Hello and welcome to the fifth edition of The Book Supplement. Thank you for being here.

When I first launched this column back in early March, I did so without first securing funding to pay contributors, and without even knowing where said funding would come from week to week—other than my own grocery bill! Two months and five editions later, I still do…

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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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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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In this issue:

SALT LAKES: An Unnatural History, by Caroline Tracey

YESTERYEAR, by Caro Claire Burke

EL PASO: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, by Jazmine Ulloa

LIPSTICK, by Eileen G’Sell

All titles can be found here.

SALT LAKES: An Unnatural History, by Caroline Tracey

W.W. Norton & Company; 272 pages; $31.99 US Hardback

At first, I found the lakes of the American Southwest vaguely uncanny, ultra-blue and surrounded by stone, perfect mirrors of the surrounding mesas, the troubled New Mexico skies. They were nothing like the lakes I grew up with, the tea-colored, pine-scented waters of upstate New York and rural Massachusetts. I fell in love immediately with the quiet colors of the desert and the rich, warm scents of the high, arid forests, but the lakes took time to understand. They are so conspicuously altered by humanity; one couldn’t pretend at any romanticized relationship between human and landscape. Our handprints are everywhere, our signature of death writ so clearly on their dusty, shallow beds.

Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, by writer and geographer Caroline Tracey, presents an alternative way of reading these bodies of water, not as sites of defeat and self-flagellation, but places of resilience and hope. This engaging, genre-crossing book—it could be shelved under nature writing, travelogue, memoir, or history—is part of a growing movement that rails against our dominant understanding of nature. For too long, bodies of water (and plants and animals) have been defined by their use-value, their ability to “serve” human flourishing. We’ve used our scientific understanding to quantify their significance, rendering them as dull and flat as any economic actor. But Tracey joins authors like Andreas Weber, Robert MacFarlane, and Robin Wall Kimmerer in arguing that the natural world deserves more than that. Rivers can be alive, plants can be kin, and salt lakes can be queered.

Before Tracey can begin making her greater argument about queer ecology, she first must prove that salt lakes are worthy of all this attention. Over the course of a decade, she visits a number of these ecosystems, traveling from Utah to Kazakhstan to Mexico. “People often refer to salt lakes as ‘dead,’ inferring that they are absent of life. But the lakes overflow with life—just in specific, small forms,” she writes. Not only are they fascinating studies of life finding its improbable, briny way, they’re also jaw-droppingly lovely (at least to Tracey). This matters, too: “Our earthly future, I knew deeply and resolutely, depended on loving the lakes in all their mysterious, freakish, sacred beauty.” To embrace a place like California’s Salton Sea is challenging but vital. From these strange, disturbed places, we can learn to accept the damage we’ve done to the natural order of things and begin reparations.

Throughout the book, Tracey weaves in stories from her own love life, which are intended to help bolster the point that salt lakes fall under the purview of queer ecology. “As a perspective on landscapes, queer ecology is often used to denote places that are denigrated, unruly, and inhabited by unusual, improbable groupings of species,” she explains. Sometimes this works, like when she describes falling in love with her wife, set against the backdrop of Mexico City’s marshy Texcoco Lake. In other instances, as in her chapters spent with a former boyfriend, the results are less compelling. Overall, Salt Lakes is a strong debut and a valiant attempt to play with form. When her writing sings, as it does when she’s describing her rough-and-tumble encounters with ranching, it does so clearly, with voice and heart.

—Katy Kelleher

SALT LAKES is Caroline Tracey’s first book.

YESTERYEAR, by Caro Claire Burke

Knopf; 400 pages; $30.00 US Hardcover; $14.99 eBook

Natalie Heller Mills is an American mother of six who has built her social-media fame posting about her picture-perfect homesteading lifestyle on a 500-acre Idaho farm. What her millions of followers (whom she dubs “Angry Women”) don’t know, is that her life—complete with detached children and checked-out husband—is a carefully curated facade propped up by a host of off-camera assistants. But Natalie’s world is shattered when she inexplicably wakes up one morning on an early-nineteenth-century version of her farm, and must struggle to return to the present day.

The narrative alternates between this struggle and interludes in which she recalls her devout Christian upbringing; her full-ride education at Harvard; her lackluster marriage to a wealthy, right-wing politician’s son (a “fairy-tale fever dream of a man-child”); her risky investment in the farm; and the escalating measures she must take to uphold the image of a traditional family.

Caro Claire Burke packages her story like the glossy social-media posts of her indelible antihero, and the satire is clear: Natalie is a thinly veiled version of Instagram influencer Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm. Burke uses the page-turning trappings of a thriller to launch a blistering takedown of America’s current ideological climate, exploring political radicalization, religious psychosis, parasocial relationships, child exploitation, and the performance of womanhood.

Yesteryear’s reputation precedes it: Knopf won the manuscript in a fifteen-publisher bidding war, and Amazon MGM Studios secured the film rights. Anne Hathaway is set to produce and star. That’s plenty of pre-pub pressure for any author, let alone a first-timer, but however high the expectations, they are handily met by Burke’s propulsive, timely debut.

— Katie Calautti

YESTERYEAR is Caro Claire Burke’s first book.

EL PASO: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, by Jazmine Ulloa

Dutton; 352 pages; $30.00 US Hardcover

As New York Times journalist Jazmine Ulloa writes in her debut: “The inability of Americans to confront the uglier side of our history, to tell our story honestly—to remember the origins, both rich and violent, that made El Paso and thus our nation—appeared to me to be at the core of the cycle of violence, with blood spilled in defense of one of its deadliest myths: that such a pure white culture had ever existed on land so brown.”

Beginning with the 2019 mass murder of people presumed to be Mexican at a Walmart by a white nationalist in her hometown of El Paso in 2019, Ulloa explores twin themes of violence and the American dream. As we follow the lives of five families from the nineteenth century to the present, including individuals of Chinese and Guatemalan as well as Mexican descent, this work of literary nonfiction evokes the feel and pull of an epic, generation-spanning novel. Drawing on interviews, archives, academic scholarship, and other reporting, Ulloa constructs a narrative history of El Paso, the US-Mexico borderlands, and immigration that is both beautiful and heartbreaking.

After returning home to report on the 2019 Walmart massacre, Ulloa begins to suspect that the story of El Paso is central to the story of America itself. She becomes certain while covering the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as rioters carrying Confederate flags and Nazi insignia seize the building, and security guards sweep reporters (including Ulloa) and members of Congress away via underground passages. From a prologue that recounts the story of the child heroes of Chapultepec, martyred while defending Mexico City from the invading U.S. military in 1847, to the detention of immigrant children separated from their families in 2018, Ulloa invests her subjects with a sense of urgency and meaning.

In this newly revealed America that has long existed beside the old, she positions her hometown as a kind of modern-day Ellis Island. “El Paso is alive. It breathes and heaves with human life. Your poor and huddled masses. Your staunch conservatives. Your rebels and living saints. Your Border Patrol officers and paisanos. And you and me.” It is a point of entry with a difference, though. Here, as history shows, migrants are both drawn in and deported, destined to be “watched, bound, and shackled.” This is a story that transcends the US-Mexico border, with something fundamental to tell us about America itself.

El Paso is written for two audiences: Latinx communities like those found in El Paso, as well as readers in the broader America that has so often excluded them. This ambitious portrait of a nation, told through the assemblage and juxtaposition of diverse, individual lives, culminates in something truly impressive that is more than the sum of its parts.

— Michael L. Trujillo

EL PASO is Jazmine Ulloa’s first book.

LIPSTICK: An Object Lesson, by Eileen G’Sell

Bloomsbury Academic; 200 pages; $14.95 US Paperback; $13.45 eBook

Foundation conceals. Mascara enhances. But lipstick? Lipstick transforms.

That’s the premise of Eileen G’Sell’s brilliant ode to the most conspicuous of cosmetics, one of several recent volumes in Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series. Like the other books in this collection, Lipstick offers a radical perspective on something ordinary, or in this case, iconic. After all, has there ever been a more potent—or fraught—symbol of femininity than an (ironically phallic) tube of lipstick?

Sure, a painted mouth can make one more beautiful or alluring, but it also has the power to shock, repulse, challenge, titillate, disturb, and as G’Sell puts it, “knock gender norms off balance.” It may be “a small luxury,” she writes, “but its power of reinvention is positively epic.”

G’Sell—a poet and critic who teaches creative writing at Washington University of St. Louis—discovered lipstick’s transformative power early in life. At eight years old, her first job involved delivering Avon catalogs to her neighbors’ doorsteps. Even better than the three to four dollars she earned per route were the free lipstick samples she received as part of her compensation. But lipstick didn’t turn G’Sell into a beauty. She was still bullied for her “hairy legs,” her “uneven bangs,” and her “off-brand denim,” but lipstick did obliterate her “meek façade.”

“I became transfixed at how I could transform myself with a careful swipe of a lipstick tube,” she writes.

Is lipstick inherently feminine? In much of the ancient world, a painted pout said more about your economic status than your gender. Second-wave feminists maligned lipstick as a tool of the patriarchy and a capitulation to the male gaze, yet G’Sell shows us how different individuals—male, female, nonbinary, cis, trans—have used lipstick to subvert or destabilize that gaze, from Madonna to Courtney Love, Janelle Monet to Chappell Roan (whose theatrical makeup owes a debt to drag).

Gen Z appreciates lipstick’s slippery quality. In the US, nearly 30 percent of them identify as “queer,” while 40 percent say they don’t see gender as binary. These young people buy more lipstick than any other demographic. To them, lipstick is not a requirement of femininity, something to conform to or rebel against—they feel free to use it as a tool of self-expression and reinvention.

G’Sell’s reflections on this controversial tool of artifice is not a definitive history, but rather a rousing manifesto. “Lipstick’s possibilities should be available to anyone curious,” she concludes. “May a femme-friendlier future welcome that pleasure.”

— Raquel Laneri

Other titles by Eileen G’Sell: Life After Rugby and Francofilaments.

Other recent Object Lessons books include: Microphone by Ralph Jones, Snack by Eurie Dahn, Stock Photo by Simona Supekar, and Ballot by Anjali Enjeti.

Masthead

Editor: Summer Brennan

Contributing Editor: Howard Mittelmark

Guest reviewers: is the author of The Ugly History of Beautiful Things; her nature writing has appeared in National Geographic, Nautilus Magazine, and The Paris Review. is a writer, bookseller, medium, and cemetery historian. Michael L. Trujillo, author of Land of Disenchantment, is the Associate Chair of Chicana/o Studies at the University of New Mexico. is a journalist and critic who writes the newsletter Wearable Art.

Correction: An earlier version of this article imprecisely stated that Lipstick was Eileen G’Sell’s first book. In fact it is her first book that is not a poetry collection.

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

If you appreciate this coverage and want to see more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Even a few dollars a month will help keep this going.

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In this issue:

DAUGHTER OF MOTHER-OF-PEARL: Essays, by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

MRS. JEKYLL, by Emma Glass

A WORLD APPEARS: A Journey into Consciousness, by Michael Pollan

THE IRISH GOODBYE: Micro-Memoirs, by Beth Ann Fennelly

All titles can be found here.

DAUGHTER OF MOTHER-OF-PEARL: Essays, by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Graywolf’; 168 pages; $18.00 US Paperback

“She is born knowing how to swim. Her first few days of life she spends suspended in the plankton with all the other drifters, larval fishes, jellyfishes, just-hatched cephalopods, copepods, diatoms, microscopic flora, plastic nurdles following the ocean’s whims. She hangs high in the water column from twin sails to either side of her budding mouth.”

Thus begins Wong’s sleeper-wave of an essay collection, in no rush to tell us which micro-organism we are following: “Her skin remembers the smell of strangers who aren’t strangers. Something in that smell is eighty million years old […] The ocean’s gifts of mercy are the scent of food and the mucus trails of her ancestors. She folds her tired sails, sinks to the ocean floor. She alights upon a stone. She listens to it with her foot, skin-sniffing.”

Tender and deeply sensory, we are invited to consider the drama of an abalone spat finding its footing on a rock amid a kelp forest; a moment of connection between the author and a starfish. This is the essay as psychedelic prose poem, imagining the reader inside the bodily experience of sea creatures. It reads like the barefoot love child of Diane Ackerman and Gertrude Stein, if those authors were also in a throuple with a thesaurus.

There’s no denying that Wong makes a meal of her words, relishing them the way a sea urchin might chomp its way through a juicy kelp stalk. Her sentences, full of linguistic biodiversity, mirror the elaborate complexity of the organisms they describe. The results are frequently striking, but can also veer into tongue-twister territory. Phrases like “gastropodan pedantry, molluscan meticulousness,” and “grotesque bumps and furrows braggadocious, extravagant” abound.

For anyone who has ever wondered what it might feel like to be a sea snail—or, perhaps, a blissed-out poet on mushrooms at the beach who has just realized that the ocean is actually their soul mate—this book is for you. Don’t get me wrong, this is ambitious work, challenging the reader to think about certain creatures in a whole new way; to imagine that an abalone has thoughts, dreams, even ambitions; to see a starfish as an individual as unique and important as the author herself.

This earnest collection is a passionate love letter to marine life, with a distinctly vegan sensibility, and a romantic imagination that has strayed somewhat from the path of science. Exactly how far isn’t always clear. To Wong, animals in captivity have been “arrested and incarcerated”; extinct species don’t just disappear, they “are disappeared,” like political dissidents.

Unsure of the line between fact and metaphor, I found myself googling things like “Do abalone have eyes?” (yes); “Do starfish have eyes” (kind of); and “Do abalone dream?” (the internet tells me that, due to being invertebrates with very simple nervous systems, dreaming is unlikely). Can a starfish feel shame? Can an octopus curse? Science says no, but Wong is having none of it. In this mysterious world where certain jellyfish can revert to infancy and become polyps again if life becomes too stressful (this is a fact), who are we to say what does and does not dream?

“I am no such expert. I’m not a biologist. I’ve little patience for ideologies of quantification as an infallible adjudicator of living things’ capabilities,” Wong writes.

This will annoy some readers, especially if they came expecting a more conventional species of nonfiction. But for those willing to embrace the poetic lyricism of yearning plankton and jealous oysters, there is a kind of radical empathy to be found.

—Summer Brennan

Other titles by Mandy-Suzanne Wong: The Box, Awabi, Listen, We All Bleed, and Drafts of a Suicide Note.

MRS. JEKYLL, by Emma Glass

Union Square & Co.; 176 pages; $17.99 US paperback; $9.99 eBook

As Robert Louis Stevenson famously noted in his 1886 novella “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.” In Emma Glass’s new novel, a decidedly feminist take on the celebrated tale, her Jekyll is young schoolteacher Rosy, grappling with a devastating breast-cancer diagnosis, while Hyde is Nola, her alter ego that emerges as the malignant tumor grows.

As Rosy deteriorates, she struggles—to accept that her doting mother will not have a grandchild, to allow her husband Charlie’s role to shift from lover to caretaker, and to map the foreign land that is her nightmarishly changing body. While a burgeoning anger within her feeds on others’ pity, something dark, seductive, and murderous takes hold. Death’s inevitability looms as both destruction and freedom.

Playing within this contextual sandbox, Glass deftly emphasizes her interpretation with deliberate prose and unconventional formatting, which brings to mind Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and Sara Gran’s Come Closer. She endears the reader to her protagonist with relatable snippets of pre-lump life, as well as palpable fragments of the brutal recovery and treatments she must endure. Chapters devoted to Nola are rendered in deliciously unfettered free verse.

Equal parts horrific and cathartic, Glass’s exquisite and hallucinatory retelling reads like a live wire‚ and strikes like one too.

—Katie Calautti

Originally published by Cheerio in the UK; longlisted for the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the 2025 Gordon Burn Prize.

Other titles by Emma Glass: Rest and Be Thankful and Peach.

A WORLD APPEARS: A Journey into Consciousness, by Michael Pollan

Penguin Press; 320 pages; $32.00 US Hardcover

In his tenth book, author Michael Pollan is on a quest to understand “what consciousness is and what it does and how it came to be.” To tackle this complex task, he has mapped out four dimensions of his topic: sentience—“the ability of living beings to register sensations and respond intelligently”; feeling—“the language in which the body speaks to the mind”; thought—“the contents of human consciousness”; and self—the intuitive sense that we each have “a continuous, stable, and abiding ‘I’ that is the subject of all our experiences.”

In less able hands, such a quest might collapse under the weight of the in-depth, often heady knowledge that Pollan gathers, but the inveterate storyteller has approached his exploration as though crafting a travelogue. He sets scenes: From a meadow in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, to a low-slung science lab outside Florence, Italy, Pollan captures sensory details as subtle as the “metallic tang” of December air, or the “insomniac’s deep-set eyes” of a philosopher. The title comes from a quote by British neuroscientist Anil Seth, one of many such individuals—experts, poets, novelists, Buddhists, and others—whom Pollan meets as he explores this relatively young and rapidly evolving field.

Pollan’s storytelling prowess makes for a stimulating, if occasionally exhausting, mental journey. It helps that he confines various tangents and elaborations to the footnotes, and shares with readers his own occasional mental exhaustion, confusion, frustrations, and epiphanies. Early on, he wagers that “by the end of the book you will be more conscious than ever.” Did he deliver?

I pondered that question for days after closing the cover. Where had this long, strange trip landed us? Outside, I noticed the subtle gradations of blue in the spring Massachusetts sky. I noticed the way my fingertips tingled as they hovered over the keyboard, considering these new ways of looking at sentience, feeling, thought, and self.

—Brenda Horrigan

Other titles by Michael Pollan: This Is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, A Place of My Own, and Second Nature.

THE IRISH GOODBYE: Micro-Memoirs, by Beth Ann Fennelly

W.W. Norton & Company; 144 pages; $22.99 US Hardcover

Beth Ann Fennelly’s second installment of “micro-memoirs” begins in a key more chatty than lyrical. A former poet laureate of Mississippi, she lives in a place where attending church with one’s children is the norm, and people get reprimanded for “cursing during pickleball.” She is the kind of person who worries all year until she has found the perfect photo of her perfect family for her perfect annual Christmas card.

But just when you think you’re in a safe and casual world of Scattergories and garden slugs, something deeper opens up. Fennelly is a rule-follower, a box-ticker, a girl who tries, but she is unafraid to reveal the less flattering side that emerges when trying does not yield what she wants. Self-aware and companionable, this is a Salome who sheds her veils reluctantly, but still she sheds them—quite literally, in the end.

Straddling the line between essays and prose poems, many installments are just one paragraph long, and several are just one sentence. Fennelly seems to be daring herself and her readers: how short can she go? Perspective shifts. We encounter the self as examined in third person, in second person. The structure suits the material, with topics ranging from travel, to sibling rivalry with a sibling who has died, to caring for aging parents, to a memorable encounter with a child refugee in a decommissioned Berlin airport. The image of moonlight on snow, once it arrives, is earned. Even the sensible girl with the perfect family and the perfect family Christmas card can’t help but urge the dead to come back.

As the book picks up speed, brief vignettes and longer pieces tumble together, sparking images and feelings that ignite in lone bursts of color, or detonate in extended coordination like fireworks. One such finale includes the fascinating account of a painter who, inspired by family-vacation photos he found in a collection of Kodachrome slides from an estate sale, for eight years painted only a cheerful stranger named Helen.

Ideal for fans of Heidi Julavits’s The Folded Clock and Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments, The Irish Goodbye is a quick read, and can be enjoyed in a single, extended sitting. Fennelly is a master of her craft; with a poet’s precision, she nonetheless invests this slim volume with a satisfying emotional heft.

— Summer Brennan

Other works by Beth Ann Fennelly: Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, The Tilted World, Unmentionables, Great With Child: Letters To A Young Mother, Tender Hooks: Poems, and Open House: Poems.

Masthead

Editor: Summer Brennan

Contributing Editor: Howard Mittelmark

Guest reviewers: is a writer, bookseller, medium, and cemetery historian. , a researcher and editor, is one of four writers behind The Creative Current Substack.

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Hello and welcome to the first issue of The Book Supplement. As I wrote last month, books are a vital institution, necessary for both the health of a democracy and the well-being of the individual. In these strange times, both in America and abroad, the systems that once helped readers discover new books are collapsing. The book review sections of newspapers are almost extinct. Books need defending, and we want to do our part.

Below you’ll find a few recent and forthcoming titles of note. All opinions expressed in the review are the opinions of the reviewer. If you appreciate this coverage and wish to see more, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Even a few dollars a month will help keep this going.

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In this issue:

FROG And Other Essays, by Anne Fadiman

SISTERS IN YELLOW, by Mieko Kawakami

THE COMPANY OF OWLS, by Polly Atkin

WHO’S ALLOWED TO PROTEST? by Bruce Robbins

All titles can be found on Bookshop.org .

FROG And Other Essays, by Anne Fadiman; forward by Sam Anderson

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 170 pages; $26.00 US Hardcover; $13.99 eBook

“On our first night in Massachusetts, after we turned off the lights, I dreamily called George’s attention to the sound of peepers wafting through our window from the riverbank,” Fadiman writes in the title essay of this poignant and gently humorous collection. “He informed me that we were listening to Bunky, in Henry’s room, over the baby monitor.”

Bunky, the family’s “Grow-a-Frog” (an African clawed frog shipped as a tadpole from Florida to New York City in a Styrofoam container), is Fadiman’s unlikely protagonist, both overlooked and unforgettable.

“For years—ever since Bunky’s aquarium had migrated from Henry’s room to the kitchen counter—I’d been going downstairs for a snack at 2 a.m., and there he’d been, softly calling for a mate he would never meet,” Fadiman writes.

Ghostly, strangely balletic, and involuntarily celibate, the anthropomorphized Bunky—part of a child’s mail-order, educational biology kit—is a whim of a pet who ends up living for sixteen years, or maybe seventeen, no one is certain. It is a tale of good intentions and accidental neglect, belated fascination and stubborn, unexpected love.

“I realize that a psychiatrist might say this essay is an attempt to atone for my lack of interest in Bunky when he was alive,” she muses. “A lot of good that does him now.”

Deftly employing a wry grandiloquence, Fadiman, a master essayist, tackles unexpected objects of affection: a frog, a famous poet’s wayward son, a 1980s printer, the twentieth-century evolution of personal pronouns, a pandemic Zoom class, an unlikely Antarctic periodical, and a tribute to a promising former student.

Together, the essays tell the stories of underdogs with a vaguely amphibian feel to them. They are creatures that inhabit dual realms, misunderstood or obsolete, things that live in the shadow of other things, not belonging solely to one place or another. They share themes of responsibility and dependence, guilt and avoidance, parenthood and paralysis.

At one point, reading this volume very early in the morning, I found myself saying aloud, “Good book…niiice book,” as though it were an animal that had curled up beside me. Is there any higher praise? Bunky and his fellow essay subjects will not easily be forgotten.

— Summer Brennan

Other titles by Anne Fadiman: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction), Ex Libris, At Large and At Small, The Wine Lover’s Daughter, Rereadings (editor) and The Best American Essays 2003 (editor).

SISTERS IN YELLOW, by Mieko Kawakami; translated from the Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio

Knopf; 448 pages; $30.00 US Hardcover

Hana Ito, a fifteen-year-old girl living in a suburb of Tokyo with her increasingly neglectful mother, knows what it means to be poor. She forgoes her studies and any attempt at friendship to focus solely on working and adding money to the savings account she keeps in a secret shoe box—the one glimmer of hope she feels for the future. Her fixation only intensifies after these savings are stolen, and she leaves her mother’s home to live with Kimiko, a mysterious woman twenty years her senior.

Like the films of the French New Wave, Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow, which won Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature, cleverly employs the aesthetics of a classic noir crime story to explore issues of class, wealth disparity, structural misogyny, and the yearning for a sense of safety and belonging felt by those on the outside.

Hana surrounds herself with anything yellow. It is the color of prosperity and abundance, according to feng shui, and for a time her yellow shrine seems to work. The two women begin running a successful bar called Lemon (so named by Hana because, well, yellow), and soon her new savings account requires a much bigger box. For the first time in her life, Hana feels content and safe—but safety is only ever an illusion. She will soon face dark betrayals and even greater secrets.

“Money is power, and poverty is violence,” Hana is told by a character helping her tiptoe into the world of crime. “People with money make the rules to help themselves, and poor people get sucked dry. And when you’re all dried up, when you’re nothing but dregs, they make you think it was your fault that you failed at life. They make it sound like you had a chance. Well, fuck that.”

Kawakami has once again created a compelling first-person narrative, with all of her usual pop-cultural references and philosophical musings on ample display. Appearing for the first time in English, the translation by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio (having taken over from Sam Bett and David Boyd) perfectly captures the author’s casual profundity with simple, clear sentences, and occasional shocks of beauty that sneak up and make the reader pause for a moment in wonder.

A rising star in the literary world since her breakthrough novel Breasts and Eggs (Europa Editions, 2020), Kawakami has won fans for her deep characters, her exploration of feminism, and the existential questions posed in each of her novels. This time, she has not only created a stunning work of literary merit, but an electrifying page-turner about inequality and ambition, with a lingering sense of rage.

— Bobby Keniston

Other titles by Mieko Kawakami in English: Ms Ice Sandwich, Breasts and Eggs, Heaven, All the Lovers in the Night, and Ashes of Spring.

In Japanese: わたくし率 イン 歯ー、または世界, 乳と卵, 先端で、さすわ さされるわ そらええわ, ヘヴン, すべて真夜中の恋人たち, 愛の夢とか, あこがれ, ウィステリアと三人の女たち, 夏物語, 春のこわいもの, 黄色い家.

THE COMPANY OF OWLS, by Polly Atkin

Milkweed Editions; 216 pages; $25.00 US Hardcover; $11.99 US eBook

English author Polly Atkin is forthright about her expertise in the prologue of The Company of Owls: “I am not a naturalist or an ornithologist. I am no expert in things owls or owlish. I just live next to some.”

Accordingly, her latest book is not a deep-diving, globe-spanning, single-subject tome that encompasses the entire Strigiformes order and its natural history. Rather, her memoir takes the form of a series of short, occasionally micro essays, mostly involving tawny owls (a Eurasian cousin of the familiar, similar-looking North American barred owl) and a few short-eared owls that the author, her partner Will, and their rural community of Grasmere encounter—sometimes serendipitously, but most often with ardent purpose.

Although there are plenty of owl facts to be gleaned within, the operative word in its title, it turns out, is “company”; a recurring theme throughout the book concerns Atkin’s navigation of the Covid era as someone living with chronic illness. The owls (and owlets) she observes and learns about are not only a source of inspiration and fascination, but companionship at an especially fraught and isolating time.

Atkin may not be a field biologist, but she is a keen citizen scientist as well as a poet. She brings an exacting eye for detail both to her birding and to her prose. The essays flow from one to the next intuitively, often calling backward and forward to one another like poems in a finely wrought collection or, well, like owls.

Atkin finds apt metaphors for aspects of her life’s story in the habits, histories, and even physiology of tawny owls, which she mostly studies in and just outside of her walkable village. Casual and seasoned birders alike, as well as lovers of reflective essays on any subject, will find much to savor and identify with in these pages—even those of us who’ve never set foot on a fell or heard the characteristic tu-whit tu-whoo of the tawny.

In one passage, Atkin invokes what has been called the “frequency illusion,” asking “is it an illusion if seeing something once actually enables you to recognize it the next time you see it?” I wondered about this when, after a morning spent reading her book, I drove past a barred owl perched overlooking a farm field as heavy snow swirled around, and felt its company—both the owl’s and the book’s.

— Michael Metivier

Originally published by Elliott & Thompson in the UK; longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2025.

Other titles by Polly Atkin: Some of Us Just Fall, Recovering Dorothy, Shadow Dispatches, Basic Nest Architecture, Much With Body, and Emergency Dream .

WHO’S ALLOWED TO PROTEST? by Bruce Robbins

Melville House; 160 Pages; $18.99 US Paperback

The titular question in Bruce Robbins’s Who’s Allowed to Protest? is not primarily concerned with members of the Black Civil Rights Movement, the poor of the global South, or the blue-collar workers of the American Labor Movement. Rather, this slim volume opens with the death of nineteenth-century French Romantic writer Gérard de Nerval, who was said to walk his pet lobster in the Jardin du Palais-Royal every day on a leash of blue silk (though this is likely apocryphal). In this perfectly timed intervention, Robbins concerns himself with the rights of the privileged, like nineteenth-century Bohemians in Paris or American academics and their students now, to protest in a society where they themselves live in relative comfort—or, in Nerval’s case, self-inflicted privation.

From the response to student struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including protests at Columbia University against the Israeli occupation of Gaza, to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of nineteenth-century Parisian artists, anti-elitism has often been misdirected and factually incorrect, serving to “launder” the power of money, Robbins argues. The ruling class is not in fact made up of skilled, educated, credentialed professionals, he tells us in this lively and insightful book; rather, it is made up of the owners of the companies and institutions for whom such professionals work.

Robbins sides with middle-class, economically comfortable critics, called “elites” by the Right to discredit them, in contrast to the moneyed and truly powerful who freeze inequality in place. In conversation with purveyors of American anti-elitism like David Brooks and his precursor William F. Buckley Jr., Robbins considers the implicit rhetoric of sociology, and the political economy of publications, from The National Review to N+1. His support of students opposing militarism is especially timely.

Repeated callbacks to Nerval’s struggles show Robbins’s self-awareness. That eccentric Parisian, who benefited from his parents’ wealth, died by suicide, poverty-stricken, on a winter street in 1855. He is rendered strangely heroic by Robbins’s prose.

Bourdieu’s critique of nineteenth-century Parisian artists—that they competed for social capital if not wealth, and found success in commercial failure that added to their Bohemian prestige—was employed by Brooks in the late twentieth century to prop up a contemporary notion of “anti-elitism” that devalues credentialed expertise and attacks higher education and federal agencies. Brooks argued that students did not really protest for their own explicit motives or on behalf of others, but rather to seek prestige, social capital, and a sense of superiority.

“Why the sociologists feel obliged to look elsewhere for the protestors’ motives is a bit of a puzzle,” Robbins asks, turning the question around to consider the motives of the sociologists and pundits like Brooks themselves. Comforts like a professor’s salary, the largess of middle-class parents, philanthropy from the likes of George Soros, government support in the form of the National Endowment for the Arts and even the subsidized services of the United States Postal Service, bring with them the responsibility to protest the mistreatment of others. That responsibility is itself grounded in privilege, even the privilege of merely being “dispensed, at least temporarily, from the necessity of making a living.” The question then becomes not just who is allowed to protest, but who must?

— Michael L. Trujillo

Other titles by Bruce Robbins: Criticism and Politics, Atrocity, Perpetual War, Upward Mobility and the Common Good, Feeling Global, The Servant′s Hand, The Beneficiary, Secular Vocations, and Cosmopolitanisms (editor), among others.

Masthead

Editor: Summer Brennan

Copy Editor: Howard Mittelmark

Guest Reviewers: Bobby Keniston is a playwright and critic. Michael Metivier is an editor at Merriam-Webster, with poems and essays in Orion, Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, and others. Michael L. Trujillo, author of Land of Disenchantment, is the Associate Chair of Chicana/o Studies at the University of New Mexico.

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It’s a book review apocalypse out there, and an apocalypse for book reviews means an apocalypse for books. Last night, I watched (lately of The Washington Post when it was still a real newspaper) speaking live on Substack with NPR’s Weekend Edition host . Scott said he was heartened that so many books were still coming out, but Ron said this chilling thing in response. He said:

“But it so depresses me that the vast majority of those books will never get reviewed, never get read, and will just move—you know, the long struggle it took to get that book published—several years probably, many people involved—then the book is published into complete and utter silence and then passes away. That’s very sad.”

This is so crushingly true, and indeed, so excruciatingly, mind-bendingly tragic. The book passes away. It is, in a sense, stillborn. People toil away for years—sometimes decades (eh hem)—to finally finish their book. They crawl a hundred thousand miles over broken glass to finish it and edit it and get it published, and then…crickets. The infrastructure that has existed for hundreds of years that was built to catch books as they are born and help shepherd them into the hands of the right readers—that infrastructure is largely gone.

Since all of the usual channels for book discovery have been gutted by the uber-wealthy, which they have clearcut for their own personal profit, and the entire journalism industry has been more or less murdered by tech bros, we authors are all now expected to engage in this starved and hysterical culture of the few.

What do I mean by a starved and hysterical culture of the few? I mean that only a few people can “make it.” And by make it, I mean survive. I mean have the ability to continue. It’s a “winner takes all” universe, a massacre of the midlist, an extermination of the non-celebrity working author. A good and innovative book will come out and there will be no one left to cover it. No extended weekly books section in local newspapers that might pass the news along. No way for anyone to even know that the books exist. You either become a TikTok sensation and earn $20 million, or you sink into oblivion and perish.

I am exaggerating, but only slightly. All of this is bad. Not just for authors, obviously, but for readers too, and anyone who still wants themself and the people around them to retain the ability to think for themselves. It feels somewhat idiotic to have to stand up and say “hey listen, um, books are important, actually,” but maybe we are at that point. We could all benefit from reading more and longer, from getting away from the emotional meat grinder of social media and what passes for the news, the nerve-fraying thrall of doomscrolling and screens. We need to heal—our institutions, our communities, our attention spans, our minds, ourselves. To do this, I recommend books.

The image I used to illustrate this post is a photo taken in 1940 of a milkman delivering milk during the London blitz. I saw this picture the other day and identified strongly with it. I’m not quite sure if I’m the milkman or the bombed city in this metaphor, but probably both. I feel like both right now. The world around me is in ruins, and my own personal infrastructure and the infrastructure of my profession have been smashed, and yet still I want to get to work in whatever small way I can. Even wounded and inadequate, I want to continue. To contribute.

Lesson two in Timothy Snyder’s Twenty Lessons on Fighting Tyranny is to defend institutions, and of course the institution closest to me is books. It’s funny to think of “books” as an institution, but they are. They absolutely are. The scaffolding that allowed their survival was hidden within adjacent institutions, like that of “the press,” itself deeply imperiled from all sides, as well as brick and mortar bookstores both big and small. But as we witnessed in the past week, even when newspapers themselves manage to survive, their books coverage may not. It has often been among the first things to go.

I grew up in the Bay Area reading the San Francisco Chronicle, especially the “pink pages,” as we called the arts section, for they were indeed pink. It had the music listings, the movie reviews with their 1940s-era “little man” ratings system, and of course the books section. The book reviews were in service of the reader, not the writer of the review. It wasn’t a chance to prove anything or promote something else, just a review of a book, so that people who might like that book would know of its existence (or, in rare cases, know what to avoid).

I have long dreamed of adding a monthly books supplement to this newsletter. I tried to do it myself, in a small way, for a while, a few years back, but it was more of a monthly “heads up” than a series of reviews. My time on Substack has been nothing if not one long lesson in personal limitations. Besides, I don’t want a book supplement that is just my reviews anyway. I want a real supplement, with different reviewers, all paid, and an assigning editor—paid as well—so that things can be done properly and most of all reliably.

My dream is this: a monthly book review supplement, about six reviews per month, focusing on books that the readership of this newsletter might find interesting. It might lean towards fiction and literary nonfiction, memoir and poetry, with themes of art and science, nature and politics, family and migration, micro-histories and the process of creativity, etc. The reviews would be on the shorter side, and relatively light in tone. Serious, but with humor included when possible. There would be no bad reviews, unless a writer has previously published more than three commercially successful books, or is already a celebrity in another field. Otherwise, if you don’t like it, don’t review it. Pick something else. No hatchet jobs.

I know I can’t do this by myself, so I looked into what it would cost to pay other people to do it. After all, miraculously, this newsletter somehow has a free readership that is larger than some regional newspapers, and that’s not nothing. I believe it is what some people would call a platform, and that is of use, and has value, or could have, to people other than myself.

I did some basic math on this, and to pay an assignment editor and six reviewers a month the bare minimum rate, with no increased income to myself, I would still need an additional 750 paid annual subscribers to make this happen. On the one hand, facepalm—that’s a lot of new paid subscribers. But on the other, it’s still less than 5% of the newsletter’s total readership, so technically it could happen. We’ll just have to see.

If you’re a free reader who already enjoys this newsletter and would like to see a professional, monthly book review supplement, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Books are an institution that we could defend together, at least in this small way. It’s still a dream at this point, but we could make it happen.

UPDATE: The first issue of The Book Supplement launched on March 8th 2026. To keep this going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber ($30) or a Founding Member ($250).

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