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For a while now, probably since the heightened isolation of the Covid lockdowns, I have been having fantasies about a raucous Parisian brasserie filled with artists and writers. They—or should I say, we—could meet there, say, every Thursday night. I might turn to a fellow writer and say, hey, have you read the latest essay by ———? And then we could talk about it. Maybe I liked it, maybe they didn’t. Maybe the writer of the essay themselves would walk in, and then we could all discuss it together—agreeing, disagreeing, agreeing to disagree, and all of it relatively amiable.

A brasserie of artists—it sounds like a collective noun, like a murder of crows or a book club of aunts. I think that artists and writers need a place to discuss things and sometimes to disagree, and that place probably isn’t social media. So far, in the fifteen years or so that these virtual spaces have existed and been dominant, social media has had a way of turning any disagreement into something hostile. But disagreement, whether through a difference of taste, or a misunderstanding that could be righted, a point of view that can be changed, is an extremely important part of intellectual life.

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Hello and welcome to the fourth issue of The Book Supplement.

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In this issue:

A ROOM IN BOMBAY, by Manil Suri

A SPLINTERING, by Dur e Aziz Amna

THE EVOLUTION OF FIRE: Essays on Crisis and Becoming, by Angela Pelster

ATTENTION: Writing on Life, Art, and the World, by Anne Enright

All titles can be found here.

A ROOM IN BOMBAY: A Memoir, by Manil Suri

W. W. Norton & Co.; 304 pages; $29.99 US Hardback

“One can never come back home, but one can also never truly get away,” novelist Manil Suri writes in his evocative new memoir. His parents are bound to the titular room in a Bombay apartment by real-estate pressure and the fallacy of sunk costs. Suri’s father, a Bollywood music director, and his mother, once a secretary to Indira Gandhi, share this single room with their son from the day he is born until he leaves to attend graduate school in the United States. Although his mother’s family lived in a stately mansion in Rawalpindi prior to Partition, by the time Suri is born, they are “teetering on the line between middle class and poor.”

In a dynamic that will be familiar to fans of Suri’s award-winning debut novel, The Death of Vishnu, the Hindu Suris battle constantly for bathroom and kitchen privileges with their Muslim landlords, the Jaffers, as well as with the other tenants. Still, Suri has pleasant memories too, like the trance-like Sufi Qawwali music sessions held in the main room of the apartment, and playing with the Jaffers’ son during the Hindu festival of Holi, when the two boys would gleefully splatter each other with colored powder.

In Suri’s fiction, he deploys an omniscient narrative voice with finesse; here our narrator cannot presume to know the minds of others, and must maintain a respectful distance. Conflicting points of view must be jettisoned, but Suri writes with the same confidence that characterizes his novels. What results is a book largely about the relationship between parent and child, and the lifelong pull of one’s childhood home, as well as its limitations.

Early sections of the book function as a coming-of-age story set in the tumult of urban, twentieth-century India. Pivotally, Suri comes to understand that being gay is part of his core identity. Thanks to the early reassurances (however mistaken) of his Freud-reading mother that it was just a passing phase, he avoids the “taint of abnormality” that might otherwise have hung over him. Thus Freud manages to “perform therapy from beyond the grave,” Suri writes. Later chapters see Suri as a grown man and expat, torn between faraway parents and his new life abroad. Despite living comfortably in America as a mathematics professor, and eventually as a celebrated novelist, he is called back again and again to that room in Bombay, to care for his parents as they age.

Fluid and compelling, this heartfelt narrative—cleverly tied to the humble room at the center of his life, which takes on mythic proportions—is ultimately about the ways we fail the people we love, the imperfect narratives that real life has to offer, and how to reconcile with this reality. Suri pulls off a magic trick here: even though we know where this must all be going, we still can’t help turning the pages to see what happens next.

—Summer Brennan

Also by Manil Suri: The Big Bang of Numbers, The City of Devi, The Age of Shiva, and The Death of Vishnu.

A SPLINTERING, by Dur e Aziz Amna

Dzanc; ‎ 232 pages; $17.95 US Paperback

Tara, our narrator, starts with a confession: “I am what some call an unrelatable character, and I have done something unthinkable.” Her life is rife with problems: a devastatingly poor family in rural Pakistan, domineering male relatives, tumultuous national politics, and a simmering sense of rage. When her older brother declares her school to be a “den of whores” and forbids his sisters from going, Tara refuses to quit, sparking lifelong friction.

Despite her brother’s disapproval, Tara manages to get married and move to Islamabad, where her initial elation soon gives way to malaise. She still wants more, even though there is “no socially sanctioned way” to achieve it. When a chance opportunity shows how she might get rich, things change—radically. This turning point may be what makes her “unrelatable,” but it is also where the narrative picks up speed. Set against the backdrop of Benazir Bhutto’s 2007 assassination, the inevitable results of her actions follow like so many dominos falling, not so unthinkable after all.

In this well-written and fast-paced sophomore effort, we are carried along by Tara’s relentlessness much as the people of Pakistan are swept along and buffeted by political strife. When Benazir Bhutto is killed, Tara thinks it wasn’t hard “to erase a woman who had taken such risks,” and we wonder if Bhutto’s fate will be Tara’s own. As both national and family politics descend into chaos, Tara is confronted by the consequences of her choices.

The curse—and blessing—of female rage lies in its transformative power, which is not always controlled by the one who wields it. More family drama than political thriller, A Splintering nonetheless portrays a woman with unabashed ambition who decides to act on it, something which is, in fact, more often than not, a political act.

—Deborah L. Williams

Originally published by Duckworth in the UK; winner of the 2026 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award.

Also by Dur e Aziz Amna: American Fever.

THE EVOLUTION OF FIRE: Essays on Crisis and Becoming, by Angela Pelster

Milkweed Editions; 184 pages; $20.00 US Paperback

Angela Pelster opens her searing new collection with an epigraph from Bertolt Brecht: “To those who do not know the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.” But fear not—this is no preachy polemic. We begin in the rural Alberta of Pelster’s childhood, with its dual pitfalls of drugs and religion. Her family likes to break into houses under construction on Sundays, pretending they are going to live there. They attend a church that may or may not believe in evolution, but the world they inhabit has the same rules: adapt, or go extinct.

The core metaphor in these engaging, memoiristic essays is fire. Fodder for the pyre: a marriage, a religion, a family, the stories we tell and believe about ourselves and others. There is fire as trial and fire as disaster, fire as human nature and fire as the things we can’t control. The central essay deals with the end of a relationship, a creative awakening, and a literal house fire. We barely notice her sleight of hand when “I” becomes “she.”

“A body doesn’t make a conscious decision to evolve,” Pelster writes. “She knows. It’s the crisis the body finds itself in that forces the change.”

Pelster’s imagery is haunting: we see a home with everything in its place, everything quiet, sweet- pea seeds soaking on the counter in the moonlight—just before a spreading conflagration burns it all to the ground. Even the aquatic somehow invokes the metaphor of burning. Of froglets caught as tadpoles by the small hands of children, poured back into ponds once they are grown, Pelster writes: “They grabbed for one another as they fell, arms outstretched, like sisters in the dark, like fire reaches for fire, the warmth of another flame.”

What starts with the personal and immediate eventually tunnels down and out to address all of existence. There is a meditation on diaries and the political nature of archives, how they shape the story of the past not just by what is included, but by what someone has chosen to omit.

Certain later essays can feel caught up in the net of their own poetry, and might have benefited from further untangling; occasionally, flights of incantatory syntax might cause some readers to stumble. Even so, any hindrance is minimal. Pelster never strays too far from the personal and the specific, which is where her flickering prose shines brightest.

—Summer Brennan

Also by Angela Pelster: Limber and The Curious Adventures of India Sophia.

ATTENTION: Writing on Life, Art, and the World, by Anne Enright

W. W. Norton & Co.; 288 pages; $29.99 US Hardcover

In Anne Enright’s searching new collection of essays about reading and writing, she takes on the world of literature, with women and the injustices they are subjected to her persistent theme. Adapted from various talks and articles, with introductions by the author for context, Enright jousts with Joyce and provides a survey of women writers from Toni Morrison to Edna O’Brien, all served with her signature humor and wit: “Maeve Brennan didn’t have to be a woman for her work to be forgotten, though it surely helped.”

Readers do not have to be familiar with the authors Enright writes about in order to enjoy her essays, although they might be left with the urge to run out and read them. She grapples with the tragedy of Ireland’s Mother and Baby homes, and the ambiguities of the MeToo movement—where was the line between predators and run-of-the-mill philanderers and scoundrels, and who was to decide? Many of the essays are funny—“Indeed, a long marriage is, in itself, a lot like Beckett”—while several hint at a contemporary crisis of sexuality, but as practice, not identity. Here, as elsewhere, Enright’s sense of humor is a delight: “I don’t know if tomorrow sex will be good again, but I do know that yesterday it was fantastic.”

The book is a persuasive argument for reading, and for paying attention when you do: “Fiction is, or should be, ‘transporting’: this immersive state is not something you can enter and exit every two minutes to check dog videos and the progress of the war in Ukraine.” Thought-provoking and gloriously intelligent, Attention is that rare literary work that is equally erudite and fluent. Though its pleasures are more straightforward, readers who manage to follow Enright’s prescription might have an experience similar to hers on first reading Joyce. “For me, at fourteen, it was like mainlining language, getting high on words, just the pleasure of them, their intricacies and density.”

—Summer Brennan

Originally published by Jonathan Cape in the UK in 2025 .

Also by Anne Enright: The Portable Virgin, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, Making Babies, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, The Gathering, Taking Pictures, Yesterday’s Weather, The Forgotten Waltz, The Green Road, Actress, and The Wren, the Wren.

Masthead

Editor: Summer Brennan

Copy Editor: Howard Mittelmark

Guest reviewer: , author of The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction, has written for The New York Times, The Rumpus, Brevity, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.

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When I was in college, I studied playwriting with a memorable instructor, the novelist, playwright, and commercial Maine fisherman Gladden Schrock. Gladden was something of a character, a kind of mythical figure on campus. He doled out cryptic, twinkly wisdom while exuding an extremely masculine, weathered vibe. His classes were fun, and he peppered his critiques of our work with Gladden-specific phrases, the most famous of which was probably the concept of “the eight-foot bear.”

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I am a writer, but once upon a time I was also an artist. I studied painting as an undergraduate, and maintained some form of modest studio practice until I was in my early thirties. Sometimes all that meant was that a corner of my bedroom or apartment was devoted to canvases and glass palettes, their edges blunted by masking tape. Newspapers or drop cloths were spread across the floor. For a long time there was always a pair of jeans ruined by slashes of gesso and careless daubs of color, the places where I wiped my palette knife, hanging on a hook. There was the mineral smell of pigments, cobalts and cadmiums, and the lintseeds and turpentines I used to thin them, an eau de studio which clung to my winter coats.

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I must confess that I am a creature of habit. I like exploring, but I thrive on routine. Like Gustave Flaubert, I ascribe to the idea of being “regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”1 To this end, I like taking the same walk every day.

Of course, whether in a city or the country, even the same walk isn’t always the same. Every day, things change. The weather, the people, the plants, the animals. There are always surprises.

As I settle back into Parisian life, or rather, as I try to—so far I’m not having much luck—I’m trying to reconnect with my habits. When my life is functioning well, I usually try to go for a walk every day for my physical and mental health. Most days, without thinking, I take some variation of the same one-hour loop.

In a recent post, I believe I mentioned that I live in the Marais near Les Halles. There are many wonderful culinary shops in the neighborhood, and sometimes I go inside one of them to look. Someday I’d like to find out what kind of desserts I can make with yuzu, violet, or poppy flavoring. I wonder, does the poppy taste like poppy seeds? Or like the flower? I wouldn’t mind trying to make a madeleine the size of a child’s head (mould pictured above), perhaps for a Proust-themed dinner party. Maybe one flavored with jasmine or rose?

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Yesterday on the rainy market street I bought a bouquet of lilacs wrapped in packing tape. The flower seller spoke neither French nor English. In a cardboard box at his feet he had the bouquets arranged with no water; daffodils in various hues, and the lilacs. They are the kind of lilacs one might steal from a public park or a roadside, which is surely where these came from.

Almost every day I see them, these young men, selling their stolen flowers. The bug-eaten petals that probably looked better under cover of darkness. Good or bad, I encourage this enterprise with my crumpled five euro notes.

I can see them there, in the spring night, the river of headlights and taillights flashing white and red over them as they gather the goods in the rain. This city and its suburbs coming into flower, awash in a language they don’t know.

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Hello and welcome to the third issue of The Book Supplement.

If you appreciate this coverage and want to see more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your subscriptions go directly to paying freelance critics. Even a few dollars a month will help keep this going.

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Once upon a time, I created this section of the newsletter after a nice weekend walk to the Luxembourg Gardens and back, but then never followed up with it. Now I am back home after several months away—stressful, hard, sad months—and seeing the city with fresher eyes once again. It’s nice to pay attention to one’s surroundings and to share the things one notices, especially when the world is in such a dark place. I used to share these things with my parents, whom I often called when I was out for walks, but now, having just lost them both, I can’t do that anymore. Maybe I can share these things with you all instead.

I had gotten into Paris in the late afternoon of the previous day, riding in from Orly in the back of a cab. I saw that the trees along the river were coming into leaf. The pink blossoms on the cherry trees were already starting. I appear to have missed the magnolias.

That evening, I managed to get some necessities from around my neighborhood in the Marais—pick up medications, pay my Internet bill—but the next day I decided to venture further afield to a pharmacy on the Left Bank that stocks some of the hair products I use. After several months in the States, I am fresh out of all my French things.

Starting out on my walk, I noticed the number of businesses in my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that have recently closed. The cobbler is slated to become an upscale eyeglasses store. The smaller of three pharmacies is now a fancy skincare boutique. The toy store and the bike shop have both closed as well. Thankfully, the fishmonger that had closed in the summer has since reopened as a new fishmonger’s, with the same people working there, including the same strappingly handsome older guy with a white ponytail and white beard who looks like the mascot of a fish stick company1.

I used to be friends with one of the local tailors, around the corner from the fishmonger’s. He was from Turkey, and not very old, maybe about fifty. He fixed the holes in my jeans, and one day he grabbed me as I was passing one of the café terraces and bought me a hot chocolate. After that we would greet each other warmly whenever we passed in the street. His name was Kemal. About a year or so ago I noticed that his shop was closed more and more often. Someone in the neighborhood told me that Kemal had stomach cancer. I would see him sitting on the local café terraces, alone. I would wave and say hello, ask how he was, but he always looked so sad. I don’t know if he went back to Turkey or if something worse has happened. I will ask around.

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“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” ― Virginia Woolf

Welcome to the fifth and final day of Essay Camp!

My dear campers, thank you for joining me this week for another session of Essay Camp. As we gather to write once more, I hope that those of you who chose to participate were able to get something out of the experience. Even if all you did was dip a…

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Welcome to the fourth day of Essay Camp.

If you’ve made it this far, well done. It’s actually quite hard for most people to commit to write every day for five days in a row and then actually do it.

Today we’re going to talk about structure. While ou…

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Welcome to the second day of Essay Camp.

I hope you’re getting settled nicely into your virtual cabins—there are extra blankets in the boathouse if you find yourself getting chilly, and a fictional fire that stays lit al…

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Welcome to the first day of Essay Camp

Traditionally, I like to welcome all the participants of Essay Camp to this virtual space we are going to…

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