book goes deeper into the weird science that powers this fictional world, and the very bizarre ‘enhancements’ people within it use to do this difficult work.

Ana is the Sherlock Holmes/Nero Wolfe here, a savant who is nearly always blindfolded because she says the visual stimuli of the world are too much for her senses to handle. Din is her faithful assistant, more sagacious than Dr. Watson and more serious than Archie Goodwin, and has himself been enhanced as an engraver who can record things he sees in his mind, as if he had an eidetic memory. Their partnership, awkward and tentative for most of the first book, is more solid and more fluid here, so we step almost directly into their work to solve the first murder – which, mild spoiler here, gets solved far sooner than you might expect because of the way it expands outward into a larger story.

Again, the characters are the real thing here, although in this book Bennett has dropped more clues that might help readers piece together the ultimate solution. (The intermediate one I just mentioned isn’t solvable in that way.) Din gets more screen time than Ana, and it helps flesh out his character more, although if you jumped right to this book without reading the first, you might think Ana is two-dimensional and a bit of comic relief when her oddness is inherent to her character. One of the new characters introduced here, Malo, who has an enhanced olfactory sense, is a strong comic foil for Din, and balances his overly serious manner with her sarcasm.

The setting was what really sucked me into A Drop of Corruption. I’ve played a handful of role-playing games, almost entirely computer ones with a little D&D and its ilk in high school, and I would absolutely play the hell out of a roleplaying game set in this world – especially Yarrow, which is richer and stranger and more foreboding than even Khanum, with political intrigue and what sounds like a massive grey-market economy, along with a people hostile to almost any stranger. Fantasy novels almost always seem to involve magic on some level; Bennett replaces that with his science, which involves the use of plants and fungi to alter people and even create buildings along with the chemical enhancements that many of these characters have undergone. It’s highly imaginative, yet also coherent enough to work with the story rather than detracting from it.

The story is overlong, but the core mystery and its resolution are tighter than that of the first novel, and there are definitely more clues to catch if you’re that sort of reader. (I wish I was, but I am not.) The first murder is a locked-door mystery, part homage, part parody, and that’s about the only thing I sort of figured out here – how it was done, but not who did it. Bennett’s ambition in his plotting works for and against him, making the narrative broader and more interesting, but resulting a book that’s quite long for the genre. I’ve read a few hundred mystery novels by myriad authors and have read very few of this length, mainly by Anthony Horowitz in some of his novel-within-a-novel works. I was pulled through the book quickly – it’s 450 pages and I read it inside of six days – as much because of the characters as my desire to find the solution to the story.

Bennett also slips in a little social commentary here that the first novel lacked, some obvious (hey, slavery is bad!), but some more timely, such as Din’s family story that serves as a metaphor for the crushing pattern of medical debt in the U.S., and the main plot’s exploration of what happens in a world without regulations. Yarrow is an absolute monarchy, but Khanum is also an autocracy, and Bennett should continue to explore what that means for his main characters, who, for now at least, serve its emperor.

I will confess I’m glad to see the next book in the series, A Trade of Blood, came in under 400 pages. I’m a fan, and would have read the third book regardless, but I’ll be happy to see Ana and Din get to the point a little more expeditiously. As for this year’s Hugo, I’m fine with this book being on the shortlist but not the winner; it’s not as good as The Incandescent or The Everlasting but I’d probably put it ahead of Death of the Author.

Next up: A book off the Hugo longlist, There Is No Antimemetics Division, by Sam Hughes, who writes under the pen name qntm.

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September 21, 2026  ·  2 comments

Crook Manifesto.

Colson Whitehead followed up his second Pulitzer Prize win with the first book in what has become his Harlem Trilogy, the action-packed, dark crime novel Harlem Shuffle. Set in the early to mid 1960s, the book introduced us to Ray Carney, the prosperous owner of a Harlem furniture store who occasionally fences stolen goods, although he’s less involved in criminal enterprises than his late father Big Mike or his cousin Freddie. The second book about Ray, Crook Manifesto, is itself a triptych of stories featuring him and some of his less scrupulous acquaintances, set in three different years in the 1970s against the backdrop of a rapidly changing New York City. It’s a pale successor to the first novel, with far less interesting plots and a shallower look at its social and physical setting than Harlem Shuffle offered.

Ray is still running his furniture store, and has largely left the criminal scene entirely by the time the story opens in 1971, when his young daughter asks for tickets to an upcoming Jackson 5 concert. Ray asks around to see if anyone has a hookup when he lands on the crooked cop Munson, who conscripts Ray into a fencing job that touches multiple underworld elements and ultimately threatens Ray’s life. Two years later, a blaxsploitation film shoot in Harlem brings us Ray’s muscle man Pepper, a side gig, along with some scenes in Ray’s store, but the project goes sideways when the lead actress disappears. In 1976, Harlem is beset by arson cases, many set by landlords torching their own buildings for fraudulent insurance claims. When one fire nearly kills a young boy in the neighborhood, Carney decides to investigate, running into a major real estate scam that sets him against some of the most powerful people in the borough.

Part of Crook Manifesto’s problem is that the stories are too short, and Whitehead packs in so much action – it’s a quick read – that there’s very little space for the bigger picture he’s trying to paint of a city in decline, or at least a neighborhood in decline as other, whiter areas hold their ground. The third section, about the constant threat of fires, whether deliberate or not, has a more profound point about the intersection of racism, corruption, and ineffective (if not outright counterproductive) public policy choices, even by those who profess to be trying to help economically disadvantaged areas. Whitehead barely gets to any of that because he’s racing through the story – sometimes literally, given the speed of some of the fires – and has to get us to the twist ending, which wasn’t all that surprising given how few possibilities there were for the solution to the mini-mystery anyway.

The first section with the crooked cop has the slowest buildup, but it does capture the noirish vibe that characterized most of Harlem Shuffle, particularly once Munson has Ray hooked enough that there appears to be no physical or figurative way out for the protagonist. We know Ray survives to part two, so that’s not much of a plot point, so Whitehead instead creates a situation where Ray’s predicament gradually gets worse, and he realizes it’s getting worse, until there’s the slightest opening for something to happen that gets Ray out of this in one piece. As I was reading that section, I was hoping that would be the worst of the three, because Whitehead was setting up something larger, but it ended up the best section by default.

I’ll still check out the third book, Cool Machine, at some point, but it’s another triptych, which doesn’t give me very high hopes for it.

Next up: The fourth of this year’s Hugo nominees for me, A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett.

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September 17, 2026  ·  4 comments

The Everlasting.

Mousy academic and erstwhile war hero Owen Mallory uncovers a mythical manuscript about the folk hero Una the Everlasting, only to learn that the book is actually a time machine – and that he needs to go back in history to make sure that the real Una does what she’s supposed to do according to the myth. The two fall in love, however, which makes completing her legend a bit complicated, since it ends in her death. And so Owen goes back in time again, and again, egged on by the War Minister of his country, Dominion, to try to set the story straight, until he eventually discovers that someone else is writing their story, too.

Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting won the Hugo Award for Best Novel this year, quite handily according to the voting, and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, while acquiring what appears to be a dedicated fan base online for its sweeping romance, a love story that literally knows no bounds of time. The time-travel bits don’t add up here; you have to suspend your disbelief early and go with the flow, pun intended. That’s not a serious flaw when the time-travel aspect comes in service of a larger goal, and in The Everlasting, a story about power and loyalty and courage, that goal is evident. Where the story falls short, however, is in its two characters, and the weak chemistry between them that undermines much of the love story.

Una comes from the archetypal wild-child woman warrior, wielding a magical sword that apparently can’t be broken or destroyed, often living by her wits and her hunting prowess, feared by many of the peasants of her time but revered in hindsight by the Dominion of the present day. Dominion has just recently fought a bruising war that resembles our World War I in some ways, and Owen, still a coward, turned out to be a crack shot, dispatching enemy soldiers until he was nearly decapitated in a battle that became a massacre. He’s returned from that war dead-set on becoming a historian with a particular interest in Una’s legend, so finding and translating an original manuscript of her story, or any of the artifacts associated with her, would make his academic career. When the book arrives, of course he dives in, and he remains devoted to the task until he notices several details that make him question the nature of everything, from the righteousness of his cause to his own free will. Yet he’s much more of a Nick Jenkins here, observing, noticing, more involved in the action than Jenkins typically was but still on the outside of most of it, and as such ends up a blander character whose primary attribute is the cowardice that he tells us about – but seldom shows in these pages.

The world that Harrow has created may be the book’s real strength, as it’s recognizable and, other than the time travel, plausible, while allowing her to play around with setting and style. There are subtle shifts in the prose and tone between the more medieval settings of Una’s ‘true’ time and the contemporary vignettes of Owen’s childhood, the war, and the aftermath, along with an unsubtle warning about fascism and people who’ll destroy everything, even time itself, to gain power. (I’d also note that the identity of the villain here is as obvious as a sledgehammer to the forehead.)

The Everlasting is also an exploration of the gap between myth and reality, and the way that history, especially oral history, can change over time while also changing those who follow and hear it. Una’s legend turns out to be very far from the truth, and Owen, who grew up hearing some of the folk tales and believes he may have met Una under a yew tree when he was a child, has to grapple with the difference between the Una of the page and the one he’s traveling with, and whose mission he must protect to save Dominion. As he changes the story, however, the future changes as well, not quite in an A Sound of Thunder way, but enough to lay out an argument that past and future are intertwined in ways beyond the merely physical.

I read The Everlasting expecting to be sucked into the characters and their romance, but for the most part, I didn’t buy it. (There is one very well-written sex scene, however, especially shocking for a genre that produces some of the cringiest sex scenes put to paper.) I found the political and historical narrative much more compelling, which is enough for me to recommend the book, but also left me knowing I didn’t get what many readers seem to have gotten, and feeling like maybe I just missed something. Instead there’s some padding here and there on the duo’s repeated quests that was probably part of how Harrow tried to build their chemistry, and without that foundation, those parts dragged.

I’ve only read three of the six Hugo nominees this year, but I’d put this behind The Incandescent and ahead of Death of the Author. A Drop of Corruption is on my to-read shelf right now.

Next up: Tattoo by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

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September 8, 2026  ·  4 comments

Death of the Author.

Metafiction can be a powerful tool in the hands of the right author; At Swim-Two-Birds is one of my favorite novels of all time, using the technique to explore the relationship between an author and their creation, and to ask broader questions of free will and the meaning of life. More frequently, at least in my experience as a reader, it’s a gimmick that interrupts the narrative and results in one good story and one mediocre one, as in The Blind Assassin, which creates a work that ends up less satisfying than it would have been had the author just focused on a single work.

(I’m using the term “metafiction” here to refer to a fictional story within a novel, which is the definition I learned in college while we studied Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, one of the best examples of the genre I’ve ever read. Wikipedia defines it differently.)

Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, which made the shortlist for this year’s Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel, is more than just one novel; it’s trying to be at least two, the story of a disabled Black woman named Zelu who writes a best-selling sci-fi novel, and the novel itself, called Rusted Robots, with interviews interspersed throughout the book. The result is more like one and a half novels, each of them feeling about three-quarters full.

Zelu is Nigerian-American, raised in Chicago, one of six children to a couple of Igbo and Yoruba origins. When she was 11, she fell out of a tree while playing with friends, an accident that left her a paraplegic and made her the subject of pity and infantilization from her parents and siblings and of scorn and fear from relatives in Africa. She’s tried for years to write serious literature, barely making ends meet by working as an adjunct professor, but as the novel opens, she’s fired from that job and gets her umpteenth rejection letter from a publisher, forcing her to move back in with her parents. At this personal nadir, she begins writing a science-fiction novel about a post-human world populated by two types of artificial life, robots in human-shaped shells called Humes and bodiless AI programs called NoBodies. The novel is an immediate success, sparking a bidding war before it’s published and making Zelu rich.

The sudden media attention brings her into the sights of a scientist who has developed a form of intelligent prosthetic limbs called exos; Zelu decides to take the leap, regaining some mobility and independence while making herself world-famous as “that robot author.” Her family, however, doesn’t understand her writing, despises her choice to use the exos as a violation of God’s will, and wishes she’d stop smoking so much weed. As the novel keeps building, along with a film adaptation and expectations of sequels, Zelu struggles to adjust to the rapid shift from anonymity to celebrity, and grapples with an existential crisis of her own – much as the protagonist of her novel, the Hume named Ankara, has to do in the escalating conflicts of its post-apocalyptic world.

Rusted Robots is not a very good or convincing novel, and that undermines huge parts of the rest of Death of the Author. It’s written in a different voice from Okorafor’s usual writing, and the result sounds like a stilted attempt at YA literature. There’s some character development, and there’s a plot-shaped object there, but because it’s maybe the length of a short novella and written in a simpler style, it feels like she’s showing us the veneer of a novel rather than an actual one.

The constant interruptions to veer into Rusted Robots or those interview segments also end up detracting from Zelu’s story, which is the most interesting and the most fleshed-out by far. She’s a fascinating character, at least in part an author surrogate, evolving in some ways as her life changes rapidly, while still maintaining the fatalism that forms her main line of defense against her family and the world in general. Her choices can be irrational, which makes her maddening but also recognizable as a three-dimensional character who feels human. She deserves a better partner than Msizi, the South African entrepreneur whose AI-powered personal assistant app ends up a secondary distraction throughout the book.

Then there’s the ending, which is clever, maybe extremely clever, but also rather unsatisfying. Okorafor throws several matters into question with the resolution of both of the main plot points, and I’m not sure it’s internally consistent with what came before. I’ve seen this novel described as a Möbius strip; that doesn’t fit the structure, as it’s not Finnegan’s Wake, but the conclusion at least should force readers to re-evaluate some of what’s come before.

Death of the Author is very much a novel of ideas, which does mitigate some of the plot deficiencies. The main story sits on a foundation of Zelu’s identity as a disabled Black woman born to immigrant parents, with a large extended family in Nigeria, and as someone who perceives herself as an intellectual but ends up finding success writing a genre piece wildly different from her previous work. Zelu lives much of her life feeling like whatever she does is going to go wrong, which at least in some part is a function of the number of people expecting something of her, and the number of different faces she has to present to the world. (Okorafor hints at a religious divide, where Zelu is secular but retains some of the trappings of belief, such as thinking the universe is ready to smack her down if she gets too high.) Yet her ability to interrogate these influences on her life is limited. Her decisions are often impetuous, even if they’re right, and she doesn’t seem to have the introspection required to understand what’s pushing her in any direction.

The role of technology in society and individual lives, including AI, pervades both the novel proper and Rusted Root, while that inner novella’s story hinges on the power of storytelling and whether that is unique to humanity. Okorafor seems to be an AI believer, or at least a proponent, as there’s no hint in the novel of anything going awry from the technology, and its presence in the story is only positive. Zelu’s meteoric rise is possible because of technological progress, including her exos, and it opens up further opportunities for her later in the novel, one of which comes about in part due to the absence of real privacy caused by tech firms gathering endless information on us. Even I found myself skeptical of some of the pro-technology language in this book, as someone whose career also arose due to the changes in our world that technological progress has brought about.

Death of the Author is a lot of book, and offers plenty to discuss and debate, more than even the typical Hugo winner would. It’s an ambitious book, and a profound one. It’s also not entirely successful as a work of fiction, thanks to the shared narrative that results in neither Zelu nor her robots getting their due in the end. It’s a better work of literature than The Incandescent, also nominated for those same two awards, but nowhere near as enjoyable a read.

(Aside: I have read Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, about a year ago, and loved it.)

Next up: Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto, the second book in his Harlem trilogy.

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February 11, 2026  ·  No comments yet

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother).

Raja is a portly gay 63-year-old teacher in Beirut who lives with his overbearing, impossible mother. He calls himself gullible, although I think he’s being overly self-deprecating; he’s surrounded by lunatics, and lived through more history than most of us, from the Lebanese Civil War to the collapse of the country’s economy to the 2020 explosion at the city’s port. Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), winner of the 2025 National Book Award, follows him in a sort of picaresque fashion through his memories of these and other major events in Lebanese history, as he ends up in one ridiculous situation after another, often with the city around him in ruins or chaos. It’s consistently funny, even in its sorrows, with an indelible main character (and his mother) as our tour guide through a sort of absurdist realism, where the improbable takes place right amidst the actual over the course of six decades.

The prompt that opens the novel is that Raja, a philosophy teacher who wrote one book that was reasonably successful, receives an invitation from a foundation in the United States to pay for him to come to their compound and give a lecture. This, he tells us, he accepted, because he is gullible, and it turned out to be a mistake, although we won’t find out what happened until the penultimate chapter of the book. On the way to that story, Raja walks us through multiple episodes in his life story, each tied to some major event in modern Lebanese history. He missed a huge chunk of the Civil War because he was kidnapped, but not by enemies: it was by a friend of sorts from school who hides Raja away after he witnesses a murder. He’s saving Raja’s life, but he also insists that Raja teach him to dance so he can sleep with some girl in their class – clearly assuming Raja can dance because he’s gay. That’s just the setup; the story goes off the rails from there, or perhaps the rails were blown up by the Israeli invaders. Who can say.

Raja is truly a delight as a narrator and a main character, and his relationship with his mother, who loves to respond to him in paradoxical fashion with “Fuck your mother,” is both an important throughline and a consistent source of laughs. The novel’s nested-stories structure allows Alameddine to jump around through time, while Raja and his mother are there in every one of those stories – true or not, as some of these tales are hard to believe, notably the one of the kidnapping, where Raja and his kidnapper become lovers in a sort of kicked-up gay Stockholm syndrome. Each of the stories, including the resolution of the speaking invitation, which itself is hard for Raja to believe because he’s not an author – he wrote one book, 25 years earlier, that wasn’t successful in the United States, so why on earth would someone there want him to come speak? The answer to that, as with so much else in the book, is hilarious on its surface, but comes with layers of meaning that point to Lebanon’s inability to reckon with or learn from its own history, which keeps looping back on itself, from crisis to crisis, with the Lebanese people always the ones to suffer – including Raja, who takes each setback in a fatalist’s stride.

There are probably further layers of the book that I missed because I’m not that familiar with Lebanon’s history; what I do know is largely through an American lens, such as the news coverage of the hostage crisis, which obviously didn’t paint Lebanon in a kind or accurate light. Alameddine depicts an entirely different Beirut, that of a worldly city with many modern aspects, beset by corruption and conflict, but one where a gay philosophy teacher and his overbearing mother can live their ridiculous life, with a too-large coffee table and a parade of terrible relatives, in something resembling happiness. It’s a richly textured work that takes great tragedies and packages them in wry humor, all delivered by one of the most delightful narrators I’ve encountered in ages.

Next up: I’m way behind on writing up books I’ve read, but right now I’m reading Andrei Bely’s Petersburg.

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November 20, 2025  ·  2 comments

We Do Not Part.

Han Kang won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature in part for her 2021 novel We Do Not Part, which appeared earlier this year in English translation for the first time. This exploration of one of the darkest moments in modern Korean – and American – history works through a struggling female protagonist, somewhat similar to the lead character of her novel The Vegetarian, who finds herself called to the hospital bedside of a friend with whom she was once collaborating on a project about the Cheju genocide. This call leads to a visit to the sick friend’s house, where the lines between reality and dream start to bend, and it’s unclear whose memories we’re reading or how legitimate they are.

Kyungha is a writer who is deeply isolated and almost certainly depressed, often forgetting to eat, sometimes lying for hours on her apartment floor to escape the oppressive heat of the city’s summers. When she sleeps, she’s plagued by nightmares related to the massacres at Cheju, which inspired a scene in her latest, unfinished novel. She gets a call from Inseon, with whom she’d worked on a documentary of sorts about the same killings; Inseon is injured and will be stuck in the hospital for weeks, so she asks Kyungha to go to her house to feed her bird Ama. Once there, however, Kyungha gets stuck in the house without power due to a blizzard, and she begins hallucinating, or perhaps she has died and is experiencing something paranormal, with the result that she ends up hearing the history of Inseon’s family during the massacres.

Cheju (or Jeju) Island is located south of the Korean peninsula and currently has over 600,000 people living there. The residents of the island had begun protesting the planned election in the southern half of Korea, controlled by the United States at the time, because they believed it would lead to a permanent partition. In 1948, the communist party on the island organized a general strike, which turned into an armed insurgency. The strongman Syngman Rhee, the first President of the Republic of Korea, responded with brutal force, with the full backing and consent of the United States, killing somewhere between 15,000 and 100,000 people on the island. The Korean army forces killed children and babies and gang-raped women and girls. Tens of thousands of others were imprisoned for their alleged roles in the insurgency. After the massacre, it was illegal to even mention the government’s actions on Cheju until 1990, and South Korea didn’t hold a truth & reconciliation commission until 2003, when the government finally admitted they had committed genocide against the people of Cheju. (For more on the history of the Cheju genocide, the Wikipedia article is superb, as is this 2000 story from Newsweek.)

We Do Not Part deals with such heavy material that it’s hard to call it a “light” read, but Kang is such a strong prose writer – and some of this may be a credit to the translators, e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris – that it is an incredibly compelling, accessible read, even for someone (like me, before I read the book) with zero knowledge of the history involved. The first half of the book reads quite a bit like Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, with the protagonist’s alienation permeating all aspects of the narrative, while the second half veers almost into magical realism. As Inseon and her mother retell the histories of Inseon’s father and uncle from the time of the genocide, including witnessing massacres of civilians, Kang’s technique and prose give them a hazy quality to emphasize that these are ghosts or spirits or even Kyungha’s subconscious relating these stories.

I’ve been sitting on this post for four days now, and I think I’m just stuck on this one. I loved this book, but I also know this book has way more going on than I understood or appreciated. I’m not Korean and I didn’t know a single thing about the Jeju genocide until I read it and went to Wikipedia to figure out what I was missing. I’ll just stop here and say the book is fantastic, and I would recommend this even before The Vegetarian.

—

In 2021, LitHub published a list of the 50 best classic novels under 200 pages, which included several titles I’d already read and enjoyed, so I copied the list into a Google sheet and started reading my way through it – often just reading whatever I found in bookstores on my travels. I grabbed Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart at Changing Hands last month, since it’s on the list and takes its title from the same James Joyce quote that Japandroids used for their best album. It got the better of me; I did finish it, but I struggled because nothing happens in the novel. It presents the inner monologue of Joana, flashing back to her childhood and her present marriage to her faithless husband Otávio, with the sort of disjointed sentence structure of Joyce or Alfred Döblin or Virginia Woolf, all of whom I have found difficult to read. This one just wasn’t for me.

Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man also comes from the LitHub list; he’s better known now for his Berlin Stories, which inspired the musical Cabaret, but this is a more serious novel and seems like it was considered his best work during his lifetime. The title character is George Falconer, a gay man whose partner Jim has recently died. George is British and now lives in California, in the house he shared with Jim and some pets he seems to have gotten rid of after Jim’s death, teaching at a local university and trying to find new meaning in his relationships with other people. The story moves in fits and starts, but picks up towards the end with two much more meaningful conversations, before the slightly ambiguous ending (I think it’s real, but I see online some people believe it’s a what-if). Falconer is a flawed character, pretentious at times, mopey at others, probably just not a very nice guy, but still makes for an interesting study. I can’t find an answer to this, but I wonder if John Cheever was paying homage to A Single Man in his novel Falconer, another influential gay novel that came out about 16 years after this one. The dialogue here can get a little stilted, but it seems to be in service of making George’s awkwardness in social situations – but not in terms of his own sexuality – clearer on the page.

Next up: Susan Orlean’s The Library Book.

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October 31, 2025  ·  No comments yet

Someone You Can Build a Nest In.

John Wiswell won this year’s Nebula Award for his novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In, while also making the shortlist for the Hugo for Best Novel and winning the Locus Award for Best Novel. It’s a queer love story that tries to approach some enormous questions about the meanings of family, secrecy, and what it means to trust and be trusted, but it gets bogged down too much in the details of how its shapeshifting protagonist works.

Shesheshen is that main character, a shapeshifter with no natural form who lives by eating living creatures – including humans – and absorbing their body parts to create facsimiles of them, although she* can also use inanimate objects to take the places of bones and other hard physical structures. Thus she can imitate a human’s form and even some of its senses despite lacking a circulatory or nervous system. She recalls being born from a sac of eggs within a host human and having to defend herself when her siblings tried to attack and presumably eat her, eating them instead to survive. She lives in a castle outside a town whose residents fear a “wyrm” in the countryside, and the story opens when three adventurers, one the scion of a noble family, invade the house to try to kill her – despite not knowing what manner of creature she is – and collect some sort of bounty. She survives the battle but is wounded, and when she wakes after a fall, she finds herself in the care of a traveling woman named Homily who rescues her and nurses her back to health. Shesheshen develops feelings for Homily, something she has never experienced before, which becomes far more complicated when the full picture becomes apparent.

* I believe Wiswell used she/her pronouns for Shesheshen, while specifically identifying other characters as nonbinary, but obviously the concept of gender for a literal shapeshifter is a bit silly.

Shesheshen learns early on that there’s a connection between Homily and the people who want her dead, and also realizes that Homily thinks she’s a human, but despite coming close multiple times she decides not to tell Homily the truth until much later in the story (mild spoiler, but obviously that reckoning is coming at some point). This presented the most compelling aspect of the entire narrative, even more than the “will they/won’t they” between the two main characters or the eventual conflict between Shesheshen and the Baroness Wulfyre, who has sworn to kill the wyrm and take its heart so that she can lift a curse on her family. Instead, Shesheshen goes through the very familiar and normal set of rationalizations as she vacillates between coming clean – hi, I’m a human-eating monster of no fixed shape, also I think I love you – and avoiding the inevitable conflict and recriminations, both of the actual truth and her choices to deceive Homily for what turns out to be quite some time. It’s a superb portrait of the internal monologue that people who are conflict-avoidant (raises hand) go through, and the lies we even tell ourselves to rationalize our decisions.

Wiswell’s a fine prose writer, but there is just way too much ink spilled here about Shesheshen absorbing and digesting parts of the humans and creatures she attacks. The issue isn’t so much that it’s gross – it is kind of gross, but I’ve seen worse, and Wiswell’s descriptions aren’t lurid – but that it occupies so much of the page when we should be following the plot. There’s a lot happening in this book, and I’d say at least one very big twist, and it gets a bit drowned by all the blood and viscera being spilled by Shesheshen and some of her enemies.

Wiswell has a neuromuscular disorder and other disabilities, which he speaks about often and incorporates into some of his work; I was looking for the possible metaphors for disability and visibility in Someone to Build a Nest In, but if they’re there, I missed them, and thus possibly missed some significant context for the story itself. All I saw was a mildly interesting love story (where you know they’re getting together somehow, although it could prove tragic in the end) boosted by Shesheshen’s moral dilemma and the wrong choices she continually makes, even as she tries to convince herself they’re the right ones. That made for a solid novel but hardly the best of the year, certainly not over finalist The Book of Love by Kelly Link, which remains the best new novel I have read this year.

Next up: I just finished Theft, the newest novel by Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, and started Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn.

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September 11, 2025  ·  3 comments

Glyph.

Glyph was Percival Everett’s tenth novel, published in 1999, at a point when Everett was earning critical acclaim but not much commercial attention. It’s a much more academic work than any of his later novels I’ve read, satirizing post-structuralism and some of its leading lights, but you can see more than a few glimpses of Everett’s humor, foreshadowing his more broadly successful later work.

Glyph is narrated by Ralph, a very precocious baby who is able to read and write at the level of a graduate student before he turns one, shocking his parents – whom he calls Inflato (father) and Mo (Mother) – and eventually leading to unfortunate interest from a series of would-be evildoers who plan to use him for their own nefarious purposes. Ralph communicates via written notes, which, of course, people don’t believe he wrote at first, but after his parents accept that Ralph is indeed a genius, they take him to a psychologist for evaluation, only for the psychologist to decide that Ralph is her ticket to research fame and to kidnap him – which works until the government shows up.

The plot itself takes up maybe half of the book, with the remainder split between Ralph’s musings and various interstitials, like imagined conversations between important personages from history, including literary theorist Roland Barthes, one of the major figures of structuralism and post-structuralism – and thus a prime target for Everett’s satire. Inflato is a failing professor of literary theory, and at one point he has Barthes over for dinner, only for the French philosopher to leer at Mo and eventually admit he’s never read Inflato’s work.

Other literary theorists and thinkers in related fields like semiotics and philosophy come in for further satire or just outright mockery, whether directly in the text or in any of the many asides, like constructed dialogues between two such figures from different times in history. Every chapter is divided further with subheadings that almost seem drawn from a hat filled with terms from lit-crit movements of the latter half of the 20th century, including structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction, and post-modernism. Everett wrote the book while he was a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside, but had moved on to become chair of the English department at USC by the time it was published, which at least makes me wonder if he was mocking some of his by then former colleagues at UCR for their adherence to these philosophies – not least because he has said many times since that Ralph is the closest of all of his protagonists to his own character.

Glyph also has plenty of lowbrow humor, including a slew of potty – well, first diaper, then potty – jokes, bad puns, and Airplane!-esque gags, which softens some of the more abstruse material here for readers who, like me, don’t care for these distinctly anti-literary schools of thought. Yes, academics can certainly spend their time on textual analysis or examining the relationship between a work and its broader context. I’d probably do just that if I were a professor of literature somewhere, or if my livelihood otherwise depended on it. I read for pleasure, however, and I can’t read books in that way at all. If a book doesn’t grab me with its plot, or its protagonist, or its prose, I’m not going to like it or appreciate it. Glyph skewers some of the same ideas I disdain for their desire to strip literature down to the studs and ignore the trappings of great fiction, but it also does so with a strong and funny central character, Everett’s acerbic wit, and a ridiculous plot that just barely holds together for the novel’s 200 pages.

Related: This 2024 profile of Everett in the New Yorker, written by Maya Binyam, is outstanding.

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July 1, 2025  ·  2 comments

Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.

Will Leitch’s Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is the heart-warming story of a police officer and divorced dad of an 11-year-old son who discovers he has terminal brain cancer and decides to die on the job so his son can get more cash in death benefits. It’s definitely the most enjoyable book you’ll read about dying of glioblastoma this year.

(Disclaimer: Will’s a friend – someone I’ve actually spent time with on multiple occasions – so there’s just no way I was going to be objective about this book. If I had disliked it, I just wouldn’t mention it at all, so bear in mind that this is one time you can actually accuse me of bias and be correct.)

Lloyd is a cop in Atlanta, the son of a decorated, hard-nosed, military-minded cop who was a sort of legend in the force himself until he died of a heart attack, possibly hastened by the case of a serial killer that he couldn’t solve. He learns at the very start of the book that his headaches are caused by an aggressive type of brain tumor called a glioblastoma that will kill him in a matter of months, and do so in ugly fashion as he starts to experience memory loss, extreme mood swings, and pain in his head he describes as “lightning bolts.” He doesn’t tell anyone at all about the diagnosis – not his son Bishop, his partner Anderson, his boss, his ex-wife, nobody but his doctor. He realizes that his life insurance policy isn’t going to do much for his son, paying for about a year of college if they’re lucky, and realizes that there are large payouts coming to any officer who dies in the line of duty, so he decides to find a way to do just that, only to learn that he’s a pretty good cop and not that good at the dying part.

Lloyd’s letters to his son, which he calls his ten edicts, are interspersed throughout the narrative and lend some gravity to the proceedings, which otherwise are quite jovial for a story about a guy with a time bomb in his brain and a gun at his hip. (To say nothing of his car, which is a weapon in its own right when Lloyd’s behind the wheel.) Those poignant interludes are an accurate reminder of every parent’s nightmare – that you won’t be there when your kid grows up to experience all of the big moments, to tell him how to change a tire or ask someone on a date, to answer the phone (or a text) when something’s wrong and they need their mom or their dad. The real genius of the book is that those moments aren’t sappy or maudlin, which they could so easily be. They read as honest and clear, probably clearer than any of us could really be if we sat down and thought too hard about what writing that kind of letters really meant, and as a result they hit some big emotional notes without dragging down what is otherwise a fast-paced novel with some great action sequences once Lloyd decides he has a literal death wish.

I would still rank Will’s first novel, How Lucky, as my favorite of the three, because I think its protagonist, Daniel, is such an incredible, compelling character, and I love the way the tension builds in that story. That’s not a knock on Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, as they’re different books with clearly different goals. There are even nods in this book to Will’s second book, The Time Has Come, that I won’t spoil, and a few other Easter eggs scattered here and there. I’d say Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is his most earnest book, but I feel like that word has morphed into a backhanded insult, like a pat on the head for a writer who’s mailed in the emotional stuff in most of their previous works. It’s very thoughtful, getting the details right in the important ways, and even in more trivial ways, like details of what an Atlanta cop’s daily routine might be like, that most readers wouldn’t even notice. (I only realized it after reading the acknowledgements.) It’s a novel with a big heart that earns your response through its honesty, with a strong main character and some levity to get you past the fact that the main character is staring death in the face from page one.

Next up: I actually finished Rita Bullwinkel’s gimmicky, Pulitzer-finalist novel Headshot last week and am reading Masashi Matsuie’s The Summer House.

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June 24, 2025  ·  1 comment

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond.

A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond lives up to the absurdity of its name, although I’m not sure if it reaches whatever the goals of its authors, Percival Everett and his colleague James Kincaid, may have had in writing it. It’s an epistolary satire, written entirely in the form of letters and emails between those two, a foppish dandy named Barton Wilkes who works in Sen. Thurmond’s office, an editor at Simon & Schuster and his assistant, and others, as the plot to write the book of the title becomes increasingly convoluted and the behavior of several people involved becomes unhinged.

The aide to Sen. Thurmond, Barton Wilkes, is positively nuts, as I think is clear from the first few pages. He proposes the book to Simon & Schuster, arguing that Sen. Thurmond is uniquely qualified to opine on the subject of Black people in the United States since Civil War, in part because he was alive for pretty much all of that period. Somehow, he gets an editor, Martin Snell, interested in this preposterous proposal, possibly through some acquaintance with Snell’s assistant Juniper, and the project progresses far enough that Everett and Kincaid come in as ghost-writers. The plan is that Wilkes will send them the Senator’s notes and they’ll turn it all into a book somehow. Of course, the Senator’s actual involvement in or awareness of the project becomes an open question, Wilkes and Snell both appear to be perverts, Everett and Kincaid can’t stop sniping at each other, there’s a possibly mobbed-up rival editor at S&S, and somehow Juniper’s sister ends up part of the story, too.

The obvious target of the satire is Thurmond, who was Senator for about 120 years and spent most of that time pushing white nationalist ideas, particularly anything related to segregation. He split off from the Democrats after World War II, running for President in 1948 as a “States Rights Democratic” candidate and carrying four states. (Since then, only one third-party candidate has earned any electoral votes, another racist windbag, George Wallace, in 1968.) The Thurmond in this book is well aware that he’s about to die and wants to both set the record “straight” on his legacy and possibly grease his path into some sort of afterlife. Everett and Kincaid don’t want any part of whitewashing (pun intended) the Senator’s grim history, and it’s not like they’re getting much money from the project either, although it seems to offer some professional benefits to Kincaid within the story. (I wondered if he was even a real person, but he is, and his specialty is on the sexualization of children in Victorian literature and culture.) Thurmond’s an easy target and the two take him down rather efficiently, although they could obviously have spent even more time lampooning him as a sort of Foghorn Leghorn in Nazi garb and discussing the legacy of his legislative initiatives.

What I didn’t understand was all of the frippery around that part. Snell and Wilkes both seem to be sexual predators of a sort, and Juniper spends most of the novel trying not to become the victim of either of them. Juniper then finds himself farmed out to Vendetti, the editor who definitely does not have mob ties, a switch which ends up putting two people in the hospital. It’s not homophobic, and I’m not sure either Snell or Wilkes is ever identified as gay, but the authors seem to play these two men both trying to sleep with another young man for some kind of humor I didn’t exactly get.

In the end, this book also didn’t land for me, just like American Desert, although that had the benefit of a more coherent narrative and more of Everett’s brilliant prose. This book is comical, and has plenty of laughs, but mostly it’s just so unrealistic that you’ll wonder what we’re doing here.

Next up: I just finished my friend Will Leitch’s newest novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, and started the last of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalists, Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot.

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