THURSDAY, JULY 2, 2026
7.30 p.m.

Regent Street Cinema
307 Regent St.

London

W1B 2HW

Granta and Regent Street Cinema are pleased to present a screening of Reprise (2006), directed by Joachim Trier. The film will be followed by a prerecorded Q&A with Trier and novelist and critic Leo Robson. Purchase tickets here.

Reprise follows Philip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman Høiner), a pair of young aspiring novelists, as they navigate a range of romantic, social, and creative challenges in contemporary Oslo. Widely praised on original release for its energy, wit, and unconventional structure, Reprise was voted the best Norwegian films of the 2000s in the newspaper Verdens Gang and launched Trier’s career as one of the leading directors of his generation.

This special event, presented in tandem with our Spring 2026 issue dedicated to Scandinavian writing, offers audiences a rare opportunity to see Reprise in the cinema and to hear Trier reflect on his creative influences and the literary and cultural landscape that shaped his work.

Joachim Trier was born in Denmark and raised in Oslo and studied at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. He is the co-director of the documentary The Other Munch, about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s relationship with the painter Edvard Munch, and the co-writer and director of six features films, including Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and received the prize for best international film at the Oscars and BAFTAs.

Leo Robson is a contributing editor at Granta. His writing on film and literature has appeared in the New Left Review, the New Yorker, and the London Review of Books, among other publications.

For our Interviews series, we ask contributors to reflect on the work they’ve contributed to our pages. Here, we speak to Stephen Gill about his photoessay ‘School Run’, which appears in Issue 175: Scandinavia.

What do your mornings look like on the school run?

My children – Ada and Ylva – are scheduled to start school at 8.30 a.m. There is an infinite combination of events leading up to us sitting in the car, and things rarely happen in a repeated sequence. The process of exiting the house can feature anything from rousing those who have overslept, packing parcels, folding laundry, trying to connect a Bluetooth speaker, scraping ice, retrieving a lost key or music lesson book, lip balm, glasses, or an overly ambitious decision to make a full English breakfast in only fifteen minutes.

It’s not uncommon for me to decide, during the short time the toaster is scorching two slices of bread, that this has now offered two minutes to empty and start refilling the dishwasher, feed the garden birds, or run outside half clothed to get some firewood. All such actions are usually calmly followed by ‘Marmite, peanut butter, or jam?’ Now the children are older, they also join in this dance.

The girls switch front seats on a one-week rotation (that they put in place). The front passenger has a responsibility to look out for wild boars, deer, pheasants and the ocassional badger on or just about to join the road. This has proved helpful. We also have an agreement that even if I have seen a person on the road, they can also say ‘person’.

We tend to take the same route, passing through the villages and flat farmland of Skåne. We mostly talk about their day ahead, or music, though today we discussed black ice and how to spot it. I realise that often I am passing things on to them – and only when saying them aloud do I understand that it might well be something my father also told me.

The journey usually takes around thirty-four minutes and the distance is 21 km (not as the crow flies). In the winter months we leave in darkness and return in darkness.

How did the idea of this series start out?

These images – taken over a three-year period – were not born from an idea or intention to form a body of work. Some of the pictures were made en route to school, but most were made after dropping the girls off, when I stopped to walk at various places on the way home.

As a single parent, after a busy weekend, my mind is both full and exhausted. My walks are often filled with the beginning of an overwhelming absence, knowing I am returning to a home that looks like an empty film set, with props in place like the dregs in a glass of cold, but once hot chocolate; cereal boxes; a forgotten pair of gloves; and solidified candle wax that was picked off and moulded into shapes with small, concave fingerprints scattered on the table.

These walks are a time to adjust, to dwell, to settle. Sometimes a path will appear, mostly trodden in by animals before fading out into the open. I find myself adopting a state of mind that is both extremely present and absent equally, without needs, intent, a sense of time, a goal, or any kind of fixed destination.

It’s this internal state that has mostly lead to the images. You are just there; some sensations become heightened and others decrease. For example, your awareness of small details could be sharpened, noticing the movement of trees, bird song, slugs and snails, or moss on a dry-stone wall. But in these moments, you can also be completely unaware that it’s raining and you’re soaked to the skin.

I think it’s healthy when life informs your practice, rather than practice informing your life. When I have been making these photographs, care and precision has been replaced by feelings and instinct. I cannot deny that some of the images are embedded with a sadness, or longing, and general fatigue.

Is repetition important to your practice?

In my early work, say late 90’s colour work, I was very much working with photography’s great descriptive strengths and often making comparative studies that presented variations within a chosen subject, almost like typologies of day-to-day things we do and encounter.

In recent years, as my distrust in photography has grown, I’ve started to have more faith in a lack of information. To step back and attempt to encourage the subject to steer and guide the work, rather than suffocate it with my own ego, techniques, or preconceptions.

Much of this work leans on letting go completely. I was classically trained in photography, mostly by my father, and when you reach a point when you can dismantle everything you know, or have learnt, sometimes you’re left with something special.

How did you achieve your dream-like colours?

These were mostly informed by out-of-date film and some instant film. The colours were also influenced by the temperature, and this could be controlled to an extent by resting the photographs in a box I made with a battery hand warmer, or placing them above the car fan heater en route.

You moved to Sweden in 2014, how has living there affected your photography?

Living in Sweden has had a large effect on my photographic practice. Unlike inner-city London, where I lived and worked for twenty years prior, you are not bombarded with constant visual noise.

The Swedish countryside is much quieter, to the point that it appears very little is happening. But, quite soon after moving here, I realised that it’s a kind of reversed mirage, that in fact it’s teeming with intense activity. It’s less visually apparent, but all the same it’s there.

Stephen Gill’s photographic practice spans over forty years and his works are held in private and public collections. Recently published bodies of work include Night Procession, The Pillar, Please Notify the Sun and Magnificent Failure.

Photo Credit: Ylva Gill.

Robin sped along the empty road and wondered if he might recognise anyone. He’d left Patch in the bath, still wittering about dead dogs, and just before he set off he’d texted Mark, the history teacher, to say that everything was going well: he had cooked dinner, his daughter was coping, the arrangements were underway. Things with Mark weren’t serious and Robin was unsure whether he would reply – although he probably would, the mother of Robin’s child was dead – but Robin wanted to feel connected, however tenuously, to another adult. If his daughter was going to carry on drinking and babbling about dead dogs he needed a co-pilot, even if that co-pilot only existed in the form of incomplete, poorly punctuated texts sent at irregular intervals. That’s what texting was all about, having a cast of supporting characters stored in an app in your phone, people who reassured you that you were doing a stellar job. Robin wasn’t looking for more than that.

He turned on the radio, pushing the car above fifty. Dutifully, he began to cry when he heard a sad song. He increased the volume. Rolling down his window, with one hand steadying the wheel, he sang the words he knew – truncated lines, bits and pieces from the chorus – and let the lyrics puncture his soul. The clean country air slapped his wet face and open mouth. He felt duly punished and very pure.

The villages Robin passed through were motionless. Curtains were drawn and the lanes were empty of streetlights, but the roads themselves were active. Twice Robin had to brake to allow a badger to pad thickly on to the verge and then moments later he almost flattened a muntjac after the stunted deer leapt from under the hedge. But Robin was careful, even when driving over the speed limit and with a higher than advisable measurement of alcohol in his system; he knew better than to take risks.

Robin admired the night-time creatures; they were more interesting than Mary’s pets, which he had never had time for. He hadn’t minded the rabbits Patch kept as a child. He appreciated their sex drive and their approach to freedom – they multiplied and then they escaped. But none of the cats and dogs that Mary had enlisted to keep her company were as elegant as the animals Robin encountered driving through the countryside at night. The deer that moved in fluid shoals over the fields, the extra-terrestrial crayfish he once spotted when he pulled in beside a brook to smoke a post-coital cigarette.

The small roads began to widen and the buildings grew closer together as Robin followed the bypass around the fringes of town. There was a recent housing development bleeding across the fields. A new secondary school had been built in a meadow. It looked like an airport; there were neon lights accenting the perimeter even though it was late at night and the middle of the summer holidays. The structure was made almost entirely from glass, which was eerie, futuristic, at odds with the pale brick that characterised the surrounding houses. The school Robin used to teach at when he, Mary and Patch lived together – the school where he had met Mary in the first place – had burned down and he supposed this contemporary monstrosity was the replacement. He remembered that Mary had texted him about the fire, told him about the children who were taking their lessons in tents donated by the local RAF base, appealing to their history. Robin had taken three weeks to reply to that message. He felt bad about that now. He had intended to respond sooner, but had forgotten.

He completed the bypass – the multiple roundabouts, the signs for fresh produce and the annual county fair – and made an abrupt right-hand turn. The moment the car merged on to the empty main road Robin felt excitement swell below his ribs, gradually descending so that the buzz grazed his bowels. He was like a horse. The first hint of a new thrill and he needed to shit. On the steering wheel, his palms tingled and he tried to settle himself by sinking his arse deeper into the upholstery.

All of this – the journey, the sensations – felt familiar. The circumstances could have been better but it was good to be back. He could practically taste the grip of the thick-necked men, rosy and reliably avuncular in their attempts to make him come. He swung the wheel languidly to the left, parking Mary’s car in the empty lay-by.

The men who frequented the lay-by – the demographic doomed by the nuptial declarations they’d made when they were still young and handsome – were nice enough. Robin felt they retained a certain charm, especially after the years he had spent dating neat London gays, shiny in their Japanese-inflected fashion and their love of Fino.

The men out here were authentic, rustic. They wore tired cashmere jumpers from reputable country brands, expensive green wool undermined by the giant holes gaping beneath the armpits. They were usually weathered with big teeth, their incisors creamy from drinking milk pumped straight from the cow. Robin liked to picture the spume, bubbles gathering like warm breath at the neck of the glass milk bottles lining their fridges.

Once, after Robin had been fucked by a farmer, they had gone to watch the cows marching sleepily into the dairy at dawn. The farmer had jogged up to the main house and returned to the barn with bowls of cereal. Panting, he’d handed one to Robin and topped it up with milk that was plump and thick and left a skirt of fat around the edge of the bowl.

He liked talking to them. Robin was good at listening and enjoyed hearing about their absurd routines. He’d met farmers who had to get back for morning feeds; men who worried over their lambs. Robin admired this. He liked to imagine them plucking reams of amniotic fluid from tiny trotters. Although the fantasy was quickly extinguished when Robin heard a description of a lamb, premature and still, trapped in its sack. There were some disappointments, obviously. Sometimes the lambing men weren’t sexy at all: they were skinny and barely filled their green overalls; they were self-conscious when they unzipped themselves from those dirty boiler suits, the empty arms hanging flaccidly by their hips, the smell of shit and wet wool emanating from their bodies, and their penises would poke forth, emerging apologetically from a scraggle of dark hair like a candle wick flailing in the dark, a stalactite hanging below a grubby white vest.

Robin turned off the ignition, glancing across at the half-eaten packets of chewing gum, chocolate-bar wrappers, hair bobbles and stray clips flattened into the passenger seat of Mary’s car. Mary had always claimed that he was the untidy one, but a person’s car was like their bathroom, it was the real litmus test for cleanliness. Mary didn’t scrub away the limescale or hoover the backseats, and despite her attempts to keep order she was just as messy as he was.

He hoped someone would turn up soon. Someone who was rough and ineloquent and keen to keep their clothes on. He didn’t realise he liked this until he had been pushed to the floor of a cattle trailer. The farmer mounted him, fully dressed, and rubbed himself, groaning, while Robin tried to keep his lips raised an inch above the matted, shit-studded floor. This sort of occurrence was rare, which was a shame.

Often, though, it was a well-spoken, well-dressed man in a wax jacket who would tap politely on Robin’s window, and the events that followed were perfunctory, economical. These were the men Robin encountered when he pulled in after work, the men who also went home to their wives and girlfriends, their children and their Labradors. The post-work fucks were always hurried. There was the stress of the road and the awareness of the slim window between signing off and launching into dinner, bath and bed. Technically, their lives probably mirrored his. But Robin disliked the idea that his choices had placed him within such a generic continuum of male homosexuals. He told himself that he was different. There had been a time when he wanted Mary very much.

Afterwards it used to make Robin sick, bile piling up inside his larynx while he ate the food that Mary had prepared; Patch small and sweet and climbing all over him. There was always the fear that he might still smell like sex, or that semen had stained his trousers, and that at any moment these traces of the adult world might be transferred on to Patch’s pyjamas.

It was now around midnight. This used to be a prime window. Perhaps nobody came to the lay-by looking for sex anymore. It was possible that much like their cosmopolitan counterparts, the gay men of the countryside had migrated to the apps. This option was still open to Robin. He had his phone. He had battery, signal. It wouldn’t take long to find out who was close by, maybe five hundred metres, maybe ten miles. Mary’s car was well fuelled.

Robin began to feel tired. The history teacher hadn’t replied – which Robin found mildly offensive – and for all he knew his daughter had taken her vermouth into the bath and dozed off in the water. He would find her frame, subsumed and serene. And if the latter was true, he’d be just like the old postman. He’d have to hang himself in Mary’s front room to complete the threefold death. He unbuckled his seatbelt. He would wait ten more minutes.

–

Robin’s breath tasted appalling. He’d fallen asleep and it was around three a.m. The silt of a prematurely disturbed nap clung to his gums; he pictured dead skin cells, remnants of his dinner, staining his tongue yellow. Someone short, with a tiny T-shirt straining against taut biceps, was grinning at Robin through the glass. Robin pressed the button to lower the window. He pressed it twice before he realised that the reason it wasn’t working was because the keys were in his lap. The man stepped back and Robin opened the door.

He was pushing five foot five. His top was cropped, revealing a clenched, solid abdomen. A trail of soft blond fuzz led Robin’s gaze down to an ornate silver buckle, a pair of dusty blue jeans and steel toe-capped boots. There was red glitter on his eyelids and he was standing in front of a beat-up white Polo, the same car Mary had driven in the nineties. Robin wondered if he might be younger than Patch. The glitter was a danger sign.

You having a good night, then? he asked Robin.

His name was Jackson and Robin followed his car down a rocky track. There were fields on either side, the landscape demarcated into sections with fraying electrical tape. The ground was splitting and brown and there wasn’t much grass. Horses stood quietly in their paddocks; some were lying down, still sleeping.

Jackson didn’t wait for Robin when he parked his Polo in the yard outside the stable block. You can head on into the caravan, he shouted, gesturing to a mobile home at the edge of the gravel car park.

Robin watched Jackson strut down the aisle of stables, his gaze lingering on Jackson’s skinny hips, the arse that barely filled his jeans. The horses in the stables whickered at him, an undulating hum that grew into a chorus as he unlatched kick bolts, casually tossing hay into mangers. I won’t be a minute, he called, without turning around. Robin could hear in his voice that he was smiling. Clearly he could tell Robin was staring. And don’t mind Britney. She’s a doll, really.

Britney was a Jack Russell. She launched her compact body at Robin, the skin around her mouth stretched back to reveal her manic little teeth. Fuck. Robin flicked his leg, shaking his loafer a foot above the paisley carpet while she snarled and darted at his knee. He brought his hands to his face, briefly forgetting that she was the size of a juice carton and that there was a limit to the heights she was able to access. She leapt again. He tried to grab her but then stopped, wary of tossing her on to the yard with his bare hands. Instead he backed towards the door, planning to open it and guide her outside with his foot. Robin acted quickly. Fuck, he repeated, adrenalin thudding through his knees. Bracing himself, he manoeuvred the dog with his toe and slammed the door. She continued to bark – shrill and furious – and Robin heard Jackson laugh.

Come here, baby girl. We have to be gentle with Robbie.

Everything inside the caravan was hairy. Fur was embedded into the carpet, disfiguring the pattern, and the interior wore the same faded sheen as Jackson’s car. It was as if the furniture had gone the way of an Old Master’s painting in desperate need of retouching, like the walls inside Jackson’s home were several shades yellower – or in some cases browner – than they ought to be. Robin shuddered as he sat down and his skin made contact with the woollen rug flung over the back of the sofa. There were loose hairs everywhere. He wondered if he was about to have a reaction. His nose twitched. He could feel the coarse hairs through his clothes, prickling his neck like the shaft of a feather interfering with the skin of a down pillow.

Did she get you? Jackson said, opening the door, Britney gathered under his arm.

She tried, Robin replied. Christ. Robin’s chat needed work. He felt shy. Britney’s attack had been public, almost; Jackson had heard him swear. Maybe he had even seen him wobble his leg in flimsy self-defence through the frosted window.

Jackson kissed the dog on the head and let her jump to the floor. She bounced across the room and on to the sofa. She made a tight ball, careful not to actually touch Robin, who was sitting on the edge of the cushion, his hands placed formally on his knees.

Jackson’s mouth tasted like cranberry juice. Don’t worry. I don’t have a UTI, he said, when Robin mentioned it. I just like the flavour. Vodka and cranberry juice. Jackson bent down to take off his boots. I bet you’ve never been to Tubes, have you? Robin hadn’t – what was Tubes? The club in town. I’ve been out with the girlies. My stable girls. They work for me. Spotting an opportunity to dial up the waning tension, Jackson added: I can work for you, if you want me to. He pulled off his socks, which were flecked with hay and shavings, and returned to Robin’s mouth. He moved his tongue erratically, licking Robin’s teeth – hardly an erogenous zone – and Robin could only assume that Jackson meant to slide his tongue along the rim of Robin’s lips.

It was trickier than Robin anticipated to negotiate Jack-son’s belt buckle. Robin had never been a natural top and Jackson had to help. But even when Jackson was in his under-wear, straddled across Robin’s lap, Robin struggled to get in the mood. The generic odour of living animals permeating the caravan was almost fungal. He breathed through his mouth.

We don’t have to.

I want to.

But Robin didn’t want to. His cock was slumped inside his pants like a listless daffodil.

Jackson was matter-of-fact about it. If they weren’t going to shag then they could do something else. You can watch me ride. It was almost five o’clock in the morning and Jackson wanted to exercise the horses before the sun became too intense. Let me grab Lola May – total heart throb, you’ll love her.

Robin perched awkwardly on the fence while Jackson trotted around an arena. Britney sat on a wooden crate in the middle of the sand, her beady eyes fixed on Jackson, who occasionally tossed her treats from his pocket and told her that she was truly precious.

Jackson looked good on a horse, better than he did on his feet. He looked much bigger, confident. He rode in the same blue jeans that he had worn to the club but had abandoned his crop top in favour of a red baseball cap. Now that he was completely shirtless, Robin could see that there were no hairs on his chest or across his shoulders. His back was toned but narrow. Robin wondered how recently he’d finished school.

After only fifteen minutes the horse was dripping; white foam had collected beneath the reins and Lola May’s flank was dark and wet. We’re almost done, called Jackson, who barely seemed to move at all as he rode a figure-of-eight around Britney. Robin was pleased the performance was almost over. Lola May was clearly working hard but not much seemed to be happening. Jackson just went around and around in circles, clicking his tongue.

Robin stroked Lola May’s muzzle, dipping his finger into her velvety nostrils while Jackson held his thumb over the end of the hose, transforming the jet into a thin, wide mist that rinsed the sweat from where the leather had chafed against her coat.

Jackson found a sponge to rub her down and asked why he’d never caught Robin in the lay-by before. Watching Jackson squeeze dirty water down his own neck and then pat down his enormous horse with a filthy towel, Robin suddenly felt disappointed about their lack of chemistry. He paid such close attention to Lola May’s body; once he’d scraped the sweat and hose water from her back, he buckled a mask around her head – to ward off flies – and sprayed her with a lemony, herbal-scented liquid. He would have been an attentive lover. Robin wanted to be cared for like that. Maybe Jackson would turn into a top eventually. Acts of service were obviously his thing. Robin was moved by the way he tended to his horse and decided to be honest: he admitted that he was actually not local, at least not anymore. He was only here for a funeral.

Whose funeral? My ex.

What was his name?

She was called Mary.

Oh, right. Wow.

Yeah. Mary Malcolm. No way.

What.

No fucking way. Miss Malcolm’s your ex?

Mary was your teacher?

What sort of marriage are we calling this then? Miss Malcolm.

We weren’t married.

She was decent. She taught me how to paint horses. Like, really well. I painted this whole herd of them for my course-work. I mean, she helped, she let me trace the outlines.

Jackson’s ability to slide into the lexicon of education – coursework, exams – betrayed his age. Robin was relieved that they hadn’t fucked. Anyone who spoke about their art exams with this much fervour was barely out of their teens.

She taught you?

She lent me this camera so I could take pictures of all the horses. I didn’t have Lola May then. She’s not really mine, anyway. Some rich cunt owns her. I just take her out competing; that’s my job.

Robin wanted to leave. He was frightened of what might happen if Jackson got emotional. What if Jackson had never experienced death? If Jackson started crying, Robin wouldn’t be able to cope.

Listen, I’ve got to go.

I can’t believe she’s dead. When’s the funeral? We all thought she was gay.

I’m sorry to have told you, like this I mean.

It was five years ago – that she gave me that camera. I never did give it back. I think it’s in the caravan. Kind of tracks, though. That her ex would be a fag.

Robin felt very tired. It’s on Monday – the funeral – if you want to say goodbye.

Image © The Cleveland Museum of Art

This is an excerpt from A Sense of Occasion by Brodie Crellin, published by Jonathan Cape and Riverhead Books.

Brodie Crellin was born in Leicester and lives in London. A Sense of Occasion is their first novel.

Ravn is one of the finest Danish writers at work today, having written sci-fi, poetry, Gothic fiction, and, most recently, an adaptation for the stage of Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy. In her short story ‘The High Priestess’, translated by Martin Aitken and featured in Granta 175, a tarot card made manifest comes to ease a woman’s difficult child birth.

In this conversation, the two discuss the state of Danish literary culture, the poet and novelist Tove Ditlevsen, whose work Ravn has edited and championed for many years, the human instinct for artistic creation and its future.

‘Being human is a great mystery to me, but it’s also something that gives me enormous solace. I am a person that always longs to be free of my own biography, I guess, or experience or individuality. And to me there’s a very close link between humanity and art – making, writing, painting, theater. I think it’s kind of what we do. In the same way as the trees outside my window right now, they’re sprouting their leaves. That’s kind of what we do.’

Granta editor Thomas Meaney will chair the judging panel, joined by prize-winning writer Rachel Kushner, former Guggenheim Fellow and one of our 2017 Best of Young American Novelists, novelist Catherine Lacey, award-winning literary critic Parul Seghal, and Giles Harvey, contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.

Each decade, the list offers a chance to map the changing landscape of American literature. In three issues over thirty years, Best of Young American Novelists has recognized and championed remarkable emerging talent, helping to shape the evolving canon of that ever-slippery category ‘American fiction’.

Granta first published the list in 1996, with now-familiar names like Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore making the cut. In 2007, the list included Yiyun Li, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nicole Krauss, and in 2017 included Joshua Cohen, Emma Cline, and Halle Butler.

The 2027 judges will consider the strongest work of long-form fiction by American writers written in English. Eligible writers must have published at least one novel or have a novel under contract with a confirmed publication date no later than May 2028. Short story collections are not eligible.

The selected writers will be featured in Granta’s Autumn 2027 issue.

American publishers must submit relevant work from writers by 16 June 2026. There is no limit on the number of authors. Publishers are invited to submit their books here.

‘My mother told me monsters do not exist. Now I know they do.’

— Alien: Resurrection (1997)

After three years, I was coming to the end of an enormous piece of work, in which I was settling the score with everyone, the living, the dead, with sex, with writing. Reaching the end of this work meant marking time; rereading the pages far more slowly than I had written them, knowing that I would still need, interminably, another read-through before deciding that everything was ready, that every sentence, one after another, was ready to be published.

I couldn’t stand it any longer. I turned off the light and rested my eyes. Only the glow from the streetlights filtered into the apartment. It was two in the morning. I lay on the rug and did some stretches, legs behind my head, feet to the roof. The muscles along my backbone moved, warming up under my skin like lizards. When I got up again, I was annoyed to see that the neighbour opposite, in his pyjamas, was looking at me.

My neighbour opposite often looked at me, straight in the eye, although sometimes I suspected that he was only looking at his reflection in the window. In his blank gaze, there was neither curiosity nor lust. Perhaps he was looking at me the way you look into the void, both of us separated by the canyon of the street, our bodies at exactly the same height, suspended above the city between the apartment cubes.

I wanted to draw the curtain. Something heavy fell onto the floorboards, a dark, motionless mass. I leaned forward but, in the shadows, I could only make out the shape on the floor, undeniable, incomprehensible.

I glanced at my neighbour’s window. Perhaps his gaze had shifted slightly, to my thighs or knees, or was lost in the reflections from the streetlights. I closed the curtain and leaned further towards the disconcerting shape that seemed to be imprinted on my retina. The hem of the curtain brushed it, but nothing happened. It looked like a rabbit, or a rag doll, or perhaps a pigeon that had fallen into the room? I couldn’t fix my gaze at the right distance to determine the size, position, colour; it was as if a lattice of air, an invisible wire mesh, had forced my eyes to perform an acrobatic refocusing. I touched it with my toe. The thing was big, yes, like a big chicken, and I thought I was beginning to distinguish a beginning and an end – a head there, a tail on the other side – but it could just as easily have been a balloon or a garment fallen off a hanger.

I turned on the light. The thing was black, that’s what I noticed first, really black, even under the bright light. And that colour was already unusual, as if the night was still clinging there, huddled on my floorboards, or rather, as if, clearly, the thing should have vanished, its shade and form, with the eruption of light. The thing was not only black (I don’t know what I was expecting, brown, beige, grey?), but remained intact, absurdly unchanged, like a shadow on a lamp.

I couldn’t see. I was analysing, considering, but it was, I believe, precisely in order to remain in the dark that my brain persisted in its astonishment: it was a strategy, a computer struggling to find workarounds, whereas my body had already grasped that there was something unbearable here, a thing in the presence of which one could neither keep still nor remain calm. My body was trembling, I felt sick. But I wanted to understand.

I moved closer again. If my eyes could have touched, smelled, eaten, they would have done so for my brain, which persisted in its stupidity, as if faced with an optical illusion. I saw a textured surface etched with tiny channels, engraved with lines, perhaps feathers, black feathers that seemed dusty, and for a moment I thought of a crow. But it was too big for a crow. I backed away, increasingly terrified, increasingly incredulous, and alone.

I had to touch this thing. But not with my fingers, not with my skin. I ran into the kitchen to get the broom. I remembered, as a little girl, in the countryside, treading on a litter of field mice. Suddenly, under the sole of my foot, the strange contact, so different from the grass, from the ordinary crackle of twigs. And then, understanding, my stomach churning: those soft bones, that gelatinous flesh crushed beneath my foot. I remembered, with a sharpness that time does not dull, that spongy sucking sensation, that puncturing – that slimy ground giving way. By grabbing my broom that evening, I wanted above all to prevent any more memories like that from returning.

It was solid, resistant, inert. I pushed, and the thing revealed its other side, a mouth, or rather a small snout – the only spot of colour, red. From there, I could make out two eyes, closed, two wrinkled slits and perhaps a nose, two orifices in any case, black and dry, and two ears or two tufts of hairs among the various feathers, which were smeared with a kind of dried, dark mucus. And there were two curled paws at the end of which hung two shrivelled hands, human hands, with nails as black as the rest of it.

It was not a crow.

I left the study and shut the door. With a single thrust of my hips, I shoved the heavy chest of drawers across and jammed it under the door handle.

The telephone was still in the study. In any case, who would I have called? That thing behind the door was so filthy, so repugnant, that I couldn’t imagine anyone I could call for help. I had to get rid of it, tomorrow, and without mentioning it to anyone. I swallowed two sleeping pills, bolted my bedroom door, and went to bed.

It was the pain that woke me up. I hadn’t opened my eyes, I was in the silence of that moment of awakening, when you don’t hear sounds yet, when you’re just beginning, only just, to feel your real legs, your real back, not those of the dream from which you’re half-emerging. An eagle’s talons gripped my back, sinking right through my skin to my stomach. My first thought was to refuse, to stay in the dream, asleep, but as I emerged, helpless, the pain shifted to a precise spot in the small of my back: the place where, yesterday, my muscles had strained against the chest of drawers. And, with a violent shock, I remembered the thing in the study.

Nothing moved. There was the usual rumble of cars in the street, and in my bedroom, overlooking the courtyard, the whispering of poplar leaves. Last summer, I had fallen asleep with the window open and the light on. A rustling in the middle of the night, a sort of subtle clicking sound . . . the ceiling was carpeted with insects, black moths, beetles, stag beetles, and all sorts of other things I didn’t know the names of. That night I emptied a can of insecticide straight onto my sheets. I sprayed for so long that a blister formed on the tip of my finger. In the morning, the insects were scattered across the carpet, the blankets, the top of the wardrobe; I still occasionally find them in the folds of my clothes, and others, mummified, between the pages of books. Since then, the poplar, that huge poplar, which was one of the real estate agency’s major selling points, that poplar, which gave the courtyard a country feel, has turned out to be a nest of living creatures, beetles and centipedes, little hard bodies that crackle.

With a bit of luck, the thing would have disappeared, it was a bad dream; or else it would be much smaller than I remembered it, just a fly, a baby pigeon, and in my feverish state, skittish from writing, I might have overreacted.

First I made myself a coffee. There’d also been the cockroach invasion. One winter, when it had rained a lot, they had come up from the flooded cellar. I had moved in with my mother while the place was being disinfected. When I got back, I discovered, to my horror, in the shower, that many of them were still alive and had taken refuge under the plug and were escaping beneath my bare feet.

I sipped my coffee, which tasted of old feathers. With difficulty, I pushed back the chest of drawers, the one I had dragged over with such determination yesterday. When I opened the door, I saw immediately that the thing had vanished.

It must have moved during the night, gone into hiding. What I instinctively feared was not so much that it would suddenly reappear, but that I would find it again, inert, disgusting, in a pile under a piece of furniture. And what repulsed me most of all was the idea of its death throes, the proximity of a thing in the process of dying in my home.

I edged forward: open the window, air the room, breathe. I pulled back the curtain. The window opposite was empty. The curtain felt heavy. I looked up, and saw the thing, hanging upside down in a fold of the fabric, its paws clenched, eyes shut, motionless.

Back in the kitchen, I got a bin bag from under the sink. In the bright, clinical light of day, the animal clinging onto the curtain, beneath its folded wings, looked a bit like a bat. But its paws were almost simian, the fingers thin and curled. Its nails were not claws but real fingernails, thick and rounded. And the snout, the mouth, the face of the creature – whether asleep or dead – was wrinkled like that of a newborn.

Perched on a stool, I shook the curtain, at first at arm’s length, then with all my strength. It didn’t come unhooked. I unscrewed the rod and slid the curtain to the floor, ring by ring.

On the ground, the thing made a lump under the fabric. I opened the bin bag as wide as possible and tried to stuff all of it in, lifting it up by the rings and pushing it with my foot, holding my breath. But the bag wasn’t big enough; I would have had to force it in, wedge it, touch it.

I sat down, distraught. Fear hollowed out its place inside me again, as air filled my lungs, as my muscles released the tension, orders and commands I had imposed on them. The light changed to the left of my field of vision and I saw my neighbour, his gaze perhaps vaguely surprised, vaguely perplexed. Without a curtain, I couldn’t face up to him.

I felt as if I could split myself in two, easily, effortlessly, as if over those few strange hours since yesterday my body had gradually become disassociated from my consciousness; and I could see what my neighbour could see, a young woman alone, her eyes fixed on a spot on the floor. I had to act again, make my body surrender to my will so that my muscles and my ideas cohered.

Kick the curtain under the table with my foot, hide it from my neighbour’s gaze. Grasp it by the rings, lift it, free the thing, climb back up on the stool, rethread the rings onto the rod, and close the curtain.

The living room returned to semi-darkness; I felt as if I were dreaming.

The thing was now resting on the rug. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The phone rang, the answering service clicked on and I heard, as if I were imagining it, the voice of my editor, calling for an update; but how could I respond?

I slept without taking a sleeping pill. I waited, all the doors shut, until sleep took hold of me, and it did, quickly, blanketing me: a heavy, featureless sleep, as devoid of personality as the indifferent night hanging over the city.

Then I heard a noise, I couldn’t say when, or where. The poplar whispered, all the windows in the courtyard were dark. I got up. I wasn’t frightened. I was outraged, disgusted and fed up. In the kitchen, perched on the sink, clinging on with its little human paws, the thing was gnawing, sucking and nibbling on a stray heel of bread, like a squirrel.

It was swaying on the edge of the sink, jerking its head, like a chicken or a pigeon. A black, glistening tongue was working away on the crust of bread. Teeth appeared, black and red at the gums, then white or grey at the points of the teeth. The mouth was a wide slash much higher up, almost reaching what looked like ears – holes with movable protuberances, as if the sounds were pressing on keys of flesh – so that the thing seemed to be smiling joylessly, stupidly, driven solely by hunger. As it jerked its head again, the heel of bread rolled, the creature lost its balance and a wing opened, or a membrane, a black, pointed thing, which cast a sudden shadow over the sink.

I stayed in the doorway, ready to leap away if it came closer, but I was calm at last – tired and annoyed. It seemed not to see me. No matter how much I moved, the folds of skin beneath which I imagined eye sockets remained glued shut, puckered in the light. I opened the fridge without a second thought and tossed it a bit of Gruyère.

The minuscule snout, like a button, that ended at the top of its gleeful mouth, began to twitch, and the thing leapt eagerly on the morsel. It emitted small rodent noises and then, head on wing, wiped away a trickle of black drool.

Another piece of Gruyère. Some leftover chicken. The fat off a slice of ham. An apricot, some peanuts, and a yoghurt that it inhaled in two seconds.

I was interrupted by the phone. It was my mother. The creature was trying to make its way back into my study – I’d left the door open. It waddled, occasionally steadying itself with a delicate little flick of its wing if it stumbled. ‘I’ll call you back,’ I said to my mother.

The creature jumped on my desk, and from there, unfolding its wings, sprang under the curtain and curled up there. For a few seconds the fabric stirred – clawing and jerking. And then, nothing more. I lifted the curtain a little; it had fallen asleep, hanging upside down under its wings.

It had shat in the sink, black, dry and odourless turds. I let the water run for a long time without managing to dissolve them; I considered the problem and decided to go and buy it a crate and some litter right away.

In the street, I tried to observe what could be seen from my window. There definitely was a shadow in the curtain, but it could be mistaken for a fold, or a stain. My neighbour was looking at me. We gave each other a little nod.

It was a mild day. The weather had turned fine. On Quai de la Mégisserie, beneath the dusty plane trees, between the rabbit hutches and the boa constrictor terrariums, the musky smell intensified. The grain products, wet food and kibble, were fermenting in the exhaust fumes, and the cats, mice and sea otters, seized by a comical and heartbreaking frenzy, were trying desperately to groom their coats.

I said it was for a squirrel, a decent-sized squirrel, a large squirrel, like, from the Amazon. ‘A squirrel monkey,’ said the salesman. ‘That’s it,’ I confirmed. He eyed me respectfully, at the same time sizing me up. ‘You’ll need something at least this big.’ He showed me a fifteen-litre tray. ‘And this litter here.’ He placed a bag of it in my arms and, needless to say, a lot of dairy products and fruit. I left with my haul.

The neighbour was at his window. The creature was asleep in the curtain. How long had it been nesting there? Perhaps it had hatched there – egg, larva, chrysalis – fattening, hibernating, moulting, tiny perhaps, discreet, clean? Perhaps the neighbour had been following its growth since I moved in? His eyes were on me, but as if looking through me; in the vague lofty space, he too seemed to be growing, botanical, sensitive and peaceful, like orchids that feed on air.

I named her Clémence. She was a girl, obviously, and she was growing stronger by the day.

Louise Bourgeois, Loose sheet of writing, c. 1961, pencil on lined paper, 9 ½ x 6 in. (24.1 x 15.2 cm); LB-0019, Collection Louise Bourgeois Archive, The Easton Foundation, New York, © The Easton Foundation/DACS, UK.

In the early 1950s, Louise Bourgeois took a nearly decade-long break from making or exhibiting new work. During this time, she ran an antiquarian bookstore and underwent intensive psychoanalysis, which she continued, off and on, for the next thirty years. She first saw Dr. Leonard Cammer, who later founded Gracie Square Hospital, then Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, a Freudian trained by Wilhelm Reich, from 1952 until 1982.

In 1958, at the height of her most intensive period of therapy, she described it as ‘a duty’, ‘a joke’, ‘a love affair’, ‘a bad dream’, ‘a pain in the neck’ – but also, ‘my field of study’. In 2004, two metal boxes full of papers written during her analysis were discovered in a closet of her Chelsea brownstone by Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois’ longtime assistant. Six years later, another two boxes were found. In total, the papers run to almost a thousand pages.

A selection of Bourgeois’ psychoanalytic writings in the metal boxes in which they were stored © The Easton Foundation. Photo: Christopher Burke.

Composed on loose sheets, the writings are records of dreams and process notes. They were created as an adjunct to her analysis with Lowenfeld, for whom she sometimes made carbon copies. Granta presented six images of Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings in Issue 174, three of which are included here. Bourgeois ‘devoted a lifetime to excavating her unconscious’, wrote her friend Gary Indiana; these literary artifacts bear witness to the neuroses that fuelled her work.

Louise Bourgeois, Loose sheet of writing, c. 1958, pencil on off-white paper, 11 x 8 ½ in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm); LB-0127, Collection Louise Bourgeois Archive, The Easton Foundation, New York © The Easton Foundation/DACS, UK.

Louise Bourgeois , I Feel Threatened, 1986 , charcoal and pencil on blue paper, 11 x 8 ½ in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm), Collection The Easton Foundation, New York, © The Easton Foundation/DACS, UK, Photo: Christopher Burke.

In our latest issue, we featured Jesse Barron’s essay ‘Transference in the Afternoon’, which explored the ongoing lawsuit between Michael Pollack, a former hedge fund manager, and his therapist, Heidi Kling. Pollack and Kling maintained a sexual relationship for a decade, from 2011 to 2021. In the wake of the affair, Pollack claims that what unfolded was not a consensual relationship, but rather mishandled ‘erotic transference’ on the part of Kling.

The New York Post ran with the headline ‘NYC hedge funder says shrink “seduced” him into office sex sessions – and charged $250K in “mistress money”’. In his article, Barron goes beyond the sensationalism of the case and posed deeper questions about therapy and its discontents. Granta editor Josie Mitchell spoke to Barron recently about the story, and its resistance to any final or simplifying account.

How did you first come across this case? What led you to believe that there was something more complex at stake than the New York Post headline?

The Post – always first to the scene of a sex scandal – framed the material as a story about a badly behaved therapist, which might be the most legible interpretation, but it’s probably also the least interesting. After all, sex between therapists and patients is not unheard of. What grabbed my attention instead were the conflicting accounts of what the sexual relationship meant. Pollack describes a form of exploitation; Kling describes a consensual affair. Both versions are plausible, but they are also incompatible.

The essay centres around Pollack’s reconsideration of his relationship with Kling. For a long time, he understood their sexual relationship as a consensual affair, albeit one hidden behind the façade of therapy. He later comes to view their years together as a form of exploitation driven by ‘erotic transference’. How would you explain that term – and why is it so central to the case?

Transference is the idea that ‘we all invent each other according to early blueprints’, as Janet Malcolm puts it. We don’t form direct relationships with people; we form relationships with images of them that we have unconsciously created, usually based on formative relationships from our past, especially with our parents.

Malcolm called transference Freud’s most radical idea. I think Malcolm’s right, because of the way transference – once you grasp it – begins to inflect the way you think about your closest, most intimate relationships. It’s like a drop of ink thrown into the washing machine of your mind. Everything comes out a slightly different color.

In therapy, those blueprints can become very influential. A therapist – attentive but neutral – tends to invite projection. You’re three sessions in and you think, ‘Wow, this person really gets me.’ You don’t even know them. Or you get a crush on them and you think, ‘They’re paying so much attention to me, I bet they’re into me sexually.’ I mean, maybe! But who knows. Not you. That’s the point.

More people are in therapy today than at any other point since its inception. The whole way we understand relationships has become therapeutic and yet the concept of transference is almost never talked about outside of specialist circles. This is strange. Freud thought transference was the whole game, the main event. But now tens of millions of people are in therapy without recognizing that transference is a dynamic in the room.

When I started working on the story, a close friend said, ‘I’m not sure anyone will care about this, because transference isn’t the main thing happening in therapy right now. It’s AI, it’s chatbots.’ Well, sure. But that’s precisely the problem I’m trying to articulate. Just because we’re not talking about transference doesn’t mean it’s not ‘the main thing happening’. I promise you, it is. It’s happening with our wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends.

This is what Pollack is claiming in his lawsuit. He alleges that his feelings, which he once believed were love, were gravely mishandled transference. Where he once saw a loving relationship, he now sees abuse and manipulation.

A key question – from a legal perspective in particular – is whether Kling and Pollack’s therapeutic relationship ended before a sexual one began. Kling says the clinical arrangement ended, Pollack says it continued. What is so important about that distinction?

I’m glad you raise this, because a great deal hinges on it. If the therapy was ongoing, then the prohibition on sexual contact is clear and well-established, both within professional ethics and, in certain circumstances, in law.

Kling’s case is that she terminated the therapy. That’s her defense. She would say – I believe – that these questions of clinical ‘boundaries’ aren’t relevant, because she and Pollack were no longer patient and therapist at the time of their sexual relationship.

It’s a difficult area. In its code of ethics, the American Psychological Association states that a therapist should wait two years before having sex with a former patient (and even then, it advises that you should really avoid it). But those are professional standards rather than laws, and the legal situation varies state to state. In New York State, sex between a patient and a mental health provider during the course of treatment is classified as statutory rape, but these protections do not extend to a therapist and a former patient.

If the court accepted Kling’s version of events, she would technically have violated neither state regulations nor criminal law. In challenging that story, Pollack’s lawyer might say Kling’s argument doesn’t answer two questions: why the meetings took place in the consulting room, and why she continued to receive money from Pollack.

The essay begins with Pollack and then widens to consider psychoanalytic culture, supervision, ethics and institutional failure. How well do you think those systems operate generally? This case is no doubt exceptional, but the mishandling of transference does not seem to be so rare.

I’d refer anyone who’s interested in this topic to the work of Andrea Celenza and Glenn Gabbard, which I found invaluable as I was writing the piece. Celenza in particular has tried to account for why doctors, who know these theories inside and out, nonetheless sometimes act on their desires for their patients, and by doing so, risk their reputations and careers. A therapist who commits a boundary violation is said to be insufficiently analyzed, not aware enough of his or her own inner landscape to manage the feelings that inevitably arise in the consulting room.

Training institutes play a role too. Institutes are like extended families. The sibling bonds between the candidates carry over into the rest of their lives, while the parental figures – the teachers and supervisors – continue to loom over them. One result of the family bond is that people are reluctant to expose one another, like siblings who promise not to tattle. That could have played a role in this case, in the relationship between Kling and her supervisor, Joseph Newirth.

Power is unusually difficult to locate in this case – financial, professional and erotic. Did your own sense of where power lay shift as you worked on it?

Yes, but everyone needs to come to their own view of it. Part of the electric charge of this story – not necessarily my version of it, just the actual facts themselves – is the way it arouses conflicting interpretations. Two people could read it in bed next to each other and come to opposite conclusions.

The essay resists any single settled reading. It can be read as a story of belated recognition, or as a cynical reframing. How did you hold those two possibilities in tension?

Easy question. I had great editors. Tom Meaney and you, Josie, worked on this story like it was your own. We spent hours poring over the documents together, testing different versions of the same sentences and paragraphs, holding them at different angles to the light. What does it do to write ‘session’ rather than ‘meeting’ in this one spot? Whose perspective are we considering? And on and on. At one point, I think either you or Tom literally color-coded a draft to see whether we were unconsciously privileging one position or the other. You’d be like, ‘it’s getting a bit too green on this page.’

Once we started to have semi-coherent drafts, we’d show them to other people at the magazine, and say, ‘Does this seem fair to you? Where are we stacking the deck?’ It was consistently surprising – and it brings you to your knees you as a writer, because sometimes you’re not doing what you believe you’re doing. I’d make a tiny change in how I released a seemingly minor piece of information, and it would tilt the whole story in one direction. I had to retrace my steps and fix it.

I wanted Michael Pollack’s argument to come through very clearly, and I wanted the reader to empathize with him, but at the same time, I wanted the piece to be even-handed. I wanted it to consider all the angles. The reader needs to feel they have all the information they need to come to an interpretation of their own.

As part of your research for the essay, you spoke to various psychologists and psychoanalysts. What sense did you form of the profession’s response to the case? Was there a consensus, or did it reveal a range of views in how Kling’s actions were understood?

One of the most interesting reactions came from a therapist who had trained, like Kling, at the Derner Institute. There is a third figure in this case: the psychoanalyst Joseph Newirth, who was supervising Kling during the period of her relationship with Pollack, and later became Pollack’s analyst as well. For a period of time, he was seeing them both. The therapist I spoke to placed much of the responsibility on Newirth, for having failed to put a stop to the sexual relationship. I quote her in the piece: ‘Newirth was Kling’s analytical parent, but he didn’t protect her.’

Of course Newirth mounts a strong defence in the court documents: he totally disagrees with Pollack’s allegations.

After spending so long with this case, what remains unresolved for you?

Well, now that we’re talking about him: Joseph Newirth. He was intimately involved. In some ways, the whole story orbits him, this scholarly, edgy figure, alternately beloved and criticized. You could see him as the father in a family triangle, and Pollack himself uses that metaphor in his legal complaint. This is appropriate for a lawsuit about therapy: to locate, at the core, a damaged relationship with a parent.

‘Transference in the Afternoon’ is free to read for the next four days.

Jesse Barron is a journalist based in Los Angeles, and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. His article ‘The Girl From Plainville’ was adapted into the TV series of the same name.

Josie Mitchell is a senior editor at Granta.

If you haven’t read Sophocles in a while, it’s worth reminding yourself that his Oedipus didn’t suffer from an Oedipus complex. Oedipus Rex is about the limits of human knowledge. At every stage in the play’s backstory, Oedipus and his parents attempted to avoid the fates predicted for them. Having been told his son would kill him, Laius ordered Jocasta to kill the infant. She gave the job to a servant, who left the boy on top of a mountain with his feet bound to die of exposure. A shepherd rescued him and delivered him to the childless king of Thebes, who raised him as his own. When the oracle of Delphi told the grown Oedipus that he would kill his father and sleep with his mother, he resolved never to go home. Encountering Laius on the road, Oedipus killed him without knowing who he was. And when he came to Thebes and married Jocasta, he again didn’t know what he was doing. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud admitted that Sophocles’ play wasn’t about the primal urges of his Oedipus complex, i.e., that ‘It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.’ Sophocles had made a ‘misconceived secondary revision of the material, which has sought to exploit it for theological purposes’. In other words, Freud thought Sophocles had repressed the myth’s true meaning.

As an undergraduate Classics major in the late 1990s I stood up and made something like this point at a talk by a graduate student who was presenting a Freudian reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. I was twenty years old and not quite aware that it wasn’t very polite for an undergraduate to argue against the premises of a paper by a recent PhD giving a job talk. I’d only been exposed to Freud two years earlier in the form of the Dora case study in a freshman comp class. The mounting critiques of that text, from feminists and others, weren’t part of the syllabus; we were taught to read it more like a detective story. But I knew my Sophocles well enough to predict the reactions of my professors in the room. They were pretty conventional classical philologists and historians. They spent most of their time teaching teenagers the difficult process of reading dead languages and elucidating allusions to other ancient writings that might have been obvious to their original readers. They weren’t interested in secret meanings or messages emerging from the unconscious. They’d been educated in the decades when Freud was ascendant within the academy and they’d taken their place in precincts that were relatively untouched by his influence. In the Freud Wars then transpiring in journals I hadn’t yet started reading, there was no doubt which side they were on.

The first temptation for a reader of Frederick Crews’s late work is to suspect that Crews is acting on an Oedipus complex of his own. As Crews admits of Freud’s popularity in the mid-twentieth century: ‘Although the peers who knew his writings perceived the flaws in his system, intellectuals in later years were spellbound by his self-portrayal as a lone explorer possessing courageous perseverance, deductive brilliance, tragic insight, and healing power. Much can still be learned from that episode of mass infatuation, in which I myself participated fifty years ago.’ In 1966, Crews published The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes, and he continued to advocate the use of Freudian ideas in literary criticism in the 1970s even as he came to doubt the efficacy of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic technique. The full break came with his 1980 Commentary essay ‘Analysis Terminable’ in which he argued that psychoanalysis was at best a set of ‘welcome placebos’ based on theories ‘unsubstantiated by clinical success’ and ‘positively erroneous in isolating curative factors’. Crews persisted throughout, publishing The Memory Wars in 1995 and many broadsides in the New York Review of Books, which tend to stand out for the way Crews the polemicist gives no ground to his opponent-subjects.

Crews’s 2017 diatribe Freud: The Making of an Illusion was the capstone to that effort, marshalling evidence from previously unexamined material and so-called Sleeping Beauty archives (i.e., portions of the Freud literature that were unavailable to scholars until a recent expiration date), especially the full correspondence with his future wife Martha Bernays during their long engagement. Yet as Crews admits, his book is a cannon blast in a war that has largely been won by his side: by the late 1990s Freud and psychoanalytic research generally was being ignored by mainstream academic psychology. Crews states that his book is concerned with one question: ‘How and why did a studious, ambitious, and philosophically reflective young man, trained in rigorous inductivism by distinguished researchers and eager to win their favor, lose perspective on his wild hunches, efface the record of his mistakes, and establish an international cult of personality?’

Crews, who died last year at the age of ninety-one, delivers only part of the answer. He establishes Freud as a young man in the mold of Julien Sorel, eager to transcend his humble, even shameful origins and become famous and rich, historically so. Two of his heroes were Hannibal, the Carthaginian (read: Semitic) general who challenged Rome, and Napoleon. But in pursuing medical training – instead of becoming a politician or a poet – Freud discovered that he was also Charles Bovary, an incompetent physician with no surgical abilities and little taste for clinical practice. And so on the way to conquering the world, it was necessary to promulgate ‘dogma’ of sexuality, ‘the key that unlocks everything’, as science. Why a cult of personality would be desirable and necessary to achieve these ends is clear, but Crews’s book stops short of telling the full story of how that cult was formed, though we get a picture of some of its mechanics along the way from his accounts of the interventions in the construction of Freud’s posthumous reputation by his daughter Anna Freud and disciples like his biographer Ernest Jones. In Crews’s portrait Freud comes to resemble one of his kookiest latter-day enemies: L. Ron Hubbard.

It is perhaps less interesting in light of Freud’s diminished status in all fields – scientific, therapeutic, literary, and philosophical – to read Crews’s book as another shot in the Freud Wars than as a specimen of biography as all-out attack. The drama of this very long book – 666 pages of text and another 80 of notes – unfolds as a cat-and-mouse game between its subject and author. The reader starts to wonder whether the Freud Crews constructs – a drug addict, a serial betrayer of his mentors and friends, a confidence man, and an adulterer – ever thought he would get away with it, where getting away with it meant nothing short of immortality as a revolutionary healer and sage.

Crews’s account of Freud’s youth focuses on reasons he might have had to feel ashamed. His father Jacob was a bankrupt wool merchant who, by the time Sigismund was a teenager, depended on charity from relatives near and far to support the family. In 1865, his uncle Josef Freud was imprisoned for possessing counterfeit rubles, a scandal reported in the papers. Jacob admitted to his son that he’d endured anti-Semitic bullying as a boy in Moravia, and this led to Freud’s fantasy of becoming a Hannibal who’d ‘take vengeance on the Romans’. Later, Freud would speculate that he’d been haunted by the death of his nearest sibling, a brother named Julius, because he’d harbored ill will toward the usurper of his mother Amalia’s affections. Amalia believed in the words of a fortune teller that Sigismund was destined for a brilliant career. He was a prize-winning high school student, excelling in Greek, Latin, and history. Growing up in Vienna, he also came to think of his parents, whose origins were to the east in Galicia and Ukraine, as his social lessers. He ‘Germanized’ himself, altering the spelling of his name to the more Norse-sounding Sigmund. Crews says that Freud is never known to have missed an opportunity because of anti-Semitism, but that its ambient presence in Vienna aroused in him ‘a permanent rage against Christian smugness’. (Of course, it was the arrival of the German Army in Vienna in 1938 that drove Freud finally from the city, and his four sisters died in the Nazi death camps, but this is outside the scope of Crews’s focus.)

Crews sees Freud’s pursuit of medical training as a cynical form of careerism. What’s remarkable is the way his Freud keeps faith that he’ll be able to wed a lucrative medical career to his world-historical aspirations. Are there any plastic surgeons or anesthesiologists who think this way today? The true interests of Freud’s youth, in Crews’s account, were literary (he had aspirations to be a novelist or a poet) and philosophical (the hero of his teens was the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach). ‘By 1841,’ Crews writes, ‘Feuerbach had already developed the thesis Freud would elaborate in The Future of an Illusion (1927): that the God posited by Jewish and Christian theology is nothing other than a projection of human needs and fears.’ With an aversion to the sight of blood and the practice of vivisecting animals, he took a post at the Institute of Comparative Anatomy, where the work consisted of examining specimens of dead animal tissues under a microscope. The subject of his first paper was the recognizability of testes in eels. He earned his M.D. without treating a patient and completed his residency in the university hospital’s neurology ward, where syphilis was ‘the most intently investigated and controversial of diseases’ because its induction of both paralysis and insanity confused the division between neurology and psychiatry.

Freud compiled what Crews calls ‘a worthy record.’ His first bid for fame (such as it was) and fortune was in the development of an improved and commercially viable technique for dying tissue samples with gold chloride: ‘a near miss,’ says Crews, ‘both its originality and its value have been overstated by most commentators’. He turned his attention to another possible breakthrough innovation: cocaine. Crews sees the moment of Freud’s discovery of the drug as a replay of the moment in Goethe’s Faust (which Freud loved) when on Walpurgisnacht – the holiday of ‘witchcraft and trafficking with the devil’ that lands on April 30, the same date Freud took his first dose of one twentieth of a gram in a liquid solution, prepared from a powder secured by mail from the drug manufacturer Merck – Faust makes a deal with Mephistopheles and drinks his elixir. By July 1 Freud had published his paper ‘On Coca’, mostly based on the available literature, and endorsed it as a treatment for ‘indigestion, depression, heart problems, and “all the diseases that involve a degeneration of the tissues”’, based on his observations of ‘others, mostly my own age’. Among his sources was the Italian anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza who’d researched coca leaves in South America. Crews quotes a particularly colorful passage of Mantegazza’s:

I sneered at the poor mortals condemned to live in this valley of tears while I, carried on the wings of two leaves of coca, went flying through the spaces of 77,438 worlds, each more splendid than the one before.

An hour later I was sufficiently calm to write these words in a steady hand: ‘God is unjust because he has made man incapable of sustaining the effects of coca all life long. I would rather have a life span of ten years with coca than one of 1000000 . . . (and here I had inserted a line of zeros) centuries without coca.

Jay McInerney, take note. Crews remarks: ‘What we can be sure of is that Freud, in offering a blanket endorsement of Mantegazza on coca, was manifesting his own surrender to the charms of cocaine.’ This sort of remark becomes a refrain in Crews’s book: ‘If Freud needed cocaine in order to reach a “normal” state, one in which he felt capable of putting forward his ideas, it follows that his writings were typically influenced by cocaine. Those writings, moreover, included the texts containing his first articulation of psychoanalytic theory.’

Crews’s arguments about Freud and cocaine represent in miniature his arguments about Freud the man as a whole: about his domineering relationship to his wife; about his alleged infidelity with his sister-in-law; about his alternately ingratiating and undermining relations with his mentors and friends. These are all the sorts of behaviors we more or less tolerate and even expect in biographies of writers. These flaws become unacceptable in the life of a doctor, therapist, lawgiver, and prophet. The effect is amplified when the life in question has been subjected to a systematic process of hagiography led by his daughters and friends, involving the suppression of documents, to present an image of purity and rationality at odds with reality. And so when it comes to cocaine, his own usage, enthusiasm, and even paid shilling for a drug that was still in its infancy is perhaps only to be regarded as a regrettable reflection of his times. The drug was still used as an ingredient in soft drinks and a popular wine endorsed by the pope and President McKinley; the prevalence of therapeutic hypnosis, Freud’s belief in the hydraulic neuron theory, and his friend Wilhelm Fliess’s theory of nasal reactive neurosis and use of surgery on the nose to relieve it are marks that the last decades of the nineteenth century were in some ways closer to the Dark Ages than they are to our own. Most damning, though, is the way Freud for years encouraged and enabled the use of cocaine as a cure for morphine addiction by, among others, his friend Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, which contributed to his premature death. About this he expressed some remorse: ‘I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885,’ Freud would write in The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me. The misuse of that drug hastened the death of a dear friend of mine.’

Infantile sexuality, seduction theory, free association, and ultimately the Oedipus complex would be the ingredients of the lucrative and fame-delivering cure-all Freud was seeking, and Crews musters the evidence at great length that Freud deviated from his own rules of analysis, imposed his ideas on his patients (resistance indicated positive proof of a sound diagnosis), and was indifferent to actually healing them. ‘In developing a new science’, Freud wrote to one of his American disciples, ‘one has to make its theories vague’. Crews locates Freud’s appeal for professors of the humanities in his creation of an ambiguous science: it satisfied their desire to be more scientific while remaining at heart practitioners of interpretation. Crews also identifies the literary template of Freud’s case studies: the detective story. That Freud was an avid reader of detective novels was attested by one of his servants who reported that he read them every night, and by Sergei Pankejeff, the patient called Wolf Man in a famous case study:

Once when I happened to speak of Conan Doyle and his creation, Sherlock Holmes, I had thought that Freud would have no use for this type of light reading matter, and was surprised to find that this was not at all the case and that Freud had read this author attentively.

What distinguishes the detective story as a genre is that it narrates not primarily the crime (or in the case of Freud’s subjects, the illness and its symptoms) but the detective’s (or doctor’s) process of investigation, culminating in the epiphanic moment of discovery. Freud as much as admitted this:

It still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like novellas and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. The fact is that local diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria, whereas a detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psychological formulas to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of hysteria.

The ‘mental processes’, ‘formulas’, and ‘insight’ are crucially the doctor/author/hero’s own. It was this method that also set the table for The Interpretation of Dreams: It’s in his remarks on that book that Crews strikes the only note of praise in Freud: The Making of an Illusion:

Freud would truly be breaking new ground in the Interpretation, not as a scientist but as a literary artist. Coolly attaching his cultural allusiveness to the triviality and occasional sordidness of dream imagery, he would defy the existing genres with a boldness that bears comparison to James Joyce in his astounding Ulysses of 1922. Like that work, the Interpretation would constitute a studied insult to the graybeards, prudes, and hypocrites who had tried in vain to keep the author down. In its blend of lawgiving, whimsy, digressiveness, self-disclosure, and mockery of the high and mighty, the shaggy treatise would be Freud’s testament of all around emancipation.

It’s difficult to tell whether Crews is being ironic in comparing Freud’s work to Joyce’s masterpiece of twenty-five years hence, but it’s a sign from Crews that no matter how effective he and others are in their attempts to discredit and remove Freud from the field of psychotherapy and literary criticism, he’ll never be entirely discarded as a writer. The book also marks the point where the influence of Nietzsche first appears in Freud, with the strain of dark romanticism that attracted Crews to both writers in his youth so strongly that it would occasion a four-decade retreat.

Whatever Freud’s status now in the academy, there is another field, outside of Crews’s purview, where Freud’s influence will always be felt because his inheritors will continue to use his methods as long as they seem to pay off. Here his true heir – not his daughter Anna, or Jung, or any psychoanalyst – was his nephew Edward Bernays, who moved from Vienna to New York as a boy in the 1890s, immersed himself in his uncle’s writings, and became the father of modern advertising.

Christian Lorentzen writes for the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine and Bookforum.

Image © The New York Public Library

In this episode of the Granta podcast, editor Thomas Meaney speaks with Christopher Bollas, one of the most widely read and influential psychoanalytic writers working today. A wide-ranging interview about his life and work appears in Granta 174: Therapy.

In this further conversation, Bollas reflects on the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, the significance of daydreams, whether analysis can speak to the great crises of our time, and (betraying his California upbringing) its unexpected affinities.

‘I used to be a surfer. You have to be really patient waiting for the right waves to come along. You may be out there for hours before anything happens. And then it comes and it’s wonderful. In sessions, you may wait for days or weeks and there’s nothing of any meaning so far as you know taking place. Both you and the patient learn to be patient.’

Listen and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Photograph by Nyo Jinyong Lian.

For our new Interviews series, we’re asking contributors to dissect the stories they’ve contributed to our pages. Here, we speak to Anne Serre about ‘Madame Gandi’, which appears in our Winter issue, no 174.

Your story ‘Madame Gandi’ is part of a collection where each story begins with the opening sentence of a book by another writer. In this case, it comes from William Styron’s Darkness Visible. Could you tell us about this project, and what drew you to this opening line in particular?

A few years ago, feeling a bit lost between two books, searching for the starting point of a new one and unable to find it, I decided to write down the first sentences of every book in my library – nearly three thousand. Then I spent a considerable amount of time going through this file and reading these sentences. Suddenly, it occurred to me that some of them could open up a story of my own, introduce me to my world. That’s how I isolated about fifty of them, including the opening of Darkness Visible, and was able to write my stories.

The narrator recounts attending a therapy session with Madame Gandi. What interested you about the dynamic between a patient and their therapist, and were you drawing at all on your own experiences with therapy?

I only used one specific detail from my own experience: the narrator’s difficulty in entering his psychoanalyst’s building, in other words, in “finding the front door”, exactly like in my experience with a new book . . . Otherwise, I think what I wanted to show is this somewhat daunting enigma that the analyst represents for the patient during the first meeting. Because, in this first meeting, the patient will have to open up, and all his senses are then on high alert to try to assess whether this stranger can truly hear who he is.

The narrator discovers that Madame Gandi is actually his cousin, working under an alias. What drew you to this transgressive conceit?

Does he discover it or does he believe it? In my experience with psychoanalysis, one of the things I greatly appreciated was that it was a vast space where my imagination could unfold, frolic, and move forward with complete freedom. I think my narrator imagines that Madame Gandi is his cousin, and this is because this fantasy will be very useful to him in being able to think more deeply.

Granta recently published another of your stories, ‘Ending it in Turn’, which also recounts a charged encounter between two people after a long time apart. What role do estrangement and reconnection play in your work?

This is an observation that greatly interests me. I have a tendency to stage a reconnection . . . So, I will proceed by association, as in a psychoanalytic session, and here is what comes to mind: my mother died when I was twelve years old, and in my Notebooks, which I have just published in France, I noted somewhere that even fifty years later, when I hear the sound of an email arriving on my computer, especially at night, I sometimes furtively hope that it is an email from my mother . . . It is possible that this question of disappearance and reunion is at the center of my work, but I leave it to the literary critics to decide.

The ‘mysterious and obliging’ Madame Gandi cuts an oblique figure. Beyond her decision to ‘transform people she knew into strangers’, it’s unclear what her motivations are, or what game she is playing. What are we to make of her motivation? And how does their relationship to one another reflect or disrupt the contract between a therapist and their patient?

Isn’t a psychoanalyst always mysterious to their patient? We know little or nothing about our psychoanalyst. That’s part of the treatment. In this short story, we know nothing objective about Madame Gandi. It’s the patient who thinks she wants to “transform the familiar into strangers”, who imagines, who interprets, who draws conclusions, and thus does his psychological work. And this Madame Gandi seems to me to be a very good psychoanalyst since she allows him to imagine a great deal.

Anne Serre is the author of nineteen works of fiction, including The Governesses and A Leopard-Skin Hat. Her latest book, Vertu et Rosalinde, will be published in English in 2026.

Brodie Crellin is an editor at Granta and the author of the novel A Sense of Occasion forthcoming from Jonathan Cape.

She eventually wrote this about herself: I do not deserve nature. I want to have sex in the daylight. She would not include in her dating profile where she was raised, on the West Coast with drought-appropriate faucets and toilets, and chickens. (Her mother had kept them around for company, and for food.) She understood the potential consequences of presenting her needs completely yet concisely online. The advice, overwhelming, that she had scrolled through recommended doing the exact opposite. Females advised other females to save themselves from immediate or eventual scrutiny by hiding their true self.

Before going to all the trouble of building an online profile, which was enormously time-consuming (she had a job and an infant to care for, alone, in Los Angeles), she first ran the idea of seeking daytime sex by other mothers online who called her a slut, which she didn’t fight, though she recognized that perhaps she would be better off looking for guidance elsewhere. She then took the sex-nature conundrum – as she came to see the proposition – to her boss, a wealthy art collector, who was also kind. She explained to her boss, an actual widow herself (not a mother raising a child alone like she was), over fistfuls of fresh bread, that she had found this specific platform for weirdos on recommendation from the other mothers who had publicly slammed her for being a new mom with sick slut desires, but who had privately called her their hero for putting herself out there. Her boss wanted in, too.

As they waited for the housepainters to arrive, she and her boss took out a legal pad and began compiling their notable attributes. From there, they imputed the data onto the dating app open on their computers. Her boss said that she just wanted someone to prepare her a perfect omelet after fucking, and she would provide all the ingredients to make this happen. For her profile, she had inched open a bit more – there was her fear of nature, as she wrote, her mother (an abyss), her preference for waffles over pancakes, and of course her want of sex with either gender (both have feminine and masculine auras) between when work ended in the late afternoon, and before picking her daughter up from daycare. MartyArty immediately responded, ‘How old?’

The doorbell rang. Her dinging phone was ricocheting on her lap. She looked to find a flurry of texts that had come in from her mother, who wrote saying that she was at the airport in Los Angeles to see her daughter. Heavy storms were on their way. Her mother loved a good storm. Everything was happening at once. The house-painters had arrived, as her boss’s small dogs barked in defense of their property. She removed the breadcrumbs from the table with her hands, and thought about how she used to be a pretty good artist. Now, she made bad mom art to care for herself. The red chip bullshit stuff. (She had a dozen videos starring her daughter using plastic dinosaurs positioned inside of their refrigerator make-believing ‘existence.’) On her own time, she labored to convince herself that the mundane, the inappropriately, excessively lackluster – soiled diapers, pumping while Googling trash pick-up schedules – was enough to feel awake. Then her aching breasts were right there to remind her of her need for nature. She had read articles on motherhood that suggested being horny, stimulating yourself, helps with the milk flow. Though the experts didn’t express themselves in those exact words. What they recommended was to scroll through images of your infant as you pumped to get the liquids flowing.

She drove to the Los Angeles International Airport to pick up her mother, as she had no other choice. ‘Don’t move to Orem. Utah’s really a desert. Remember the dead squirrel?’ her mother said, fresh off her flight from Portland, Oregon, hopping into her daughter’s Honda Fit. She touched her mother’s knee: bare, solid, beautifully familiar. Her mother refused to wear anything other than summer clothes when visiting her daughter in California. The two of them – mother and daughter – tucked inside the Fit like sticks of gum in the humid California weather, then sped away.

A few weeks before, after several days of heavy rainfall, before her mother’s visit to experience more heavy rainfall, before posting her dating profile, and before the sun had come out momentarily though not long enough to dry the land – she had found a dead, very plump, and very well-endowed squirrel. Its body was on the driveway belonging to the Modernist mansion for sale next door to her duplex . She was charmed by the totem. The squirrel, despite no longer living, had an unmistakable, masterful erection, striking like the Gothic spires adorning Paris. With a nearby palm frond that had fallen, she scooped up the squirrel and shuttled him to the top of the hill in Silver Lake, where she deposited him inside of a smooth grave that she had carved from the mud beneath an impromptu shrine assembled from a half-eaten bag of Doritos, and an empty can of Pure La Croix. His resting place. Not far from where she and her daughter slept. Right at the hem of the sky.

Fast-forward, and now her mother was in her car, visiting without having been invited. Her mother was the reason she hadn’t left Los Angeles to join her husband in rural Utah, where he had taken a new position autonomously, without a family discussion. Her mother was the reason she had not left her well-paying job managing a wealthy woman’s day-to-day affairs, as well as her art collection. Her mother was the reason she had not given up their cute one-bedroom ‘treehouse’ to join her husband, where he had taken a coveted position with an updated job title in an educational institution (Student Operations Specialist Coordinator), apparently a dinosaur role (that even the name change would not be able to reverse), that was increasingly near-impossible to come by. He had signed a one-year lease on a rental without consulting her. He was there, and now, eagerly, impatiently, waiting for her and their six-month-old daughter to join him in Utah to begin their future. Her mother had said to her daughter that to leave her role with the wealthy art collector, who provided quality kickbacks, who was notorious for her unexpected kindness – like passing her chilled bottles of real champagne from the country of France – to leave her community to move to a place where she had none, amounted to self-harm. Her boss was rich and nice, which confused people who expected her boss to be entitled and evil. Her mother made it a habit to remind her of their maternal line. The women in their family did not leave well-paying positions, reliable domiciles, kickbacks of any kind, to follow men. Men were not solutions. Men were like piping, her mother said, verbally slapping her: things passed through them up until a point. The fix could be jeopardizing and costly. You could lose everything. Those women refused to relinquish their independence. Subsequently, all female children were taught the ways of women. They were provided with a cassette player of their own, and tapes of female rock bands such as Heart. They were provided tutorials on how to masturbate, and taught how to read. This was the way to ensure a female’s longevity. ‘While we don’t burn our witches anymore, we do everything but,’ her mother said, clutching onto her seatbelt for dear life, noting the black SUV merging onto the highway didn’t fit in its lane nearly pummeled them.

‘Those giant vehicles are weapons,’ her mother said.

Her mother asked about the dating app, which was open on her cellphone on the car’s dashboard, so that she could reply to MartyArty at some point, maybe. They were stuck in traffic.

‘Here’s the thing,’ she said to her mother – she was out of time. ‘Days pass carelessly.’

As it was, she had a large, alarming bump next to her bellybutton. It could be a hernia. Maybe it was cancer. Her hair was falling out by the handful. Her belly sagged like a Baggu bag. And her child – all of six months – was no longer being stored there. Day care meant sick baby. And sick baby meant she had to skip work to care for sick baby, and entertain sick baby with bad mom art, like playing kangaroo or making shadow videos or asking the internet, ‘what do we really know about the microwave?’ Her wealthy employer was growing impatient with empathy. The thing was, she fiddled with her online profile not only to get off during the hours she was available (limited), but also to better understand why she’d ended up in her current position – raising a child alone as her mother had done. Her online profile seeking daytime sex, as far as she saw it, had the potential to be truer to herself than she could be to herself in real life under real life pressures, because the web was infinite and her car and her one-bedroom duplex – which was to say, her reality – were not.

‘Is she thriving?’ her mother insisted on knowing about her granddaughter.

‘Yeah, she likes school,’ she said to her mother about her daughter’s day care. Meanwhile, she paid attention to the car in front of her while simultaneously rejecting a deep well of feeling caused by missing her daughter so enormously, which was all encompassing and mostly debilitating. Every morning, she dropped her daughter off at day care and then drove to her boss’ house near the reservoir. (Her boss collected art but did not consider herself to be an art collector.) Her work responsibilities were wide-ranging. She did things such as checking in on international shipments, liaising with galler-ists, and tracking smaller orders, like homemade, patchy linen napkins procured from Etsy. Sometimes, she had one, even two hours between getting home from work and assembling her daughter’s dinner, before picking her up from day care, where the kid made no effort to conceal her preference to stay. An evaporating bracket of time for her to have sex. Meanwhile, her husband – father of their baby – waited for them to arrive in rural Utah.

There was an unpure silence between mother and daughter. Her mother changed the radio station from news to K-EARTH’s classic hits. Her mother could be hurtfully aloof. She would open her heart just enough so that you might spot softness, but the effort to go inside would require a crowbar. Her mother offered to drop her off back at work. Her mother would take the Fit, try not to lose control on the Los Angeles streets, to then pick up her granddaughter and take her to play at the recreation center playground in Silver Lake. Her mother volunteered to wash the car that was nasty with grit. Her mother embraced a good car wash. As a longtime coupon-clipper, she loved a deal. Plus, the car wash architecture and culture in Los Angeles could not be matched.

Back at work, her boss had left two hefty bags of dry cleaning in the middle of the kitchen floor next to the dog bowls, which needed to be rinsed and put away. In the parking lot outside of the dry cleaners, she looked at the weather in Orem, Utah – scorching. She looked at the real estate and wished she hadn’t.

She restarted her phone, hoping to start again. She put a baby wipe on her lap and watched the water leave a wet mark on her crotch. Her phone, refreshed, was back on. She looked to it for instructions. The dry cleaner texted to say that the order was ready for pickup. In addition to art-managing, she completed these day-to-day tasks, too, running errands for her wealthy boss. But often she sat in overheating parking lots, sweating and daydreaming about cannonballs. She excused herself of this mental meandering, reasoning millions of people in corporate positions wasted time.

A mosquito had left a mark on her fleshy arm. They relished her flesh. Nobody thinks that Los Angeles has mosquitos. People go on and on about it being a desert, but mosquitos worship the city. She searched ‘help me,’ and it seemed she had broken Google. She adjusted her inquiry: ‘How to disrupt patterns and lifecycles?’ ‘How to offset one’s own predictability?’

‘Is anyone else out there totally tired of themselves?’

Google was dead. Until it wasn’t: ‘Work on your inner peace,’ was one mom’s advice online, when she decided to refine her search: ‘How to raise a child alone when your mother raised you alone and you don’t wish to turn out exactly the same and yet it looks like you are identical.’

She came home from work to find her daughter and her mother playing with blocks on the floor. Her daughter didn’t understand her grandmother. Sure, she was a baby, but even babies could identify what was a complicated matter. Her mother had made herself a pomegranate-lime gin fizz cocktail in a mason jar, and when she caught her daughter’s glare, she said people in Los Angeles start early. ‘Have you seen the nannies at the coffee shop? Now that’s a study,’ recommended her mother. Her mother’s jar of gin was frosty. Her infant’s little fingers had left marks on it. Her mother asked about her day and took her smartphone away. Her mother produced an old flip phone, presenting it to her like a puppy.

‘Portland is analog,’ her mother said.

The next day, she left early for work with her working flip phone. Her daughter was still sleeping in her crib in the bedroom. Her mother was asleep on the couch, covered in layers of sweatshirts, sprinkled with plastic dinosaurs.

‘Do I not pay you enough?’ Her boss was in her workout gear, eyeing the flip phone, which dangled limply in her hand. She explained to her boss that her mother had given it to her to slow down. Her mother had thoughts about the internet, speed, and female power. Her mother basically believed that smartphones were the devil, and not the desirable one that knows good booze, fine ass, and reads literature at parties.

She shared several more of her mother’s theories about pleasure with her boss until her boss’ eyes ran out of juice. She then returned to focusing on the swatches of wallpaper. She told her boss she had to pump because she did. Her boss then went off to her aerobics trainer, which luckily was in another part of town, which meant she could have a second breakfast with gobs of nut butters without being monitored. She found herself starving after first breakfast. Plus, she could read all the glossy magazines – like, touch them, press the pages in her hands like another hand. She could be in the presence of the beautiful and eat a lot again. When her boss came back from her workout, she carried with her a refurbished iPhone 13, already activated. Her boss had added her to the family plan.

‘Traitor,’ her mother said later that night of her daughter’s new, refurbished phone when everyone was cozily assembled in the one-bedroom duplex. Why her mother couldn’t just focus on being a grandmother should have been the theme. There they were, the three of them an outline of a triangle – baby-daughter, daughter-mother, daughter-mother-grandmother – around the table, eating turkey meatballs with spaghetti dripping with red sauce. A painting, she thought. Not even a bad one.

The next day was the same: the baby was asleep in her crib, her mother was passed out on the couch. She went to work. Her boss left to work out. She ate another round of breakfast – water-based oatmeal with raisins, almond, peanut, cashew, and sunflower butters – and imagined lunchtime. During lunch breaks, she would go to her all-time favorite room in her boss’ expansive domicile: the sea green bathroom with a view of the reservoir. There, on the third floor next to the library, she studied her packed lunch – a yellow cheese on yellow cheese sandwich, on sourdough bread – and sought inner peace. She has never once wondered why the wealthy suggest that others, like the poor, look on the bright side.

In front of her yellow-layered cheese sandwich, moist in a plastic baggy, she ate fudgy chocolate and revised her view on Mary Cassatt’s mothers. With chocolate from France that she had borrowed from her boss’ pantry, which she vowed that she would replace, cocooned safely in her mouth, she wondered if the painter’s women, alone, save for their children, dressed in their bonnets and pastel hues, did what they did in her paintings – knit, sew, stared blanky to another time and place – so as to avoid murdering their children. Mary’s women had restraint. In the bathroom, she worked to release her breasts from their amassed liquid. She wondered where the abundance of milk came from, and whether climate change was to blame for making everything go moldy faster. Her tits were ginormous. Dinosaurs were extinct and she could only partially remember why.

Her refurbished iPhone sat propped against a mandarin-lilac-scented candle that needed replacing – part of her job – on top of the toilet. She devoured insanely decadent chocolates that she would never be able to replace and scrolled through images of her daughter sleeping. She consumed photographs of her child over the past six months, a ritual to compel her breasts to give in and ‘let down.’ At any moment, the nice new phone might fall in the toilet bowl and she would be stuck searching for a bag of rice to drop it into. She would have to go to Trader Joe’s. She would be forced to seek out answers: ‘How to tell your boss the truth about the contents of their pantry evaporating when they are beginning to mistrust you?’ Inner peace would be much harder to locate once unemployed. Unemployed, and worse off, she would really have no choice but to move to Orem to join her husband.

Her tits and head swelled and ached like they had finally found each other across a crowded room. Her breasts needed to get on antidepressants. Her boss knew a guy that knew a guy that could take care of that.

Then – at long last, a notification from a potential sex match. At once, feeling utterly disgusting, like a very bad mom looking for daytime sex while her child was in day care, the milk came pouring out like art. She capped the little plastic tubs now filled with ‘liquid gold,’ a phrase someone had shared with her when she had mistakenly called it ‘boob juice.’

It was revealed that her mother had edited her profile. Her mother had limited the men who could contact her daughter to a one-mile radius, which her mother fully understood significantly lowered her chances for daytime sex in Los Angeles. People were scheduled. The whole idea was to cast a wide net, to have options, to make things happen with little-to-no effort. The whole sleep-deprived mind process was about tripling her chances at finding a match.

While her boss was working out with her personal trainer, she took her mother back to the airport and told her to fly back to Oregon. She told her that she would mail her belongings.

‘You fucking love the post,’ she said to her mother, dropping her at the LAX curb.

‘I hope you find the sex you’re looking for,’ her mother said, and meant it.

Parking enforcement circled her Fit. Her mother got out. They waved at each other like in a romantic comedy. A cop rapped on her window, but she was already moving – the wheels were in motion. She nodded and hit the gas. Her phone buzzed. It was her mother. ‘Be careful of mom slogans online,’ her voice projected through the car’s speakers. Having been left to care for two children, her mother had a thing about abandonment and anonymity, which was to say, about being disappeared. If her mother had had the chance to go to college, she would have championed the alchemist Mary Anne Atwood, who in the 1800s wrote on hermeticism at her father’s bequest. Her father went on to publish her philosophical treaty anonymously. Then, after the fact, upon reading it, he went on to buy up the remaining copies and burned them. Mary Anne had given away too many secrets about nature.

Before returning to work, she stopped at Echo Park Lake. She needed goji berries from Lassen’s Market to refill the container in her boss’ pantry, which were not yet empty. Looking ahead was good thinking – the kind of thinking her mother had hoped might save her daughter. Joggers panted around the lake. The Canadian Geese – which had multiplied and claimed the park as their own – quickly ran after them. She bought a cone full of chopped mango and lime from a vendor. She sat on the hood of her car in the sun, squeezing the lime juice over her fruit, and snapped a selfie. Not a succession of selfies – because fuck that shit, what happened to art? – but one imperfect photo of herself. She uploaded it to her profile. Everything in the photo looked in order. Lately, she was experiencing incontinence. That, or she would be moving along, getting through her day, only to look down and notice a boob hanging out like a best girlfriend, or her fly unzipped and wide like a whale’s mouth.

Finally, her mother was on a plane back to Portland, and she was able to retrieve past messages on her dating account, before her mother had changed it. She decided on a man in his late twenties from Duluth, whose daytime schedule aligned with hers. An engineer, who worked at Disney in the animation department. He, too, had a small child and was desperate for sex. His wife had been afraid of him ever since their baby was born. He was hoping a promising connection might relieve him from his other attachments, like changing bike tires. He was doing his finest to adjust to the shifts within the domestic sphere – children were prisms, feelings of parental loneliness could be sharp – and to resist his need to hoard his favorite sneakers that would no doubt be discontinued.

After having sex, they looked at the ceiling in her bedroom. The overwhelming sun bounced off the white walls. Her baby’s crib was next to them, and it was full of unfolded, clean laundry. The engineer had on one of those handy but clunky watches that calculated his movements. She let him check his progress because he was itching to do so. She let him trace her stretchmarks. He’d been curious about having sex with a mother of a six-month-old since his wife never let him touch her after their child was born. She and the engineer had sex again. They talked about having ear wax – so much more of it than when they were kids. They worried about their children. After, she asked him to cry like an animated baby. Like, really wail in the style of one of the cartoons that he made for Disney. Obediently, he made some unconvincing noises. Try harder, she instructed. His wails sounded totally and absolutely wrong and unconvincing.

The Disney engineer from Duluth had not given his all.

‘You need to throw your torso into it, like rushing toward a need that cannot be met,’ she explained of infants. ‘You should know this.’

Didn’t he have a baby?

It was time for the engineer to leave. She said she was grateful for the hour or so that they were able to share in their schedules. He said she was talking in that condescending way that everyone around him did when they recounted what they were grateful for. She thanked him for the daytime sex, but she needed to get going – her child didn’t spend all day in daycare. Time was a luxury, which she thoroughly understood when she found herself sitting upright, uncomfortably breastfeeding into the wee hours of the morning, when the blackout curtains didn’t stand a chance against the bright California light, and even in the rain, as her toddler repeated ‘DADA’ mid-suck-bite as he waited for them to join him in Utah.

That night, after cleaning up and putting her baby to bed in their single bedroom, she hid out in the bathroom. Her mother called. It was raining in Portland. She missed wearing shorts, she said over the phone. It was her mother’s habit to check in when it was rainy in Portland, which was to say that she called often. The two of them made up. They became especially warm when returning to the subject of the dismantling body as it aged. About birth: giving it, receiving it. About pleasure. About feeling like yourself again, and how online new mothers talk about getting ‘it back,’ but what did that even mean when calculating time passing? How could that mean anything other than to stick your head in an oven?

She asked her mother about her boyfriend. Her mother had a durable man in Portland who lived on her same block. She appreciated hearing about this man that was kind to her mother. Sex, it seemed to her mother, held more significance later in life, when all should be said and done. But everything was just beginning, for her and for her daughter, too. They reasoned that perhaps this was the case, because over time, women became closer to their truer selves. To knowing what did please them. On the toilet, in peace, she earnestly prayed that her daughter would sleep through the night.

When her daughter was first born, she was like a goldfish. That was how her mouth, and the hospital room felt. ‘Everything submerged in atmosphere,’ she had told the nurses who were with her in the hospital that day. Babies’ eyes liked to stay tightly closed, like a clam refusing to open. Her daughter was born nearly two months early. To reach her, to get her to open her delicate mouth, she’d had to kiss her lips. Kiss after kiss. Sure enough, like a music box, her baby sprung to life.

On the toilet, talking to her mother, her baby safe and asleep in her crib, the neighbor’s sensor lights flooded through the slim rectangular window. These kept her awake at night as she tried to dream on her mattress in the living room. Lit-up like an identified convict-mom, she eyed the mold developing in the shower. There was an incoming call from her husband in Utah. She placed her mother on hold to take it.

‘You ready to move?’ her husband asked. No. She was not ready. Not even a hint of momentum. Even the sated, erect, dead squirrel – though all those promising things – was not ready to be limp on a driveway, of all places, outside of a Modernist mansion. Surely, the animal would have preferred the cushy mattress in the primary bedroom.

‘Duck duck goose,’ she said.

‘You’re my best friend,’ he told her of his loving her for twenty years.

‘Bags are packed,’ she told her husband.

She and their daughter’s plane tickets had been purchased. The movers had been scheduled for later that week and more rain was predicted to arrive.

Crouched on the toilet seat, she wondered if her husband’s place – the one he had rented in Utah, where he sat waiting for them to join him to initiate their future together – had a bathtub. One without mold. She would be sure to purchase a gray plastic whale. The sort that fits nicely inside a porcelain tub to keep the child safe. She could bathe her baby until her skin squeaked.

Nora Lange’s debut novel, Us Fools, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This previously unpublished piece will appear in her upcoming collection Day Care which will be published in April by Two Dollar Radio.

Whether they have little or no interest in perfume, most American Gen X men will have strong and specific memories of Drakkar Noir and Polo Green. If you give them a spritz on their wrist now, as I like to do unannounced at dinner parties, you will see a range of real-time emotions cross their face as they flash through first loves, older brothers, sleepaway camps – their many early attempts at manliness.

The appeal of such colognes was obviously the instant manhood they imparted, but smelling them now I realize they are the olfactory equivalent of a brown wool suit. Drakkar is an aromatic fougère, the longest-standing genre of men’s perfumes, and perhaps the last great fougère. It is herbal, circumspect, brooding. Polo is even darker, an ominous leather forest lurking just behind Ralph Lauren’s bright, preppy aesthetic. A teenage boy wearing either of these is ridiculous – a put on. But we all did it; we didn’t know we were so painfully out of sync.

Thinking about how desperately we were trying to jump forward in time made me realize that I had unwittingly caught up to the colognes of my youth. What was wrong could be made right, and doubly so: for Gen Xers, Drakkar and Polo are now both totally nostalgic and, finally, age-appropriate. I thought it would be funny to go back to wearing them for just this reason, as a kind of bit. To put the 80s and the 2020s in stereo sound.

You can get a bottle of current Drakkar Noir for about $13, so that was easy. The Polo is pricier, around $50 a bottle, so I just got a 2 ml decant. The instant effect is, as described, pure Proust. If you stay with them a little longer, however, you start noticing differences from the smell you remember. It is surprising that a forty-year-old memory can be this specific, but it is: the 2026 Drakkar hovers very close to the 1987 Drakkar, but it feels thinner, more diaphanous. I remember it sharper, eye-wateringly so. I was a child in those days so maybe any cologne would have burned my eyes. I am smelling it through the veil of memory, so I concluded that this veil was diluting the perfume’s impression on me now, but I had the opposite experience with the Polo: the leather smell is far stronger than I remember. Animalic is the word perfume reviewers use. Maybe this adult funk was imperceptible to me as a child, unnamable. Or maybe Polo has just messed up the leather in its reformulations. I am tempted to get in touch with Carlos Benaïm, Polo’s legendary perfumer, and ask, but I imagine he can’t comment, for contractual reasons, or maybe because the slow disfiguration of one’s early-career masterpiece is too painful to acknowledge.

I mentioned all this to my friend Charley Friedman, and he told me he smelled current Polo in an airport and was confused by how much it had changed. Later that day, into evening, Charley sent me text updates as he looked for his old bottle of Polo, first in his own basement, then over at his mom’s. Meanwhile, I started looking online for solutions and found a dupe company called Classic Match that sells $8 knock-offs of Drakkar and Polo that online connoisseurs swear are closer to the original perfumes than what Guy Laroche and Ralph Lauren (both now owned by L’Oreal) are currently putting out.

Charley never did find his bottle, just some very old Jägermeister, but my dupes arrived and, the truth is, they deliver. Rougher, perhaps, than the originals, but closer to my memory of them than the current official versions. The Drakkar burns your eyes, the Polo subtly darkens your soul. The dupe bottles look cheap, though, and like a partial victory. It’s like watching a cover band who actually sound how the original band used to, better than how the old band sounds now: it takes you back for a moment, only to spit you out into the undeniable present.

Dushko Petrovich Córdova is a painter, writer and publisher. His piece Secondhand Smoke appears in our Winter issue, No. 174: Therapy.

Image: Richard Prince, Untitled (four single men with interchangeable backgrounds looking to the right), 1977.

Our Winter issue is now online and will be on newsstands next week!

Inside, you will find a tour de force essay by Sheila Heti, in which the novelist takes a spiritual-existential quest through the underworld of psychedelic drugs. ‘Medicine’, one practitioner reminds her. ‘We don’t say drug.’ With intimacy and casual command, Heti relays the images and revelations that came to her over a summer of ketamine, DMT, and LSD/MDMA treatments. 'In the ten days that followed, before my next appointment, I found it fun, in small and daily ways, to press myself, testingly, against the world, and to feel it, gently, pressing back.’

The California-born psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, who became, over the course of his career, the British Object Relations School’s greatest inheritor, discusses the stories we tell about ourselves in a new interview with Granta editor Thomas Meaney. ‘Most people reveal more truths about themselves through fictive representations than they do by stating the solemn and verifiable truths of their lives. No analyst I know in the United Kingdom would maintain that he or she was trying to get to the ‘truth’ beyond self-fictionalization. That is because to create fiction is to unconsciously tell the truth.’

Also in our pages you will find prose by Elfriede Jelinek, Paul Keegan, Anne Serre, Benjamin Kunkel, Camilla Grudova and Missouri Williams, poems by Robert Hass and Natalie Shapero, and selections from Louise Bourgeois’s psychoanalytic writings, unearthed by her longtime assistant Jerry Gorvoy. Produced between 1951 and 1966, these dream records and process notes capture the struggle to make language record what’s really going on in our heads. ‘When I do not attack,’ she writes on one loose sheet, ‘I do not feel myself alive.’

When I searched my phone for texts I’d sent with ‘lol’ in them, there were thousands. Most of them were just ‘lol’ by itself, or ‘lol ok’, ‘lol no’ or ‘lol hahaha’, and very few of these messages had anything to do with laughter or jokes. ‘For like two years at uni I wrote one shite poem per week lol.’ ‘I’m genuinely so sorry lol I shouldn’t have said anything.’ ‘Lol I was mega lonely hahahaha.’

I realised that I had sent a lot of messages like these while actively crying. A few years ago, crying hard, quite drunk, after a complicated night with my friend A., I sent him a text that said, ‘lmaooo ok I’m on the bus absolutely LOLLING at my bad personality.’ Shortly afterwards I tried to write a story inspired by that moment of absolutely lolling on the bus. ‘The bus was trapped inside the night’s blue walls, the blue walls wet and starless, pressing down upon the roof, pressing the doors in. My love for him felt totally clear and ancient. It felt like the oldest and most sacred thing inside my life . . .’

My story was melodramatic, and the admission that I was ‘absolutely LOLLING at my bad personality’ was insincere and dumb. But what was I trying to communicate by telling A. that I was laughing, while simultaneously writing that my love for him felt clear and ancient in between the wet walls of the blue and starless night? I guess the truth was something more generic, some more basic combination of sadness, embarrassment and longing, more uncomfortable and also more boring than either ‘my love for him felt totally clear and ancient’ or ‘lmaooo ok I’m on the bus absolutely LOLLING at my bad personality’.

Like an exclamation mark, which adds something jovial and upbeat to a statement, ‘lol’ indicates that a sentence should be taken less seriously – but this often feels like a sort of mutually understood but unacknowledged mask. Often ‘lol’ conveys a near-explicit desperation to connect. Both my ‘bad personality’ text and that description of experiencing ancient sacred love on the bus are pretty transparent efforts to express something in a way that encourages empathy from the recipient or reader. The ‘lol’ is a way of asking for something – attention, reassurance, care or even love – while pretending not to ask for anything. Reading through my texts, the tone eventually starts to seem a bit manipulative. ‘Lol I’m literally the most boring woman in the world and you’re so interesting charming funny etc LOL.’ ‘Btw, you don’t have to respond to these texts lol, but you can?’

I started feeling horrified by the thousands of times I had written ‘lol’ in messages to my friends. I googled ‘lol semiotics’ and ‘lol google scholar’, and found that basically every article, essay, Reddit post and even the Google AI overview described ‘lol’ as a tool for social bonding. The AI overview said that ‘lol’ indicates ‘a shared context of interpretation’ and gave some examples of ‘lol’ texts that do so: ‘lol I’m doing homework,’ ‘lol I’m bored,’ ‘lol it’s cold.’ Those texts aren’t supposed to be funny. What they do is imply a mutual understanding of the feeling or experience of something. We both know what it’s like to do homework. We both know how boredom feels. We both know what it means to be cold, out here, wherever we both are or have been.

This is what I mean when I say ‘lol’ sometimes. ‘Lol I love that song too.’ ‘Lol you’re on the train now? Is it busy?’ ‘Lol yes come over!’ This sort of ‘lol’ – less abjectly emotional than when I told my friend I was lolling on the bus about my bad personality – is soft and open, and somehow restrained. I am saying that, for some reason, this is important to me, but I don’t want to burden you or make things heavy. I just want to tell you what it’s like for me and to know what it is like for you.

I thought of the ending of Ben Lerner’s 10:04: ‘I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.’ Maybe the best ‘lol’ texts do something like that: they speak to something which might be complex, or go unspoken for whatever reason, and they acknowledge that context without needing to explain it. They neither deflect nor fully disclose; they don’t need to, because both the sender and the recipient understand it all already. ‘Lol yes of course I know.’

‘I was lolling and looking at you’ is one of the few texts on my phone that describes a moment of actual, interpersonal laughter. I sent it to A. a few months ago, after we’d been at the pub with a big group of mutual acquaintances. One of our mutual acquaintances was saying something strange, and I was looking at A. because I knew what he was thinking – an obvious thought that probably everyone was thinking: what the mutual acquaintance was saying seemed strange, somehow rude, and that the fact of this person saying this strange, rude thing was funny. I was looking at A. because I wanted to make eye contact and see him trying not to laugh, and have him see me doing the same, and for us both to know exactly what the other person was thinking. I wanted to make eye contact with A. specifically because I wanted to feel a special, private understanding – to feel it blatantly, and in public. I’m always wanting to perceive the secret publicly with A. He didn’t look, and so afterwards, once I was home, I texted ‘I was lolling and looking at you,’ which is what all the ‘lol’ texts are doing – looking at you, hoping you look back and we can lol together, but it’s okay if you don’t and if we can’t, it’s totally fine, but lol I’m crying rn hahahaha lol please come over!

Harriet Armstrong’s first novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, was published by Les Fugitives. Her fiction has been published in Forever Magazine, London Magazine, Kismet, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Georgia Review.

This essay is part of Mark Up, a series on Granta where writers share their thoughts on punctuation and grammar.

It would be ungrateful to greet the seemingly new and suddenly ubiquitous if unaccustomed usage of a familiar word with resistance. It would be churlish upon looking such a gift horse in the mouth and finding that indeed the usage dates to the sixteenth century and has since been attested if not widely at least authoritatively in church records of all places then to object to its seepage into the vernacular and, further, into formal prose, not to mention poetry, in reputable publications and at international literary events. Yet I am stricken, my ears pounded and scratched, my eyes repulsed and my vision blurred as if by the blooming of fresh cataracts, at the sight and sound of this gift, which is the word ‘gift’ itself, specifically its use as a transitive verb. ‘To gift’ is no gift to me.

I suspect but cannot prove – because I am no detective or expert in these matters but merely a crank or a buff with some rudimentary training and strong opinions that demand to be registered before the language acquiesces and finally accepts ‘to gift’ like a child on Christmas morning, the wrapping paper in shreds on the rug and the receipt finally tossed in the bin, the point of no return, as it were, of linguistic commerce – that the resurgence of the transitive usage first took off from the coinage of ‘re-gifting’, merely a rumble in the language until the turn of the twenty-first century when it became not only permissible but practical (because, hey, why not?) to take something somebody gave you and give it on to somebody else, under a transparent veil of false pretenses, as if it isn’t the thought that counts because nothing really counts, especially at, say, an office holiday party or the birthday of an unbeloved cousin.

Once the stigma of re-gifting had withered, why not start slinging around ‘gift’ as if it were one of those switch-hitting words, both noun and verb, like drink or wink or stink? I can think of two good reasons. In any context the transitive ‘gift’ or ‘gifted’ is used, a simple ‘give’ or ‘gave’ will do (not to mention other such ready synonyms as bestow, grant, or furnish). And further, to those who may object that ‘give’ is insufficiently denotative of friendly generosity – after all, if I gave you the heebie-jeebies you’d never accuse me of gifting them to you, unless you were being ironic – consider the elegance of the constructions ‘to give as a gift’ or ‘to give the gift of’, which trained Latinists will recognise as the anglophone equivalents of the ‘cognate accusative’.

You might say the Irishman who in the 1980s made radio hits with his band out of reworked hymns – ‘I will sing / sing a new song’ and so forth – was and is a gifted vocalist. And that past passive participial usage of ‘gift’ has surely figured in the permission people have felt granted them to deploy the active indicative forms. It wasn’t always so. Here is Fowler on the matter:

gift (verb). Despite its antiquity (first recorded in the 16c.) and its frequent use, esp. by Scottish writers, since then, it has fallen out of favour among standard speakers in England, and is best avoided. On the other hand, gifted ppl adj. ‘talented’ (a gifted violinist) is standard.

When I noticed an English writer using the transitive ‘gift’ in a prestigious paper, I took the usage up with one of its editors, a Scotswoman whose fastidiousness is notorious, and showed her the entry in Fowler and she joked that it was perhaps a trace race memory that led to her leniency. In Kosovo I was doing a public reading with several other writers, including a Kosovar poet and her Montenegrin-American translator, and the translation of the first poem from Albanian, which struck me as wonderful, like first hearing the verse of a living Balkan Rimbaud, deployed the transitive ‘gift’, and I asked after the reading if it was a verb more specific than ‘to give’, and I was told indeed it was, so with this last objection I surrender my protest. At this moment in history, something’s gotta give if not gift.

Christian Lorentzen writes for the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine and Bookforum. He also publishes a Substack.

This essay is part of Mark Up, a series on Granta where writers share their thoughts on punctuation and grammar.

These are some texts my mother has sent me:

‘They found a mole on my back . . .’

‘I think Janet may have been contacted by ISIS . . .’

‘Madeline, the guest room is haunted . . .’

For the reader’s peace of mind: the mole was benign, Janet has not been contacted by the Islamic State and the guest room, well, that remains to be seen. I’ve always accepted my mother’s overuse of ellipses as an idiosyncrasy of an elderly texter. But she doesn’t reserve the ‘. . .’ for ominous messages. When I told her the date I’d be returning for the holidays, she responded, ‘OK . . .’

What does that mean? Is she going to say more? Is my coming home for Christmas an imposition? Is there an autocorrect setting on her phone she’s unaware of?

It’s not just my mother. My older downstairs neighbor left me some pastries last week. When I texted to thank her, she responded, ‘Enjoy . . .’ Why not Enjoy period or Enjoy exclamation point? Did she resent the gift? Are the treats poisoned?

There’s an extensive online discourse on the Baby Boomer generation’s penchant for ellipses. ‘OK . . .’ ‘Thanks . . .’ ‘See you next week . . .’ Sometimes they’re a playful way to build suspense, sometimes a form of passive aggression, and sometimes they relay an implication: ‘You were going to call me back in 5 minutes and it has been 10 so . . .’ Draw your own conclusions here. But my mother’s use of ellipses doesn’t reveal a pattern or convey a tone. She’ll ‘. . .’ in good times and bad. Excited, pensive, disappointed or otherwise.

To further dissect my mother’s ‘OK . . .’

‘OK.’ = annoyed, ‘OK!’ = enthusiastic, ‘OK’ = neutral

A seasoned texter knows that colloquially the dot-dot-dot is a cliffhanger and its receiver should heed the punctuation accordingly. The connotation isn’t necessarily positive or negative, it just insinuates that more is to come.

Some linguistics scholars theorize that those born before the advent of texting utilize ellipsis as a space-saving method for informality or shifting sentiment. Boomers are accustomed to analog communication, a letter on paper, where space is limited and one cannot press ‘return’ to generate infinite writing real estate. A possible, yet unsatisfying explanation.

Ellipses were developed in literature to communicate a pause or omission. The word in Greek means ‘leave out’. Many respected writers employ ellipses to different ends: drama, fragmentation, etc. Virginia Woolf likes them. They mark her move away from Victorian prose and toward modernism. She inserts ellipses not as decorative punctuation but as structural devices. Where Joyce uses stream-of-consciousness to overwhelm with abundance, Woolf uses ellipsis to pare down, to suggest that what matters most may be what is omitted.

From Mrs Dalloway:

‘She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away . . .’

The semicolon already fractures the sentence, breaking between the rational (‘She felt glad’) and the irrational (‘thrown it away’). The ellipsis takes that fracture further. It refuses closure, resists moral conclusion.

It’s of course unreasonable to compare my mother’s texting quirks to Virginia Woolf’s prose. That ‘thrown it away . . .’ is deliberate. It speaks volumes. But in a way, my mother’s ‘OK . . .’ performs the same work, though unwittingly. Her ellipsis is a modernism of its own: the pause of someone caught between analog warmth and digital brevity. Like Woolf, she’s hedging against the limits of form, trying to insert tone into a foreign medium. What has become a signature of our parents’ digital awkwardness may really be their own adaptation to the medium.

Have I not been giving this generation enough credit? Are the over sixty crowd as intentional in their punctuation as Virginia Woolf? Enlightened even? It was a Boomer who invented the smartphone after all. Maybe . . .-ers know exactly what they’re doing.

To end this piece conclusively, to not have written the ellipses of essays, I texted my mother. Why, I asked, do you do this? She responded:

‘I don’t know . . .’

‘;)’

Madeline Cash is writer living in London and New York. Her debut novel, Lost Lambs, is out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

This essay is part of Mark Up, a series on Granta where writers share their thoughts on punctuation and grammar.

ESSAYS, REPORTAGE and INTERVIEWS

Burning Mao | Fernanda Eberstadt

‘The summer of 1977, when I was sixteen years old, I started work at Andy Warhol’s Factory.’ Fernanda Eberstadt on Andy Warhol.

Drones and Decolonisation | William T. Vollmann
‘Brody was rich in fresh flowers and fresh grief.’ William T. Vollmann reports from Ukraine.

VS Naipaul: The Grief and the Glory | Aatish Taseer

‘To be taught by Naipaul would be an honour, but it also seemed to contain the risk of annihilation.’ Aatish Taseer on being mentored by V.S. Naipaul.

Connecting the Dots | Madeline Cash

‘My mother’s use of ellipses doesn’t reveal a pattern or convey a tone. She’ll “. . .” in good times and bad. Excited, pensive, disappointed or otherwise.’ Madeline Cash on the Boomer generation’s love of ellipses.

This Very Complicated Cast of Mind | Interview: Renata Adler

‘I thought of her more as a sort of parental figure in the beginning. There was scolding.’ Renata Adler on her friendship with Hannah Arendt.

The Other Girl | Annie Ernaux

‘You have always been dead. You entered my life dead the summer I turned ten. You were born and died in a story.’ Annie Ernaux on her secret sister, translated by Alison L. Strayer.

The Secret Pattern | Aube Rey Lescure

‘My father said there is fate and destiny governing each of our paths, of individuals and of nations, and this only the dead may know.’ Aube Rey Lescure on returning to China.

Indian Temptations | Sanjay Subrahmanyam

‘I understand that there is a temptation to bring everything in India, whether it’s literature, music or art, around to its relationship to nationalism. But as my friends in the art world have always taught me, that is surely impoverished as an analysis.’ Granta interviews Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

Real Tennis | Clare Bucknell

‘Real tennis players like to say that theirs is the only proper racket sport because the rest aren’t difficult enough.’ Clare Bucknell on a historical form of tennis.

Gian | Tao Lin

‘I felt compelled to publish our potentially worrying, arguably unseemly texts, in which we discussed buying, selling, trading and using a broad assortment of illegal drugs’ Tao Lin on his friendship and correspondence with Giancarlo DiTrapano.

FICTION

Pleasantries | Erin Somers

‘Her body looked good in that sumptuous way. He was not always attracted to her anymore, but he was attracted to her in this moment, and there was something noble about this, generous – he was about to let someone else have her.’ A short story by Erin Somers.

Happy Ending | Brittany Newell

‘The first customer arrived at 10.20 p.m. As soon as the doorbell rang, the girls around me sprang to their feet and formed a semicircle in the center of the room.’ Fiction by Brittany Newell.

Flesh | David Szalay

‘A moment later he’s aware of the wetness inside his trousers, and then the smell of it. It feels like a disaster, what’s happened.’ Fiction by David Szalay.

Descend | Chanel Sutherland

‘Down here, a thought was a precious thing. It carried our entire lives.’ Fiction by Chanel Sutherland.

Posterity | Joshua Cohen

‘The festival dedicated to his late father was scheduled to open tomorrow evening on the Mediterranean island of Midorca and the evening after that Acker was set to present his remarks at the Biblioteca Pública de Midorca.’ Fiction by Joshua Cohen.

My First Husband | Stephanie Wambugu

‘This dead woman, Sarah, looked more like me than my own mother, than my sister and cousins. Down to the way she wore her hair, we looked just alike.’ Fiction by Stephanie Wambugu.

The Virgin Suicides | Harriet Armstrong

‘I wanted to be a great writer of autofiction. I’d graduated high school that summer and I planned to spend my “gap year” writing. But my life was so boring, there was no way it was ever going to work.’ Fiction by Harriet Armstrong.

The Obituary of a Soft Porn Translator | Claudia Durastanti

‘Emily St George died of a heart attack buying oysters at a market stand, died thinking of oysters while buying six of them.’ Fiction by Claudia Durastanti.

Remission | Gary Indiana

‘Anyway, now we know, the guy’s a monster. Became one. I don’t think he was that way before the drugs. It was a real Jekyll and Hyde thing.’ Fiction by Gary Indiana.

Nothing New Here | Natasha Stagg

‘Had they been going any faster, the party decided, things could have been much, much worse.’ Fiction by Natasha Stagg.

POETRY

The Desert Song | Frederick Seidel

‘Summer heats my heart, beats my heart. / Summer smothers me.’ Poetry by Frederick Seidel, accompanied by a recording of Seidel reading the poem.

Five Poems | Sharon Olds

‘I was not drunk and I was not sober, / I was not in love with him because I did not / know him’ Five poems by Sharon Olds.

When Rhinestones Star the Night and You Find Yourself Thinking Fondly of Dave Hickey | Anne Carson

‘Look, the / blessings should surprise you, not / the pain.’ A poem by Anne Carson.

Perverts | Kay Gabriel

‘you dreamt of the CUNY / Graduate Center library / on fire, you dove in to save Stalin’s / copy of Capital’ Poetry by Kay Gabriel.

John Cena | Dane Holt

‘John, you leave us in little doubt, / you send the crowd home happy.’ A poem by Dane Holt.

The Cottage | Isabelle Baafi

‘I offered you my hand, which you licked. / It was cleaner then / than it had ever been before.’ Poetry by Isabelle Baafi.

Four Poems | Nasim Luczaj

‘Chagall is born / the night a great / fire breaks out’ Four poems by Nasim Luczaj.

The Prisoners on Alcatraz | Paul Muldoon

‘Since syphilis had gnawed away at his brain, / Capone held the gannet to be not only a knave / but the Knave of Hearts.’ Poetry by Paul Muldoon.

Spam for President | Harryette Mullen

‘I’m building a beautiful mall. You will receive daily updates on our campaign, complimentary tickets to our rallies, a chance to win free hotdogs for your family.’ A poem by Harryette Mullen.

Three Poems | Patrick Romero McCafferty

‘When I get to the Hebrides I’ll call / my mother nursing her father in Mexico’ Three poems by Patrick Romero McCafferty.

Featured images: Dayanita Singh, File Museum; Miranda Barnes, Orange, Texas, 2020; Michele Canciello

Tom Bolger | Managing Editor

I found W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz a slippery fusion of forms – memoir, travelogue, photography, architectural essay, fiction – creating a ‘broken, recessed enigma’ of a book. Through multiple-page-sentences on European train stations, prisons, military forts, libraries and concentration camps, I was hypnotised by the cool, cumulative prose, a relentless cataloguing of physical detail in the face of catastrophic erasure and displacement. Monumental, in all senses of the word.

I finished The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy along the coast in Kerala, not far from where the novel is set. Roy’s child protagonists bend syntax and the English language as they see fit, making it their own. Their idiosyncrasies and neologisms leap across lexical gaps and imbue the story of love and caste with a singular music and vitality.

I chanced across a faded edition of Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid at a second-hand stall and took it as a sign from Jove to re-read. His rendering of Metamorphoses in free verse has lost none of its brutal, visceral power: bodies are shorn of limbs until only crude trunks remain; divinely dished out transformations act as both annihilation and transcendence. Amid the punishment, though, are moments of tenderness; I had never paid attention to Hughes’s decision to end the collection with ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, but this time round could not help but overlay their doomed tale with his own – ‘And the two lovers in their love-knot, / One pile of inseparable ashes, / Were closed in a single urn.’

Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady sit on my bedside table, ready and waiting for my festive (and now quite American) break.

Brodie Crellin | Associate Editor

In September I read ‘The Letter Writers’ by Elizabeth Taylor, first published in the New Yorker in 1958. In the story a middle-aged woman prepares to meet a man she’s been corresponding with for a decade, and although she fears she may well be too boring and dull to really engage him, her anticipation betrays her secret hope that he might just be the love of her life. Crushes and fantasies grow best when they are allowed to develop in isolation, and while Elizabeth Taylor is excellent at setting up the conditions required to catapult her characters into limerence and romantic rumination, for me her talent is in laying bare the indignities of disappointment. After ‘The Letter Writers’ I moved on to Blaming, then Angel, A Wreath of Roses and Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. They are all different but I love each of these novels for the same reason: they are so funny! We are left in no doubt that the world is an unpleasant place to be, but Elizabeth Taylor chooses to explore life’s toils with laughter. To experience her feel for comedy at its best, I’d recommend starting with Angel.

Max Ferguson | Photography Editor

I failed at lots this year, but I read well.

Esther Kinsky is my favourite describer. In Seeing Further her photographs of an empty cinema sit inside the descriptions. Balancing image and text is difficult because they wrestle with each other but this is a masterclass in looking.

My photo book of 2025 is I Will Keep You in Good Company by Liz Johnson Artur. She is unmatched. Poppy Promises by Thomas Duffield weaves photographs and text messages between Duffield and his dad into a portrait of family and addiction (originally published in G160). If any photo book will make you laugh and cry, it’s this.

In fiction, Octavia Butler’s Kindred satisfied my need for a real story. Hisham Matar’s My Friends left me feeling as if I had looked through a book of photographs, not read a novel – nostalgia without the saccharin sweetness. I’m always rereading The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat.

The Leaf of the Neem Tree by Jamal Mehmood is as soft a collection of short stories and poems as anyone could wish for.

Not all good books get finished. I gave up on John Berger’s From A to X. The letters from A’ida to her incarcerated lover Xavier were too beautiful. I was left unconvinced that someone in love could have written them. Maybe for me, love is only in the fault lines.

Thomas Meaney | Editor

A book I enjoyed this year was U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Kannada-language masterpiece Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man. Ananthamurthy studied English literature with David Lodge in Birmingham, where he wrote a dissertation on Edward Upward. He was part of the Centre of Cultural Studies, where his colleagues were Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. The novel, which Ananthamurthy wrote in England, is a deeply local tale set in his home state of Karnataka. It follows the fate of Praneshacharya, a learned Brahmin man, who has to decide what to do with the corpse of an apostate neighbor who kept an untouchable mistress and supported the Congress party. The comedy of manners is heightened by how the Brahmins of the colony adjust their entire lifeworld around taboos and restriction. Substantively, Samskara presents a terrific picture of what the early Congress was up against in the traditional villages of India. Stylistically, Ananthamurthy makes every use of modernist techniques as he dances through the minds of his characters on a canvas saturated with the Ramayana and a brush borrowed from Virginia Woolf.

Josie Mitchell | Senior Editor

For reasons we needn’t go into, I found myself reading a number of books about warring siblings this year. I began with Louise Glück’s Marigold and Rose – the poet’s only work of prose – narrated by two newborn twins. Rose is vivacious, adored by the adults around her; Marigold is morose and ruminative, already prepared for the long disappointment of a life spent in her sister’s shadow. Glück finds a strange, world-weary, and entirely convincing language for the infants:

Rose could drink out of a cup. For the most part Rose was the answer. Next to Marigold’s name there were lots of needs improvement boxes checked. Marigold was not good at the cup. Milk spurted out of her mouth and all over her bib.

Later, I read Marilynne Robinson for the first time, beginning with Housekeeping (more sibling strife) before moving through the Gilead quartet. Another memorable book was Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, which begins and ends with the austere historian Claudia Hampton lying in a hospital bed at the end of her life, composing a ‘history of the world’ in her head for the nurses coming and going: ‘The whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute – from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine.’

Luke Neima | Deputy Editor

While we edited our issue on ‘Therapy’ I was reading Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, in which the thoroughly-untherapised Bradley Pearson stalks through London deluding himself about the scale and nature of his own literary talent, suppressing and indulging various sublimated erotic desires, gazing up occasionally at the ‘serene austere erection’ of the BT Tower. It was hard not to see thematic overlaps. Hard not to be swept along and to root for Bradley Pearson as he ruined his life and the lives of those around him.

Murdoch spent much of her life teaching and writing moral philosophy. She was interested in the ideas of moral psychology and the moral qualities of attention. For Murdoch, just as bad as the things people do are the things they don’t even think of doing, bound up as they are in resentments, fantastical thinking, runaway self-absorption. Much of this comes into the composition of Bradley, who out of spite embarks on an affair with the wife of his oldest friend, a ‘one-book-a-year’ author whose successes he disdains and badly envies. He moves quickly on to an affair with the couple’s daughter, to whom he is ‘a kind of funny uncle’. In the background his sister is having a breakdown. When she calls, he hangs up. Someone more interesting might be about to call. He cannot go out and meet her as there is every chance a letter will come in the next post. The triumph is that in spite of all the selfishness and self-delusion, Murdoch makes him likeable, even persuasive. A minor moral miracle.

I’ve also recently enjoyed reading Ben Pester’s The Expansion Project, Yan Ge’s Elsewhere, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett and Ice by Anna Kavan.

Leo Robson | Contributing Editor

The most enjoyable book I read this year – and the only book I read twice – was Susan Orlean’s memoir Joyride, which, in an unfussy chronological narrative teeming with brisk pen portraits and behind-the-scenes detail, recalls her literary career, from her start, straight out of the University of Michigan, on small outfits in Portland, Oregon, Paper Rose and Willamette Week, to her virtuoso features for Rolling Stone and the New Yorker and the often long gestation of her idiosyncratic book projects, taking in her remarkably sporting attitude to the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s unfaithful rendering of one of them, The Orchid Thief, as Adaptation, in which she was depicted (by Meryl Streep) engaging in substance abuse and attempted murder. The appendix reprints a handful of pieces, important to Orlean though by no means the best-known, on subjects including the newly built Rajneeshpuram, the gospel group The Jackson Southernaires, and an average ten-year-old boy, Colin Duffy, which appeared in Esquire in 1992 (I wonder where he is now).

Aea Varfis-van Warmelo | Editorial Assistant

My 2025 ends with 1969, via Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell and Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth – a pairing I strongly recommend. Recent writing on the former tends to invoke the latter, sometimes to explain why this excellent little book may have been overlooked at the time, but also, possibly, because it is funny to imagine their protagonists meeting. Mrs Bridge, an affluent housewife in interwar Kansas City, is almost exactly as repressed as she wants to be, and her small life is meted out to us in short but rich chapters. She occasionally butts against the limits of her world, sometimes with an unnerving fear she cannot stay with long enough to understand, but sometimes with gratitude, like a hand on a wall in a dark corridor. We can float above this constrained world and feel a genuine sympathy, but we can also laugh at her, which she often deserves. She is bigoted, judgemental and ignorant; her wonderful holiday in Mussolini’s Italy is only marred by Nazis spreading through Europe, and each of her attempts at progress (learning Spanish, taking up painting, voting Liberal) dwindle out of sheer habit, or because she suspects Mr Bridge would disapprove. I loved my time with her. I am also loving my time with Alexander ‘the Raskolnikov of jerking off’ Portnoy. Portnoy has also been destroyed by society and convention, but his frustration has more physical outlets than Mrs Bridge’s. It’s undeniable that I am enjoying these books so much because they make me laugh – it’s a shortcut to feeling like a book is a friend. In clowning this pleasurable synergy is called ‘complicité’ – in reading it’s called ‘laughing to yourself, alone’. Who’s the clown now?

Janique Vigier | Special Projects

My love of nonsense and psychoanalysis (not, of course, mutually exclusive) converged in The Piggle, D.W. Winnicott’s account of his analysis of a little girl. Gabrielle – The Piggle ­– imagines that Winnicott is writing his autobiography, in which she plays a part; that’s why he is always taking notes. Their Alice in Wonderland world moved me, as did his farewell to her: ‘So the Winnicott you invented was all yours, and now he’s finished with. And no one else can ever have him.’ The baffled melancholy of the 1912 Swedish novel The Serious Game, by Hjalmar Söderberg, about an on-and-off affair, stayed with me for weeks.

This summer I picked up Millicent Dillon’s biography of Jane Bowles, A Little Original Sin, to see if it would throw some light on her short stories or the warped novel Two Serious Ladies. Thankfully not. But I had forgotten that on a boat back from a Swiss sanitorium, in 1934, Céline saw Bowles reading Voyage au bout de la nuit and struck up a conversation with her; back in New York, she announced she was going to become a writer. On a more contemporary front: The narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Kiss Kiss, Bye-Bye reminded me of …myself, so naturally I gave away my copy the second I finished the book, and now miss it.

While I dithered away my evenings and weekends, my colleagues carried on purposefully: Josie Mitchell, alongside former Granta editor Rachael Allen, worked on a new magazine, DUMMY, which launches in the new year; Aea Varfis-van Warmelo’s (autobiographical?) novel Attention-Seeking Behavior, about a compulsive liar, is out in May; and Brodie Crellin’s novel A Sense of Occasion, about two cousins too close to bear it, will be published in June. When it comes out, I want to have posters displayed on London buses saying, ‘Brodie Crellin knows good sex.’

Feature Image: Moyra Davey, 157, Women (detail), 2012.

HARRIET ARMSTRONG

A standout book for me this year is Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace. The cover struck me as a bit cloying at first: it’s the edition with the blonde woman’s face on it, clearly an adult woman, I felt, and neither Siss nor Unn, the eleven-year-old main characters. But once I’d read a page or two, I couldn’t help finding the cover extremely beautiful, because of the overpowering beauty and mystery of the book. Very different, but with common themes (the end of childhood?) was Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards, which enthralled me for the whole of June. A deeply fun but also very sad and frightening book. I’ve been saying it makes me want to read ‘more thrillers’ but I think really I just want to reread The Shards already. The biggest literary ‘event’ of my year is undeniably Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series – I’m currently reading the latest one, The School of Night, and have spent large chunks of the year texting with friends about our progress through the series. I can’t imagine any other books ever making me feel simultaneously totally absorbed in the characters’ day-to-day lives and as if I’m coming close to understanding something huge and unnamable about the world – the world of the morning star and also the real world! Also, Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s The Sisters moved me to tears many times.

AMIE BARRODALE

I read Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters for the first time, and what I loved about it wasn’t so much the bile as the exalted recognition of love for the people in his past, and for the tenderness and fulness of his portrait of Joana and the others in his life. The slow recognition, seeming to surprise even himself, of Auersberger’s genius, and Joana’s perhaps lesser but so much more moving and particular artistic qualities. I really think it would have destroyed me had I read it when I was young. I also had a funny experience, where I woke up from a dream about Sean Thor Conroe, that he’d called me on the phone, on the day I had to go on a long drive. I was about an hour in when I realized I could buy his audiobook, and so I did, and he sort of hijacked my brain for a while, in a way my husband can’t really understand. (Dinnertime conversation. Me, ‘I like the word “bro”. Bro. Bro.’ Him, confused. Me, ‘No?’) I was also wanting to bow down at the altar of Susan Minot’s Don’t Be a Stranger. The craft, the intelligence, and the fearlessness, the fierceness of her telling. I truly do not think I have ever seen in any artistic work before the state of mind late in an uneven love affair, when a person can learn through friends that their situationship partner looked at an apartment with a woman, spend ten days thinking, ‘Don’t ask him about the apartment. Don’t ask him about the apartment.’ Then see him, sleep with him, ask him about the apartment, get chastised, and apologize. Genius. But I don’t know if I read anything new. I read Christine Smallwood’s Life of the Mind, and loved the way it opened (on the toilet) and what that came to be about, and the way she slowly slowly opened herself to communicating what it was about for her . . . I’m also reading Flesh by David Szalay. A lot to say about it, like Raymond Carver writing Layer Cake or something, but mostly it has this interesting vibe. Like so much under the surface, and then these sexual relationships sort of wash in, wash out. Very unique.

TOM CREWE

I started the year with back-to-back Russian bangers: Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov and The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Daisy Chain has stuck in my mind: it was bracing to encounter a book so strictured by a sometimes shockingly strange Christian ethic, but which at the same time manages to be a vivid and often moving study of a widower and his many children over time. Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education crept up on me with its brilliance (though of course I’d been warned). My odyssey through Trollope – I’m over thirty novels now – continues to reveal him as almost unparallelled in the variety and delicacy of his gifts. He deserves to be counted as one of his century’s greats by virtue of The American Senator, Is He Popenjoy?, John Caldigate, Cousin Henry and Mr Scarborough’s Family, and yet I expect many people haven’t even heard of these books, never mind read them. That’s how good he is. (Arabella Trefoil, in the American Senator, is more than a match for Becky Sharp.) This year I read most of Robert Louis Stevenson: lovely to be reminded of the perfection of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, but even better to read for the first time The Master of Ballantrae, The Ebb-Tide and the ‘Beach of Falesá’ (and fascinating to encounter him as the co-author of a book as odd as The Wrecker). Whenever I read Gissing, I am reminded what a distinctive and clarifying flavour he is: The Nether World is deeply impressive in its wringing of drama from a ragged bit of Clerkenwell. I loved revisiting Our Mutual Friend; loved the first part especially of The Idiot; and can see exact in my mind Mrs Poyser’s kitchen parlour from Adam Bede. But the greatest book I read this year was undoubtedly Hugo’s Les Misérables, in the brilliant translation by Christine Donougher. It is stupendous. I can only compare it to War and Peace or Anna Karenina, and need say no more than that.

GEOFF DYER

From time to time I’m asked what kind of books I like, to which I always reply, ‘Great ones.’ But that’s not really true because I have trouble reading a lot of purportedly great books, Ulysses, for example, which seems pretty much to suck ass, if you ask me. If the question is ‘What do you like books about?’ my instinctive response is ‘Anything’, but that’s not true either because there are tons of non-fiction books I’m not interested in (books about American sports, so-called biblio-memoirs, anything with the word ‘How’ in the sub-title) which means – I like the idea of reading philosophy – that there must be some things I am especially interested in. With the mind concentrated in this way I realize that if I had to choose two subjects they would be the Second World War and aviation, so, logically, what I most like must be books about Second World War aircraft, and I have reads lots of these. But logic only gets you so far because this year the book I re-read with most enthusiasm was Ernest K. Gann’s 1961 classic Fate is the Hunter, a memoir focusing primarily on his experiences during the perilous early days of commercial aviation. It combines the sidereal lyricism of Saint-Exupéry with endlessly engrossing technical detail about engines, fuel, instruments, ailerons – all the stuff that keeps planes from falling out of the sky. That was just a warm-up though for a book I read for the first time: Beryl Markham’s extraordinary West with the Night (1942), a memoir of her life flying solo, first in Africa and later – famously – across the Atlantic from east to west in 1936. It’s wonderful – as none other than Hemingway proclaimed. I’m also about to embark on what I hope will be a thorough reading of the Complete Poetry and Complete Posthumous Poetry of César Vallejo, in two separate editions, both translated by Clayton Eshleman and both published by University of California Press. A friend told me Vallejo is great, that he was sure I’d like him. Does this mean – philosophy again! – Vallejo wrote poems about flying?

FERNANDA EBERSTADT

Lots of people called Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac the best book of 2023. I may be alone in declaring it the best book of 2025. Okay, I admit I was slow in cottoning onto it; I’d been lukewarm about his previous novel. But The Maniac is not only darkly funny, pleasurable, it proves that fiction remains the truest vehicle for explaining the world-as-it-is. (It’s also the Chilean-born Labatut’s first book to be written in English.) Labatut links three real-life stories in an allegory about new technologies. In 1933, the Austrian Jewish physicist Paul Ehrenfast kills himself and his handicapped son. Why? Because he sees a connection between Nazism and quantum mechanics – this ‘profoundly inhuman form of intelligence’ that is ‘enrapturing the cleverest men and women with whispered promises of superhuman power and godlike control’. The ‘cleverest’ of those tempted by technology’s godlike promises is Labatut’s central protagonist – the Hungarian-born John von Neumann, co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb and the computer, who dreams of colonizing outer space with self-replicating automata. Von Neumann’s hubris is recounted in vivid polyphony by his family, former teachers, colleagues, suggesting how the hunger for immortality paradoxically might tempt a person into world-destruction. The Maniac’s finale takes us to 2016, when DeepMind succeeds in developing a computer capable of beating a human grandmaster at the game Go. Labatut’s conclusion? AI can only equal and surpass us by embracing what’s irrational in humans – not just the intuitive but the counter-intuitive, the chaotic, the seemingly self-destructive or outright insane, ‘the wild guess’.

MERVE EMRE

For the eleventh time, I read Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and thought, ‘I will never get tired of this.’ Like James, Glenway Wescott was a gay man fixated on the melodrama of straight marriages. In both The Pilgrim Hawk and Apartment in Athens, an ordinary husband and wife are undone by the arrival of an extraordinary creature –a hawk, a Nazi general, respectively. Halldór Laxness’s Independent People, about a proud, lousy sheep farmer and the women, children, and animals who suffer at his hands, is among the bleakest and funniest books I’ve ever read. Like the best modern epics, it summons archaic art forms – Norse fairytales, Icelandic sagas – to enchant national history. I loved it as much as I loved the two novels I read on its heels: The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s society portrait of the sensuous and degenerate Sicilian aristocracy, and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, a swirl of rumors, fables, tall tales, songs, and poems about Bosnian life under Ottoman, then Austro-Hungarian rule.

I mostly avoided contemporary fiction. The American exceptions were Makenna Goodman’s hallucinatory closet drama, Helen of Nowhere, and Joanna Howard’s Porthole, whose narrator, a ruthlessly seductive female auteur, a genius and a tyrant, thrilled me. From across the Atlantic: the Welsh librettist Paul Griffith’s two tales of Ophelia, let me tell you and let me go on, and Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, in which a pair of class-conscious marriages are thrown into crisis by the Big Freeze of 1963. These are perfectly composed novels; not a word is out of place. From farther away: Krisztina Tóth’s psychoanalytic thriller, Eye of the Monkey, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, made me feel, on every page, the horror of erotic and political hopelessness. Few things bore me more than bellyaching about AI. Thank goodness for Kyle Booten’s Gyms, nine poems composed in dialogue with nine ‘gyms’, computer programs that exercise the brain. Reading it reminded me that we are not done toning the expressive powers of human language.

SUJATHA GIDLA

This year I read two recent books that I liked very much. Megha Majumdar’s A Burning is a tragic, fast-paced, stylishly written thriller inspired by the prevailing political atmosphere in India. And Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is a shocking memoir of the well-known author’s mother. Her clear prose and direct approach let one see how much ugliness and tragedy may be hidden behind the glossy facade of high social status and prosperity.

I also caught up with three classics this year. I am a fan of true crime, and Truman Capote is justly considered the genre’s founder. His passion for research while writing his ‘non-fiction novel’ In Cold Blood reminded me what fun it was to write my own book of the same genre. Before I read Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps, I couldn’t have imagined that a year in the life of a middle-aged secondhand bookshop owner with a slight limp and an extreme passion for thrift could make for a gripping novel. And Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica is the hilarious story of the unlikely coming of age of the children of English settlers in colonial Jamaica. The turn of events in the novel’s second half was a delightful surprise.

ROBERT GLÜCK

I read (and wrote an afterword for) The Orchid Stories by Kenward Elmslie, a bonkers masterpiece of astounding and steadfast invention, reissued in 2025 by the intrepid Pilot Press. Elmslie was a member of the New York School; his novel inhabits a small category that might be called limit cases, like Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden, and William Burroughs’ The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. Speaking of Guyotat, I read Idiocy, about his hero’s maturation inside the ravages of colonialism in Algeria. In Guyotat’s mighty prose, the blinders have been removed and the senses rubbed raw. Speaking of rubbed raw there’s Claire Star Finch’s FUCK ME JUDITH, a heedless and depraved fan fiction about Wendy and Judith that is also a site of discovery. Finch sets desire on its head and in every other position. I want to add Lilacs by Rainer Diana Hamilton, a poem/disquisition on the senses and on love that is richly conversant, philosophical, and eighteenth century in its perfection of conversation and wit. Hamilton is the greatest company, a friend who invites you to refract your life through their Refining Lense. Finally, Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter. This is the tenderest of AIDS fictions. It proposes the always radical notion that play is more important than work. At the same time, it’s a manifesto proclaiming the value of queer experience and soul.

SOPHIE KEMP

I thought, going into 2025, that my year would be about the release of my first novel. As it turned out, it ended up being about the strange and sad process of being transformed by love only for it to spectacularly and brutally fall apart. When I look back at my reading this year, I can chart the entirety of the relationship. There I was in a Parisian housing project, reading Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil, while my boyfriend slept in the other room. I read Sarah Kane’s Complete Plays in April, on a couch in Bushwick while my boyfriend worked on his own writing. In May, I went to Yaddo, where I read the Anne Carson translation of Euripides’ Grief Plays and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I finished the first draft of my second book. My boyfriend called me in the evenings, while I looked out the window, out onto the great lawn.

Come summer proper, I was exquisitely miserable. I read Candide and Huck Finn, for the first time, like some kind of fourteen-year-old boy. My boyfriend went away to Europe for six weeks and did not take me with him. I sat in my apartment, completely naked, and picked at scabbed over mosquito bites. I went to a friend’s summer home in Litchfield County, and alternated between bleakly looking out at the pool, drinking champagne, and reading Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy. A few weeks later, in Truro, on psychedelics and reading Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer, I had realized things were going to end. I was right. He came back and broke up with me. I filled up my filthy, pink bathtub and sat there reading, God knows why, Emily Ratajkowski’s My Body. It got easier, quickly. A moment on the bus to Cambridge, reading Nell Dunn’s Talking to Woman, where I felt it all click into place. It became deeper into fall in New York. I took out my sweaters from the back of my closet. Someone new kissed me on my couch. I kept reading.

CHRIS KRAUS

I discovered Helen Garner’s writing this year, beginning with How to End a Story which is as suspenseful as 800+ pages of edited diary writing could possibly be. And then moved onto Monkey Grip – unrepentant and brilliant, and The Children’s Bach after that. What I love most about Garner’s writing is the way recollections of daily routines and internal debate are cut through with descriptions of the natural world. Semiotexte published On Virginia Woolf: Sylvère Lotringer’s Interviews with Members of the Bloomsbury Group, 1961 – a pamphlet of interviews transcribed, translated and edited by the writer Jeanne Graff. Twenty-two years old at the time and speaking hesitant English, Lotringer was quietly relentless in pushing his subjects beyond familiar anecdotes towards an illumination of Woolf’s writing as a new form of philosophy. Though it took a decade to get around to it, I finally read Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, which was audacious, hilarious and as outrageous as the racial history of LA and America. Is he really saying this?, I kept wondering. And then I reread Lost Illusions by Balzac which was less about Lucien’s ambitions than I remembered and more about paper manufacturing and the escalation of nineteenth-century capitalism during the Restoration, which was surprisingly even more entertaining.

CATHERINE LACEY

Overall I read much less this year because I am continuing to slowly attempt to acquire some degree of fluency in Spanish, but also because I started writing a new novel. The Spanish learning burns a lot of reading time and the novel writing makes me insanely picky and hesitant. I ended up doing a lot of re-reading and I tried to get to classics I’ve had on the TBR for too long. In February, I finally read Middlemarch and it was way more of a soap opera than I expected. I couldn’t help but yell things like, ‘Are you kidding me!?’ or ‘Oh boy, someone is definitely about to write a strongly worded letter that will humiliate its recipient.’ In March I read one book, a short one, in Spanish, but it probably took me a month to get through. It was by the Chilean writer Gonzalo Maier and it was called Cuando Cumplí Cuarenta (When I Turned Forty). A series of short, humorous essays about turning forty, I figured it would be full of vocabulary I should know since I also achieved forty years of uninterrupted life this year. Another classic was The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. I got really enthusiastic about it on Substack, which surprisingly led at least a few other people to read it as well. I’m trying not to be so drunk on book influencing as to ruin my own life. Then there were a lot of re-reads this year – Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, Tonight I’m Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson, The Lover by Marguerite Duras. In August, like it was the medicine I needed, I re-read Cain Named the Animal by Shane McCrae. Those poems are so good sometimes I had to put the book down and do a lap around the room. On a plane in November I read Gente Sin Paz (People Without Peace) a three-way correspondence about addiction and dependency between Sofia Balbuena, Daniel Saldaña París, and Sabina Urraca. I must confess I am married to one of the authors, but I loved the form of this book which is part of a series from the Spanish publisher Almadia in which they chose three authors to write a series of letters to each other loosely around a single topic. Can we start an English language version of this series somewhere?

NANCY LEMANN
This book was dear to me in 2025: Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi, an Italian author who was an expert on Pessoa and was thereby drawn to Lisbon, where this novel takes place. It is all about the soul, written in a sprightly and entrancing style. Despite or because of these attributes I felt it would appeal to about one percent of the population, which was ‘validating’ for me. So it’s OK to just be in your lane and barely in anyone else’s. There is a certain simplicity about it that I adored. The entrancing weather, the entrancing old city (Lisbon), the hero’s fidelity to his dead wife. He’s a bit of a hapless Graham Greene style hero – hapless in a good way, inspiring immediate sympathy. He’s fat, he has heart trouble, his wife is dead. He has regrets. But somehow his very hopelessness is hopeful. In the opening he feels a vague need for repentance but does not know what he has to repent. This also was entrancing. It turns out in the end that what he has to repent his lack of political activism. Till then he has stayed in his ken. He prefers to be a lone wolf. That was another resonance. I never followed politics before, but with a Shakespearean villain at the helm of the USA, this can no longer be the case. But what I loved about it most was its artistry, a stylistic gambit derived from the title.

GUADALUPE NETTEL

Mars, Fritz Zorn’s only book, was one of the first I read this year – an autobiographical essay that connects cancer with suppressed anger. Intimacies by Katie Kitamura was a great way to discover her work, I liked it so much that I read Audition as soon as it came out. Then, the collection Good and Evil by Samanta Schweblin, one of my favorite short story writers. I read in Italian Andrea Bajani’s The Anniversary, a delicate novel about domestic violence and toxicity in families, that will be published next year in the UK. I also enjoyed The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş – another great discovery – a novel of extraordinary beauty. La nuit ravagée by Jean-Baptiste del Amo in French, was next. I love haunted houses stories – and this is a very good one. After many years of waiting I finally read On Women by Susan Sontag and then immediately read the excellent biography that Benjamin Moser wrote about her. I finished the year with two gems: Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov, on his father’s last days, and Exit Paradise, the new manuscript by Lila Azam Zanganeh, an addictive story of obsessed love, exile, and family heritage.

ANDREW O’HAGAN

As readers, we are often addicted to reassurance. We view the rehearsal of what we already believe as evidence of clear-thinking. And this should raise the importance of writing which renovates how we think and tackles what we ‘know’. Donald Antrim is an American stylist with a surreal sense of concrete reality and plain sentences. This year, I’ve read everything he has written, including, in manuscript, what I believe will be his next masterpiece, My Eliot. Politicians, to speak of a different breed of believer, may be especially reliable when it comes to amplifying one’s prejudices. I’d been hoping for a breakthrough, and it came with Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir, Frankly, a book which is truthful about self-doubts, errors, hopes and fears – as well as about achievements and arguments – in a way that one seldom ever sees from a male leader showing you his medals. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, a beautifully written novel about snobbery and double-standards, was for me an obsessive read. Wharton, in one or two respects, has an edge on her friend Henry James: she can go inside a women’s hat factory, for instance, and her accounts of female humiliation (at the hands of men and women) is more experienced and less theoretical. The lives of writers increasingly interest me nowadays – they all feel like splinters from a shattered mirror – and I found myself enjoying Richard Holmes’s The Boundless Deep (his new book about Tennyson), as well as Zachary Leader’s Ellman’s Joyce, his examination of the famous biography of Ireland’s greatest novelist. Continuing along those lines, I also dug out The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair, and found myself really enjoying Nathan Waddell’s new, calm, very grounded account of the domestic and everyday wonders of George Orwell in his book A Bright Cold Day. The book summons one of the biggest questions we face nowadays, the relationship between fiction and reality. The life of the spirit, in relation to reality and other great mysteries, is there in another terrific biography, the three-volume one written by Norman Sherry about Graham Greene, and I’ve dwelt with that too this year. The spirit-level theme will continue with what is already guaranteed to be a book of the year for me, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue with Matthew Hollis. A volume of sunlight and shadow, history and memory, it is a book of treasures that provides by itself enough sparkling matter not just for this year but for many years to come.

LEOPOLD O’SHEA

My daughter was born in June, and before time ran out and I still had hands to hold books and a full night’s sleep to remember the beginning of a sentence, I was reading Middlemarch. And history, a lot of history. Braudel’s Civilisation Matérielle et Capitalisme, Sennet’s The Fall of Public Man, and Mair’s Ruling the Void. Now it’s audiobooks. MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Taylor’s A Secular Age and Postman’s Bowling Alone follow me into rooms where I forget what I was doing there like a sentence I couldn’t follow to the end. Much of what I’m reading seems to be about trying to remember how we got to this dead end of ours, to locate the moment when the social and political impetus of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seemingly wandered into a cul-de-sac, leaving their children where we stand today, endlessly rehearsing a shrill and pointless moral theatre. When I get to hold a book I read to her, mostly poetry and in French – Baudelaire, Verlaine, Éluard – because it’s short and because it practises the mother tongue I want her to keep alive. Pieces of La Vie Devant Soi, a board book entitled Regarde Dans La Nuit. I make one exception for Jack Handey’s What I’d Say to the Martians, but which I read in a French accent. Already you roll the disgruntled Rs of your countrymen so joyously you scare away the bluetits. Someday maybe we’ll get out of this cul-de-sac and you’ll sing us Le Temps Des Cerises.

SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT

For most of the year I read programmatically, trying to catch up with history. I had taken it upon myself to help organize writers and culture workers, an effort helped by a lot of Lenin and Kanafani and Grace Lee Boggs. I read Jean Guéhenno’s Diary of the Dark Years, partly because it was what Gary (Indiana) was reading when he died. I read every issue of The New York War Crimes. And I read Mohammed el-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, which is remarkable for how it both demonstrates and casts doubt on the role of cultural production in the struggle for liberation.

I couldn’t read any new novels. Fiction, the whole enterprise, started seeming quixotic and irresponsible, but also the idea of being ‘introduced’ to a ‘character’ made me feel like an agoraphobe. Possibly this is because I was already spending so much time talking to new people, which I guess is what organizing is. When I wanted to read, I would open to a random page in one of five books: Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, Airless Spaces by Shulamith Firestone, White Rat by Gayle Jones, The Blue Light by Husayn Jamil Barghuthi, I can’t remember the fifth. All the same genre, as you can see. Dépaysé. Until this year, I didn’t know that the Firestone book – like the Jones book – is constructed on a perfect loop, the last page leading you to the first. I had skipped the last section, because it was about the death of her brother, and I was superstitious. Of course, that was before.

One day I went to Bergdorfs to be alone. I pretended I was going to buy a button-down shirt for the office, and the saleswoman put me in a private fitting room that had an armchair and a vase of white flowers and a number of black-spined Penguin paperbacks, including The Consolation of Philosophy. I had never in my life thought about Boethius, but that morning on the subway I found him described as a Christian martyr, as well as a theorist of music, in Ian Penman’s book on Satie. So I felt that The Consolation wanted to be with me, even though normally I avoid anything that could, like so much moral philosophy, be classified as self-help.

‘You should not wear yourself out by setting your heart on living according to a law of your own in a world that is shared by everyone’, Boethius says in Philosophy’s voice. It’s good advice. I think, however, that the book I loved most in 2025 is by a woman who exhausted herself in precisely that way: Arwa Salih, and the book is called The Stillborn. Every Marxist should read it.

KATE RILEY

Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat, published this year, is so good it makes me angry. It has four main characters: two young Canadian men, a truck, and a gun. I found myself telling people it felt like a movie, but I hate movies and loved The Passenger Seat. So I amend: it felt like the kind of movie I like, which is the movie Dog Day Afternoon. Though there is enough action in The Passenger Seat to penetrate even the vulcanized mind of a studio executive, it’s the language that made me swoon and screenshot:

‘He had learned to hold the nippled remote with one hand covering the end so he could fondle the buttons without changing anything. He was already old enough to find secret pleasure in the contrast of rigid plastic and soft rubber, and the odd distribution of weight, much heavier at one end, that meant it could balance on his palm in a way that seemed impossible.’

My other best book was published in 2016 and its relative obscurity is bittersweet consolation to anyone dismayed by Literary Fiction lists dominated by cowards like [redacted] and [redacted]. Dodge Rose deserves display beside Pale Fire and Wolf Hall; the mind of its author, Jack Cox, seems so capacious as to contain multiple geniuses, his book populated with characters whose brilliance is evident, not advertised. Dodge Rose is an unqualified masterpiece, and since reading it I have waged a constant if largely astral campaign (of which this recommendation is part) to convey my awe at and gratitude to Jack Cox for conducting it.

DECLAN RYAN

The book I’ve read the most, gone back to endlessly, is Karen Solie’s Wellwater, her latest and possibly best collection of poems, in an absurdly strong body of work. She’s no longer a poet’s poet’s poet or whatever the phrase is now, but it’s poetry so I suspect her privacy is still relatively undisturbed. I also loved Anna Whitwham’s Soft Tissue Damage, a lyrical book about her learning to box after her mother’s death as a means of gaining some control, and shape, in every sense, to her life. Her descriptions of the relationship between fighter and trainer, and their parallels with the maternal, are especially well-rendered.

EDWARD SALEM

I’m always returning to the immense genius of Anishinabe poet and novelist Gordon Henry Jr.’s book The Light People, which is on my all-time top ten list. I can’t recommend him enough. His follow up, The Failure of Certain Charms, is also brilliant, and I’m excited to read his new book, Spirit Matters.

Amie Barrodale’s Trip is off-the-wall bizarre and unpredictable. More of this, please! Just when you think it can’t get any crazier, it goes for broke. Trip also pairs nicely with a gem I just got to this year, Michael Robbins’s poetry collection Alien vs. Predator.

I heard Torrey Peters say she got out of her TV deal for Detransition, Baby in large part because the TV people wanted to show a trans woman holding a baby, and how that would subvert what she intended with the ending. And I mean, respect. Not sure I’d have the integrity to turn down that payday and exposure. But having just seen the film adaptation of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, which I found cloying, maybe Peters’s follow up, Stag Dance, will make it to the silver screen. It takes place in the same world of early 1900s lumberjacks, but reads like something John Waters might adapt. A delight and a hoot. Here’s hoping!

Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection and Anna Poletti’s hello, world?, both from last year, are radical, inventive, and kinky, even if they’re total opposites in some ways, like their characters Kant and Seasonal (those names!). Rejection’s Ryan Trecartin-like hyperactive intensity is soothed by hello, world?’s refreshing earnestness and depth.

Ashraf Fayadh is a little like the Tony Tulathimutte of Palestinian poets, kinda sorta. His book, Instructions Within, is playful and cutting, profane and hilarious, surreal and singular.

ANNE SERRE

I started the year with Patricia Highsmith’s People Who Knock on the Door. What always strikes me about her is her use of description. Every moment is so meticulously described that after each paragraph you expect the revelation of some dramatic event, which, in fact, is always postponed. It’s her brilliant way of creating constant suspense. I read Louise Glück’s Marigold and Rose and Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook one after the other: both are about twin children. Glück has the wonderful audacity to expose the inner lives and thoughts of infants; Kristof, those of implacable children. I reread Jean Rhys’s Quartet and realized that nowhere had I read such a true evocation of psychological suffering. My friend and English translator Mark Hutchinson had me read Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which begins like a Gothic novel, continues like Lewis Carroll, and then like Swift. In June, I read Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and I thought I wished I had written that book. Among the year’s treasures, I’d also like to mention Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice, Murakami’s First Person Singular, and ten others. But that would take ten pages!

VIVEK SHANBHAG

However random they may seem together, choosing a handful of books from a year’s reading reveals something about us, something we sense inwardly though we may never be able to say aloud what.

It was a comment on the narrative style of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft that made me reach for the novel. His character-building is astonishing in its restraint; he brings the reader to the brink of a crest and lets the depth speak for itself.

Blending real people, family photographs, and identifiable places into a work of fiction demands a special, almost reckless, boldness. Jeet Thayil brings this off with striking assurance in his novel Elsewhereans.

Reading Zahid Rafiq’s collection of stories, The World with its Mouth Open, made me feel the force of the unsaid, particularly in its quiet reckoning with violence.

And then there was a newly collected volume of Roberto Bolaño’s work, where writers, poets, and failed geniuses drift through the pages like restless spirits, and the ordinary is always on the brink of slipping into menace.

In Railsong, written with evocative clarity, Rahul Bhattacharya follows Charu, one among the many women whose quiet grit and ambition continue to remake India.

When the normalisation of extremes begins to trouble me, I retreat into my favourite books. This year I returned, often, to Singer’s stories and to Jorge Amado’s The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray.

YURI SLEZKINE

I have, quite by chance, read two terrific books about friendship: Dennis C. Rasmussen’s The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship that Shaped Modern Thought (recommended by a colleague named Prudence), and Ian Leslie’s John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs (suggested by an algorithm). Friendship is love by other means. Hume and Smith called theirs ‘affection’, John and Paul needed only love but hid theirs away (and never sang openly about friendship). One celebrated reason and communicated in writing, the other sang about feelings, ‘feelings deep inside’. One helped design the moral foundations of our institutions and the wealth of (some) nations, the other retuned our temperaments and still sounds like the spring before our fall.

Hume was stout, gregarious, prolific, and, by all accounts, irresistibly charming, with a Scottish burr he acknowledged to be ‘totally desperate and irreclaimable’ and an ‘innocent mirth and agreeable raillery’ Alexander Carlyle found unmatched in his lifetime. Smith was mild-mannered, absent-minded, and reticent to the point of timidity. Both believed that ‘friendship is the chief joy of human life’ (as Hume put it) and wrote for each other as much as they did for the public and posterity. The last words Hume ever wrote were ‘Adieu My dearest Friend.’ Smith, in his only act of open defiance, published an open letter describing the late Infidel ‘as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit’.

The soundtrack to the 1960s issued from John and Paul’s tender and tempestuous ‘quasi-marriage.’ They dueled and harmonized, sang in unison and in counterpoint, from the breathlessness of one boy telling the other: ‘You think you lost your love? Well, I saw her yesterday,’ to the softly intersecting lines of ‘If I Fell,’ to the uncertain certainty of ‘We Can Work It Out,’ to the memories of Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields on the opposite sides of the same doublе-A single, to the two apparently unrelated accounts of ‘A Day In the Life’ brought together by the final piano chord. ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko,’ which seemed to spell the end, is the only Beatles song performed solely by Lennon and McCartney. ‘The lyrics are about John and Yoko,’ writes Leslie, ‘but the music is all John and Paul.’

NATASHA STAGG

When finishing Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament, I was told that no, I must read her other books, too, and also her sister’s response novel, Free Will to get the full picture. Of course, Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume is a seven-book series and I’ve only read Book I so far. And this year, I read most of Annie Ernaux’s books – well, those translated into English – which all feel interconnected and therefore incomplete without each other. Slowly continuing to read Proust has been fun, but it feels I am missing a lot if I don’t also read and see every artwork and text referenced, and so the project further slows. Reading some pages of Ulysses aloud at a Bloomsday event got me thinking: I should reread Ulysses, while I’m at it. But then, what about the rest (Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce’s correspondences)? And then there are the books and articles and newsletters my friends have published, the reading of which importantly constellates our relationships. Which made the book I’d really been waiting for, Helen DeWitt’s Your Name Here (a ‘honeycomb of books within books’, written with the journalist Ilya Gridneff) feel, ironically, of one piece. Maybe that’s because the media it names is mostly the stuff I read/watched in college, and its messiness accurately illustrates the frustrations of reading itself – the attempt to freeze time – especially as time progresses.

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

I’ve enjoyed the mnemonic triggering of thinking back over the books that I read this year. I did a search on the phrase ‘I’ve been reading,’ in my texts, and it fished and fetched up so many lost nights. You know those knotted ropes that the Inca used, to send messages and store information – quipus? It was like moving my fingers along one of those. Every title had forgotten sentences and clusters of sense-memories in it. What a strange, dark year. I read a ton of Twain and Twain-adjacent texts, by way of research for a long essay-review in Harper’s. Of that stuff, Roughing It has stuck with me best. Sometimes Twain stops joking long enough to really describe something, such as a coyote’s smile, and he’s so good. I read Maupassant’s introduction to his novel Pierre et Jean, supposedly as close as he came to a manifesto or Ars poetica. It contains this superb formulation, in re a certain kind of literary critic: ‘me paraît doué d’une perspicacité qui ressemble fort à de l’incompétence.’ That led me to read, for the first time, a different Maupassant novel, Bel-Ami, which starts like a cannonball but goes dead halfway through. (It’s hard to make a reader care about the fate of a morally vacant climber for 250 pages, whereas in a short story a drop of pity suffices! The women were more interesting, but Maupassant seemed uninterested in them, after a certain point that came too soon.) I read Bulgakov’s Notes of a Country Doctor (the fierce, pure manners of the beautiful one-legged peasant girl at the end of the first story!) and Pushkin’s great unfinished historical novel, The Moor of Peter the Great (the pain of that premature ending, or lack of one . . . a chasm opens, in the universal imagination, that can never close . . . what was he thinking leaving off like that?). I read a bunch of other stuff, of course, but I’ve gone on too long. Well, a few quick things: Nancy Lemann’s The Ritz of the Bayou (re-issued by Hub City Press), Jean Strouse’s Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers (a master class in using art as a lens on shifting society). Oh, and Joy Williams. I finally get it about Joy Williams. I’d always resisted her. But it turns out I just wasn’t ready.

JEREMY TIANG

I’ve been making my way through Yan Lianke’s back catalogue in preparation for translating his more recent work. He has a knack for plunging into the heart of a painful subject and twisting the knife. Dream of Ding Village (translated by Cindy Carter), which is narrated by the ghost of a dead child, is based on the true story of a blood merchant infecting his entire village with HIV.

Otherwise, I gravitated towards books that played with form and language. Nick Drnaso’s Acting Class was a fantastically creepy graphic novel that really got under my skin with its slippery approach to reality. Kate Beaton’s memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, also in graphic format, had all the sly humour of her comic strips along with something much more poignant. I’m still thinking about the intelligence and grace of Canisia Lubrin’s Code Noir, a righteous defilement of Louis XIV’s edicts on slavery. And I was blown away by Isabella Hammad’s Enter, Ghost, which I read immediately after her Recognising the Stranger.

I also went through a spate of only reading detective fiction because I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I recommend this as a palate cleanser; it’s very soothing to watch one misanthropic curmudgeon after another go around dismantling falsehoods and setting the world to rights.

WILLIAM T. VOLLMAN

In hopes of taking a long but (I promise) still jaundiced view of my country’s let’s say ‘rebranding’ as a right-wing thuggish kleptocracy, I have been rereading and extracting aphorisms from such dead Americans as George Washington, whose slaveholdings and chicaneries against the Indians were accompanied by bravery, endurance, modesty and a delightfully insistence that the only legitimate source of government is ‘the people’. The fact that the Founders interpreted this term as including white males only (some went farther and proposed that the men must be Christian property owners) indicates that we all partake of the same human rottenness. All the more do I admire the Constitution they built, with its checks and balances, its ‘government of laws, not men’. The fiery ex-slave Frederick Douglass (whose speech on the Fourth of July is a bitter masterpiece), John Quincy Adams, who matured into a brave and delightfully sarcastic foe of slavery and war with Mexico (the abuse and threats he endured are almost Trumpian), the Supreme Court’s chief justice John Marshall, who strengthened the judiciary branch, and Jefferson, Franklin, Margaret Fuller, Lincoln of course are some of my other dead friends. I love the noble idea of America, which is of course a work in progress, admire our Constitution despite its blemishes, and therefore am preparing a set of extracts about law, separation of powers and how to smell out despotism.

NICO WALKER

I’ll start with books I reread this year: McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh and The Long Take by Robin Robertson, two real good ones, for sure. Then for some oldies but goodies (but that were new to me): Gone Tomorrow by Gary Indiana and The Misfits by Arthur Miller, both perfect. If you’re looking for a newer release, I can recommend Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange and Sucker by Daniel Hornsby. Or if you’re more in the mood for short stories, there’s Temple Folk, by Aaliyah Bilal. Presently I’m reading Post Capitalist Desire by Mark Fisher, a posthumous release drawn from his final lectures. The book I just read before it was the best (albeit only) counterrevolutionary lit I read this year, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (Stalin also liked Bulgakov, liked him so much it saved MB from the gulag or worse, such were Mikhail’s chops, so don’t clutch your pearls, imaginary leftist). Then, last but by no means least, the book I recommend if you only read one from this list is If I Must Die: Poems and Prose, a collection of some of Refaat Alareer’s writing, published a year after he was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Northern Gaza. Let it live as a reminder of what is possible when a writer writes.

STEPHANIE WAMBUGU

I read a number of very short novels this year partly due to the devastating consequences of promoting my own book on my attention span. I’m sure I’ll get it back, or am already beginning to, but in the meantime, I am enjoying seeing just what writers can accomplish in under two hundred pages. The best novella I read this year was Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait. This slim book is written in sentences that dart away from one another in stark turns, moving from one recollection or self-description to the next, disparate one with little in the way of transition. The result is an account of a man’s life that feels as though it were written with the urgency and the candor of a prison diary. Levé’s telegraphic declarations about himself and the world read like the last words of a dying man, which is fitting because he took his own life only two years after this work of autofiction was published. His book, thankfully, is absent of euphemisms like ‘he took his own life’. Lines such as, ‘I have often gone to bed with one woman while thinking of another’ or ‘The quest for prestige makes me feel pity’ or ‘I have not signed a manifesto’, devastated me in the same way that Joe Brainard’s I Remember did, as both books are an accumulation of impressions and facts stripped of the consoling and often dishonest cope, context and self-delusion we often pad narratives of our lives with to make them tolerable and coherent. The story of anyone’s life told this severely in only one hundred and seventeen pages (the length of Autoportrait) would probably be a very sobering assemblage.

MOLLY YOUNG
The arc of digital communication bends so annoyingly toward the ‘chatty’ that I kept seeking out books-on-paper with a countervailing quality: taciturn or obstreperous books, grammatically elaborate books, books with characters or arguments that defied synopsis. Under that rude umbrella in the fiction category: Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose, Kate Riley’s Ruth, Stacey Levine’s Mice 1961 and Lauren Rothery’s Television. In nonfiction, Dagmar Herzog’s small book The New Fascist Body and Annie Ernaux’s romantic tragedy The Use of Photography. Actually there was one exception to the anti-chattiness rule. I reread Studs Terkel’s Working and was glad to remember that everyone hates her job and always has. (Except stonemasons. Stonemasons are happy.)