Fiction has a bad case of the cutes. It may have peaked with Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs, which has a silent “g” before each use of the letters “nat,” leaving you to wince through 100 or so pages of spellings like “fascignate” and “extermignate.”

But I first noticed the trend in 2018. That year Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, which ended with a bit of painfully cute wordplay unworthy of the subtler humor elsewhere in the book.

Cute humor tends to come across as childish and to condescend to adult readers. It can trivialize the most serious of subjects. And it may at times result from authors’ fear of a social-media backlash if they risk offending anyone, anywhere.

Whatever the cause, the new cute humor is a long way from Helen Fielding’s merciless sendups of “Smug Marrieds” in Bridget Jones’s Diary or Capt. John Yossarian’s tragicomic efforts to avoid bombing missions in Catch-22. And it reflects a larger problem with comic novels. The humor is too timid, setting traps for minnows instead of the sharks that beg for them. Even the darkest comedy isn’t immune. Among satirical novelists, only Carl Hiaasen keeps taking aim at and hitting worthy targets in his native Florida and beyond.

But non-cute humor abounds in a deep shelf of comic novels that have become modern classics. Here are five of my favorites.

‘Love in a Cold Climate’ and ‘The Pursuit of Love’ by Nancy Mitford (1949 and 1945)

If you want to understand why Britain’s upper crust is crumbling, you could read about Prince Harry’s frostbitten penis in his memoir Spare. Or you could pick up Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, a sendup of the follies of the English aristocracy between the two world wars, inspired partly by the author’s half-batty family.

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Have you ever suspected that the New York literary establishment is dancing with itself? Or woefully out of touch with people like you and me? If so, pat yourself on the back. The New Yorker has just proved you right.

A few days ago, the magazine launched a weekly email newsletter called What We’re Reading in which rotating writers and editors will recommend books new and old. I’d stopped subscribing to The New Yorker in part because one of its marquee critics had called a book “unputdownable,” a word that in my case is always a lie because I can put anything down.

But the magazine doesn’t give up on you easily, and over the weekend I found the first What We’re Reading newsletter in my inbox. It had six brief reviews of books, a mix of fiction and nonfiction, chosen by Namara Smith, a New Yorker editor. All came from Big Five publishers—Hachette, Macmillan, and Penguin Random House—leaving you to hope the newsletter won’t slight small and university presses.

Smith pitched each recommended book to a group to which she’d given a cute name in what seemed to be a strained attempt at wit. And she lost no time in insulting her potential readers. First on her list was Andrew Martin’s Down Time (Macmillan/FSG, 2026), a novel Smith saw as right for “aimless millennials.” I’m not aimless or a millennial and couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for a book about what she called “obnoxiously self-absorbed characters” who eventually become “somewhat less annoying.” So I moved on to her next suggestion, Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor (PRH/Crown, 2019). Smith had me there—I like Macintyre’s true tales of espionage—but I wondered why she recommended that book instead of, say, his Operation Mincemeat. She also suggested Cold Comfort Farm (PRH/Penguin, 1944) by Stella Gibbons, another author I like, for people she calls “neat freaks and masterminds.” I’m neither a neat freak nor a would-be reformer like her heroine, but I was willing to cut Smith some slack for having recommended a worthy classic.

Then I read her plug for Stephanie Wambugu’s first novel Lonely Crowds (Hachette/Little, Brown, 2025), and it stopped me cold. Smith said the book “did not get the recognition it deserved when it came out last year.” That idea seemed so out of touch with reality it was hard to give Smith more benefit of the doubt.

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You might have wondered if it was a belated April Fool’s joke. On April 3, an odd lead introduced a list of 23 forthcoming books recommended by the New York Times Book Review. It came from the then-NYTBR editor Gilbert Cruz, since reassigned by the Times to the bizarre new post of “Canon editor,” and Joumana Khatib:

“We have made it to April. We survived the snowstorms and the cold, and now that the days are getting longer, there’s more time to read.”

I’m not talking about the reference to the “snowstorms” that bypass those of us in the Deep South and other parts of the country. Cruz and Khatib might be ignoring millions with their non-inclusive language, but a larger issue lies in their assertion that “now that the days are getting longer, there’s more time to read.” A day has 24 hours in April just as it does in February, and the days aren’t “getting longer,” just the hours of daylight.

At least you know what Cruz and Khatib mean with the days “getting longer”—we’ve all said something like it. You have no idea what they mean by saying that more daylight means “there’s more time to read.” Where does that time come from? Aren’t people more likely to stay indoors and read in cold weather and to head out for parks, backyards, and bike paths as it warms? Cruz and Khatib’s words make no sense. They look like a desperate effort by two editors to make their story sound timelier than it is.

So perhaps it isn’t surprising that some of what they publish makes little sense, either, and that I keep finding fresh examples of it for my series, New York Times Book Review Leads: The good, the bad, and the ugly. You have the sense that nobody’s home at the last free-standing book section in America: that its reviews lack even the most basic level of editing, the kind that sees to it that they pass tests of logic, coherence, and common sense.

If you doubt it, you’ll find evidence below in my latest roundup of NYTBR winners and sinners. In these posts, with few exceptions the good appear above the paywall and the bad and ugly below it.

The good

“What, you thought our long national nightmare of celebrating the 50th anniversary of ‘Saturday Night Live’ was finally over? Keep dreaming.”

Alexandra Alter, an NYTBR staff critic and features writer, in a review of Paul Elie’s The Last Supper, July 13, 2025

Why it’s good: Rhetorical-question leads are among journalism’s dullest and most clichéd. They give you no reason to read further, because their answers are implicit or unknowable. But leads that subvert your expectations about such openers can shine, as this one does. Alexandra Alter could have begun this with the rhetorical, “Will we ever stop celebrating the 50th anniversary of SNL?” What she does is much fresher and more interesting.

“Last year, researchers at the University of New Mexico studying brain samples from two dozen people who died in 2024 estimated that each person’s brain contained around seven grams of plastic—an entire disposable spoon’s worth. Those who suffered from dementia had more plastic in their brains than those who did not. That’s correlation, not causation, and it will be years before scientists understand the health consequences of these synthetic particles in our tissue, but it is worrying all the same.”

Zoë Schlanger, an environmental journalist, in a review of Beth Gardiner’s Plastic Inc., March 4, 2026

Why it’s good: Openers that cite a statistic can be soporific. But Zoë Schlanger leads with one that would be new and startling to most us, and she makes it vivid with her image of a plastic spoon. She also gives it brief, helpful context in the next line, which encourages you to read further. You want to know why it’s worrying even if it involves only correlation, which she explains later in the review.

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Millennial and younger readers may know Gay Talese mainly as the husband of the elegant Nan Talese, who blazed trails in book publishing as one of the first women to edit authors of the stature of Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan. But many of us who came of age in the glory days of magazines remember him instead for five words: “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

That was the title of a classic profile that helped to establish Talese as a pioneer of the New Journalism. Esquire had sent him to Los Angeles to interview Sinatra, but the singer wouldn’t oblige. His handlers kept saying he had a cold. Sinatra had a TV special coming up and needed to preserve his voice.

Faced with the obstructionism, Talese did what he could. He found other ways to reveal Sinatra’s character. He watched him at work, visited his haunts in New York and L.A., interviewed people who knew him, including his mother, Dolly, and more.

Talese spun all of it into literary gold: a 15,000-word Esquire profile that remains perhaps the supreme example of a write-around, the journalism term for a story written without access to the intended subject. I first read it when a professor assigned it in an undergraduate feature-writing class, and its lesson stuck: Access can help. But access or the lack of it doesn’t make a story great. What makes it great is what you do with what you have.

A scene-by-scene breakdown of “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” was among the papers the 94-year-old Talese donated recently to the New York Public Library, James Barron said in a New York Times story on the gift.

“To Mr. Talese’s admirers, it’s like an illuminated manuscript,” wrote Barron, who also offered a glimpse of the author’s working methods:

“He took notes, but not when the person he was interviewing was talking—he wrote out notes immediately afterward, on stiff white shirt boards from the laundry that he had cut to fit the breast pockets of his well-tailored jackets.”

I went went back to “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” after reading the Times story and found that it had lost nothing over the years. My admiration for it had only grown as I’d learned how hard it could be to structure a novella-length piece of nonfiction.

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A disturbing trend has emerged in what publishers bill as “historical fiction.” The genre may contain much more fiction than history, or no history at all.

Hilary Mantel spent decades studying the Tudors before writing about Thomas Cromwell in her “Wolf Hall” trilogy, and Michael Shaara worked on The Killer Angels for seven years, visiting battlefields and poring over letters and diaries in order to tell a plausible story of the Battle of Gettysburg. Unlike those prize-winning books, recent historical novels too often read like quick-and-dirty versions of events, no matter how much research went into them.

An example is Marie Bostwick’s The Book Club for Troublesome Women (Harper Muse, 2025), which has sold more than a half million copies despite—or perhaps because of—a bizarre ad that calls it “Lessons in Chemistry Meets Desperate Housewives.” It has the worthy aim of introducing a new generation to Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique, which helped to spark the Second Wave of feminism. But it isn’t historical fiction so much as a blend of soap opera and fairy tale.

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Bostwick sets her 19th novel in a northern Virginia suburb where four members of a new book club find their lives upended by reading Friedan’s just-published trailblazer. All are apparently white, female, and middle class or above, and call themselves “the Bettys” in their chosen author’s honor. In early 1963, they don’t know that her book will later appear in The New York Public Library’s Books of the Century (Oxford, 1996), an appreciation of the books that did the most to shape the 20th century.

But to varying degrees the Bettys all suffer from what Friedan called, in The Feminine Mystique, “the problem that has no name.” They want more from life than what advertisers, therapists, and women’s magazines keep saying should be enough make them happy: marriage and motherhood.

Margaret hides her rented seafoam typewriter along with her unfulfilled literary aspirations. Charlotte pops Miltowns to ease her woes about her marriage and her inability to find a galley to represent her paintings. Bitsy works as a stablehand instead of the equine veterinarian she’d hoped to become before hearing from an adviser about discrimination against female students in vet schools. Vivian hopes to return to nursing, a profession she’d loved during World War II, but can’t see how to do it when she has six children.

A husband calls his wife’s work a ‘jobette’

The book club members face other insults as Friedan’s book prompts them to reach for long-deferred goals. Margaret’s husband patronizingly describes his wife’s first freelance sales as a “jobette,” a “little job” or paid hobby. Viv learns that a doctor can legally refuse to prescribe birth control pills for her unless her husband accompanies her to a medical appointment.

Bostwick’s effort to depict such sexism has arrived at a timely moment. The rise of the Trad Wife movement has reignited debates about whether a woman’s place is in the home or beyond it. And The Feminine Mystique is overdue for a fresh appreciation. It’s drawn fire for years from scholars who fault it for a lack of “intersectionality,” or its focus on white, well-off women like the quartet in Bostwick’s novel, which makes a token effort to include women of color by having Viv interact with a female veteran who makes the point that segregation existed in the armed forces in World War II.

But Bostwick doesn’t look closely enough at her women’s lives to make you see what Friedan understood well: the loneliness of women whose education had prepared them for more than lives centered on the home, no matter how much they loved their husbands and children. She instead ticks off what Tom Wolfe called “status details” of her characters’ lives: the Shalimar perfume, the sidecars and vodka stingers served at club meetings, the cigarettes smoked everywhere: at home, on the train, even in doctors’ offices. Bostwick is also prone to describing their responses in awkward phrases like, “Margaret shook her head inwardly.”

Inspired by Friedan, her characters pull off in less than a year the kinds of turnarounds that, in real life, women may need decades to achieve. As her women sprint forward, Bostwick co-opts the legacy of one of the most remarkable women in 20th century journalism, Katharine Graham, who became the publisher of the Washington Post in 1963 after her husband’s death and later led the paper through its coverage of the Watergate scandal. The injustices of the novel include inventing for Graham a horse named Delilah [1] that Bitsy cures of a dreaded equine disease with help from Margaret, who has begun to succeed as a writer.

Bostwick has Graham repay Margaret by inviting her to a lunch at her Georgetown mansion for a galaxy of potentially helpful Washington stars, including not just journalists like Helen Thomas and Nancy Dickerson but the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy. This scene is only slightly more realistic than the one in the movie “Forrest Gump” in which the title character drops his pants before LBJ at a Medal of Honor ceremony. Graham’s response is so out of line with how a U.S. newspaper publisher might have repaid a small favor that it comes across as egregious pandering to celebrity-worshippers or to a potential movie sale for the book. In such a case a publisher might more realistically have encouraged a budding writer to send her clips to an editor and to use her name when she did. The star-strewn Georgetown lunch becomes all the more unrealistic when, on her way out, Jacqueline Kennedy tells Graham, “I’ll call you as soon as Jack and I get back from Dallas.” This tasteless invented comment exploits both the publisher’s name and the death of JFK.

A paradoxical result of such improbable scenes is that if Bostwick aims to show how hard it was for women of the 1960s to fight the sexism all around them, her efforts may have the opposite effect. Her characters overcome their obstacles so easily as to make the misogyny of the day look simpler to beat than it was for millions.

Writers of historical fiction have the right to invent dialogue, characters, and scenes. But they defeat their aims when their books leave a misimpression instead of correcting one, or when they’re so implausible, they break the spell good novels cast. Oscar Wilde was right: Audiences will believe the impossible but never the improbable.

@JanHarayda is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book editor of a large newspaper and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. Her reviews or other articles have appeared in many print and online media, including in the Washington Post when Katharine Graham was chief executive officer.

1 Katharine Graham rode from an early age but did not have a horse named Delilah. Nor did she keep horses at the stables named in the novel.

Selected Notes

https://www.harpercollinsfocus.com/harpermuse/the-book-club-for-troublesome-women/

https://wwnorton.com/books/the-feminine-mystique/

https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/katharine-graham

An outpouring of grief followed the news earlier this year that the Washington Post had killed its book section. No one should weep that Gilbert Cruz is out as editor of the New York Times Book Review and moving into one of those newly created positions that companies often use to sideline an employee who has become an embarrassment but would be hard to fire.

In more than three years at the NYTBR, Cruz has dragged its standards down so far that it seemed executive editor Joe Kahn would have to act. Yesterday, he did.

Kahn and two managing editors tried to put a positive spin on their announcement that Cruz is leaving the NYTBR to take on the bizarre new role of “Canon editor” for the Times. In that post he will create lists of “the definitive works in a given discipline,” based on polls, data analysis, and the views of readers, staff, and more, aided by a team he’ll build. The Times editors made it sound as though Cruz will develop BuzzFeed-style posts with loftier goals or fancier dress, lists poured into $300 Okapa water bottles instead of something you could pick up for $20 at Walmart.

Let’s ignore the confusion that the pretentious title of “Canon editor” may cause among Times readers about what a “canonical” work is. “Canonical” isn’t the same as “popular,” and polls, however ambitious, don’t determine what meets that test. A rough but fair working definition is that “canonical” works are “considered to be among the best and most important, and worth studying,” as the Cambridge Dictionary puts it. That “worth studying” matters. It helps to explain why among books, for example, canonical status doesn’t come from bestsellerdom, literary awards, or the views of Times critics. It comes from what schools teach. Oliver La Farge’s Laughing Boy defeated William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms for a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 and may have outsold them. But Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s novels are canonical and La Farge’s isn’t. Schools teach Faulkner and Hemingway and they don’t teach La Farge.

The larger questions are: Why is Cruz out? And why now, when since mid-2022 he’s been dumbing down the NYTBR, overplaying the work of favored authors and publishers, and generally failing to make sure that the book section upholds the high standards of the rest of the Times?

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A few years ago, the first female grandmaster in chess sued Netflix for $5 million. She claimed that the streaming platform had defamed her in “The Queen’s Gambit” by saying she had never faced a man in a match when had she competed against many. Netflix tried to have her lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that the series was fictional. But a federal court ruled that viewers might still see the comment as true, and the platform settled with her.

You have to wonder how many millions Belle Burden’s ex-husband might sue for if Netflix goes ahead with a planned movie of her bestselling Strangers with Gwyneth Paltrow. Burden’s memoir casts the father of her three children as a feckless cheater who walked out on her, early in the pandemic, without warning or apology. She calls him “James” in the book and doesn’t name the hedge fund he runs.

But Burden’s devices masked his identify about as well as Bart Simpson’s red vampire costume hid his in a Halloween episode of “The Simpsons.” Journalists promptly outed Burden’s former husband as Henry P. Davis, now president of Arden Asset Management, and trolls have slammed him online as a “cad,” “jerk,” and “narcissist.” A lot of it makes Davis sound like the last person you’d want to manage your money, no matter how good the returns on his funds might be.

A recent New Yorker story by Jessica Winter gave a fuller picture of Davis when it revealed some of what Strangers had left out of its account of his 20-year-marriage to a descendant of the shipping-and-railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt and a founder of Standard Oil. Winter unearthed a prenup and divorce settlement that showed that Burden had $63 million in trusts and other assets she didn’t mention in her memoir and might have provided some comfort amid the injustices she saw her husband as having inflicted. But by the time her story came out, Davis’ reputation had clearly taken a hit online and on TV shows on which she discussed her ex-husband.

All of this makes you wonder: Is the movie adaptation of Strangers dead? And was killing the film a goal of whoever leaked the couple’s prenup and divorce settlement to The New Yorker, if it was leaked and not found by other means by the magazine? In other words, did a venerable magazine get played?

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First ladies’ memoirs typically outsell their husbands’ by a landslide. The best example: Michelle Obama’s Becoming sold more than 17 million copies versus a paltry 3 million for Barack’s A Promised Land. Other first ladies whose memoirs have trounced their husbands’ include Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Barbara Bush, and Hillary Clinton.

Sales figures like the Obamas’ have less to do with politics than with the economics of publishing. Women simply read more—and buy more books—than men.

But I’m not holding my breath to see if the third volume of Joe Biden’s memoirs, which he’s crashing out in Rehoboth Beach, Del., can pull off an upset victory over Jill’s second, View from the East Wing, which comes out on June 2.

It would be unfair to say that books by first ladies tend to be as exciting as the annual Easter egg roll on the White House lawn. But I may have hit my nadir as a critic when I reviewed a coffee-table memoir that Barbara Bush wrote in the voice of Millie, the presidential spaniel. Bush’s book had a lot of photos of the dog with members of politically important voting blocs, and I reviewed it in the voice of my childhood beagle, Skippy. In my defense I can say only that other critics had a similar idea. Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield the cat, reviewed Bush’s book for the New York Times Book Review. He did it under the byline “By Garfield” and the title, “Not Bad for a Dog.”

My review of Millie’s Book was my last foray into canine ventriloquism. But it wasn’t the last to describe my disappointment with a first lady’s book.

A few years ago, I reviewed Hillary Clinton’s lackluster first novel, State of Terror, a political thriller written with Louise Penny. It involves a pantsuit-wearing U.S. secretary of state trying to find the killers of three Pakistani nuclear physicists in Paris, London, and Frankfurt before they slaughter any Americans. She travels on official business with her media-mogul daughter and gives her a dangerous task in Iran. A Kirkus reviewer rightly noted that the book treats “a high-stakes global manhunt as Take Our Daughters to Work Day.”

None of it has left me eager to read View from the East Wing. Yes, the book shows that Jill Biden knows the correct noun for a group of starlings, a “murmuration,” Alexandra Jacobs wrote in her New York Times review.

But pundits and tabloids are already leaking the juicy bits, and none may remain untold by the time the book hits stores. The best scene in Clinton’s thriller came when her secretary of state climbed aboard Air Force Three after a failed diplomatic venture in South Korea and immediately took off her Spanx. Does Biden’s memoir have a similarly telling and believable detail? If so, it hasn’t emerged yet.

Quote of the day: The water bottle as a status symbol

“The water bottle is no longer just a water bottle. It is a status symbol. It is an extension of oneself. It is a source of good skin. It can hold 2.2 liters of water and keep it cool for 11 hours. It can be personalized, stylized and bastardized. It is Gen Z’s version of a purse dog, only heavier and less likely to destroy your handbag.

“Everyone has a reusable water bottle: 79 percent of Gen Z carry one.”

Zak Asgard, a freelance writer in London, in “Notes on…Water Bottles,” also published under the title “The Cult of the Water Bottle,” in the Spectator, July 13, 2024

What I’m reading: ‘What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories’

By happenstance, I dropped off clothes at Goodwill on Saturday and headed afterward for its used-book shelves. There I saw that the thrift shop was selling a paperback copy of Laura Shapiro’s biographical essay collection, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories (Penguin, 2017), portions of which first appeared in The New Yorker. I was planning to write about Jill Biden’s memoir, and first ladies’ stories in general, when I flipped to Shapiro’s table of contents and saw a chapter on Eleanor Roosevelt.

Obviously I had to buy the book. It was a steal at $1.98. And it might help if I couldn’t find a riveting anecdote about how Biden had ripped off her Spanx in a White House bathroom just as the U.S. Marine Corps Band was preparing to play “Hail to the Chief” at a state dinner.

Shapiro is a graceful and intelligent writer who has won the James Beard Journalism Award for her writing about food, and I’ve enjoyed the three chapters I’ve read so far: on Roosevelt, Eva Braun, and Barbara Pym. I hadn’t known that in her meal-planning, Eleanor displayed little of the courage she showed when it came to civil rights and other social-justice issues.

“By all accounts, the food in the Roosevelt White House was the worst in the history of the presidency,” Shapiro writes. Visitors suffered through meals long on items like dry overcooked mutton, desultory salads, watery prune pudding, and “undrinkable” champagne.

The surprise of Shapiro’s chapter on Braun was that nobody knows what Adolf Hitler had for his last meal before his suicide in a bunker under the Reich Chancellery.

“Hitler most probably had a dish of spaghetti with tomato sauce; some accounts add a salad,” Shapiro writes.

From a literary perspective, the chapter on Pym had the most interest. Shapiro eloquently faults a popular view of the British author’s novels as depicting “drab spinsters pouring tea for the clergy while life dwindles away.”

“Yes, there’s tea, there’s clergy, and there are spinsters, but the women are radiant with personality, the clergy are subjected to gentle, persistent ridicule, and the tea plays so many symbolic roles that another writer would have had to create a whole slew of walk-on characters to say what Barbara says with a cup.”

Shapiro develops that point beautifully in a 40-page chapter that alone might endear her book to Pym fans. I’ve read a half dozen of her novels, including her most popular, Excellent Women, and reams of literary criticism about them. But I saw them afresh after reading Shapiro’s essay. No matter how well you think you know Pym, you might, too.

Coming soon to Jansplaining

• Why The New Yorker exposé of Belle Burden’s Strangers will torpedo the movie version with Gwyneth Paltrow

• The unfair neglect of Sarah Orne Jewett’s fiction

• Another installment of the popular series New York Times Book Review Leads: The good, the bad, and the ugly, which highlights winners and sinners in America’s last free-standing book section

is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book editor of a large newspaper and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. She has written for many national magazines and newspapers and has taught journalism as an adjunct at two U.S. universities.

Selected Notes

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/View-from-the-East-Wing/Jill-Biden/9781668222881

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/books/review/jill-biden-memoir-view-from-the-east-wing.html

https://fanfare.pub/why-michelle-obamas-forthcoming-memoir-will-outsell-barack-s-latest-43165c08df54?sk=b5433df6041608fc94b776814016b03c

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46407734

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/16/books/not-bad-for-a-dog.html

https://spectator.com/article/the-cult-of-the-water-bottle/?edition=us

https://slate.com/culture/2017/07/she-dined-on-black-pudding.html

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317080/what-she-ate-by-laura-shapiro/

You might also like my post on the tone-deafness of Belle Burden’s Strangers, or this one on its evasions and misrepresentations of the truth:

Your mailman gets no respect from book publishers. Teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public servants—all turn up often in vital roles in high-profile fiction and nonfiction.

But letter-carriers are scarce. In American literature, perhaps the best known postal worker of any sort is the narrator of Eudora Welty’s classic short story, “Why I Live at the P.O.,” who got her job as the postmistress of China Grove, Mississippi, through an uncle who drinks his prescription medicine out of a bottle. It first appeared in 1941 when a first-class stamp cost three cents.

Welty’s heroine would inspire no one to follow her career path. But a short-term job with the U.S. Postal Service could be a lifesaver for recent graduates with bleak employment prospects or for workers with paychecks threatened by automation or artificial intelligence.

And there’s a book for anyone who wonders what delivering the mail might involve: Stephen Starring Grant’s Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home (Simon & Schuster, 2025). I’ve read only a portion, but credible media coverage of it has filled some gaps.

Tyler Austin Harper’s smart Atlantic review of Mailman suggests why you might view it skeptically. You recognize it immediately as Hollywood bait, he said:

“A corporate suit loses his job during COVID and spends a year as a blue-collar worker reconnecting with his inner country boy and coming to appreciate the dignity of physical labor—silently nursing, one suspects, the dream of a book contract (and maybe a studio option) all along. A stunt, in other words, that a cynic might see as more in the spirit of self-service than public service.”

But Dwight Garner’s New York Times review makes clear that Mailman has plenty for anyone looking for details about the nitty-gritty of the work. Dogs aren’t the main threat, it seems. Postal workers learn in their training to carry cans of Halt! dog spray and to aim for the eyes and nose. Nor is the worst thing about the job the rain, snow, sleet, or brutal heat in unairconditioned postal trucks. What the author disliked most was the daily “casing”: postal jargon for setting out everything you have to deliver in order so you can grab it easily while on the road.

Delivering mail with prostate cancer

Even with such chores, and as the author lived with “a worrisome nugget of prostate cancer,” the work had its rewards. Grant often felt he was delivering more than mail. He was bringing people things like “safety,” “continuity,” and “companionship”: “You know, the stuff that a government is supposed to do for people.” All of it could leave him famished, and he appreciated it when people gave him cookies or a free coffee at Starbucks. If you stick with the job for 20 years, you can earn a base pay of $83,226, the National Association of Letter Carriers says.

The reviews of the Mailman were mostly positive, and if you need a job, you might check it out. It might also appeal if you’re looking for a memoir you can relate to better than one of this season’s big books, which involves the troubles of a woman worth $63 million who found it hard to cope after her husband suddenly left her. I don’t know about you, but I think I could identify with a mailman in an unairconditioned truck more easily than with an heiress who might have been able to gold-plate such a truck.

3 creaky journalism and publishing terms to avoid

A New York Times style guide cautions reporters about referring to the Times as “the paper” in their stories. It’s a good point. Vastly more people read the Times online than in print, and digital-only subscribers may not see it as “the paper.”

Several other journalism or publishing terms sound similarly creaky today. Here are three I avoid and what I use instead.

“read the paper” (other than a print edition): read the news or read the Times

“inked a deal”: signed a contract or closed a deal

“penned a book”: wrote a book

“Penned” in particular is so stilted I suspect you wouldn’t find it in my clips if you went back to the rants I wrote for my college newspaper about the unequal treatment of women on campus. And that sentence has another outdated term: “clips.” Gen Z readers, “clips” are what you used to send instead of links to editors you hoped to dazzle with your talents. I have hundreds of mine in scrapbooks I seldom open because if I want to look up something I wrote, it’s quicker to search online.

Quote of the day: Stop mangling Jane Austen’s most famous line

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that any article about Jane Austen must begin with a mangled, platitudinous variation on her most famous line.”

Madeline Grant in “The Sad Decline of Period Dramas,” the Spectator, June 17, 2025

Belle Burden’s misrepresentations in ‘Strangers’

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Anecdote leads are God’s gift to reviewers who have to write about eye-glazing books like a history of the General Accounting Office or the definitive volume of the speeches of Calvin Coolidge. Just find a snappy little story in the book at hand—one with a beginning, middle, and end that you can sum up in a few lines—and open with it. With luck you’ll keep your readers awake for at least a page or two.

Useful as they are, anecdote leads get a bad name—or rather, a bad public face—in the New York Times Book Review. In order to work, these intros need to relate to the book at hand in a way people can see. Staff and freelance critics for the NYTBR often tell stories that say more about them than about what they’re reviewing.

I’ve gathered five examples of NYTBR anecdote leads below in the latest installment of a series intended as both media criticism and an entertaining source of ideas for anyone hoping to become a better reviewer. With occasional exceptions, in these posts the good leads appear above the paywall and the bad and ugly ones below it.

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The good

“Margaret Atwood doesn’t like being called a prophet.

“ ‘Calm down, folks,’ was the withering response when I asked why her fiction often seems eerily predictive. ‘If I could really do this, I would have cornered the stock market a long time ago.’

“Still, she concedes that she’s been right on occasion.”

Alexandra Alter, a book critic and features writer for the Times, in a profile of Margaret Atwood, Dec. 7, 2025

Why it’s good: Alexandra Alter’s opener doesn’t waste a word: It’s brief and punchy, and it makes you want to read on with its final, “Still, she concedes that she’s been right on occasion.” Alter suggests Margaret Atwood’s entire personality in three short paragraphs with just 50 words. Her brevity is especially admirable given the trend in author profiles toward backing in by describing what one newspaper editor called “the sitting and eating styles” of the famous. Does it tell you anything about an author to know the color of the couch on which she sat during an interview or whether she had poached or scrambled eggs at the hotel restaurant? No, it doesn’t, but you see such details all the time in author profiles in the Times and elsewhere.

“More than 20 years ago, I wrote a memoir that flapped its hardcover wings and flew off the shelves, only to nest in the remainder bin of literature. In public I gamely accepted its anemic reception, but privately I fumed: How could the world miss that this coming-of-age story of a Long Island Irish Catholic Copperfield had it all, except sex? No sex.

“Having written several books since then, I now accept that royalties are not meant for peasants like me.”

Dan Barry, a senior writer at the Times, in “Bait and Switch,” March 26, 2026

Why it’s good: Wit has all but vanished from the Times book section in recent years, replaced if at all by cutesy or strained feints toward lame humor. That’s partly why the NYTBR is so dull. Dan Barry’s opener is a rare example of book-section humor that works. It introduces a story on publishing scams, not a review. But it could have worked for a review of a book on the same topic. It’s vivid and funny and establishes right away a strong voice that makes you want to read more. It also describes an experience anyone can relate to: fuming that something we’ve done hasn’t had the expected raves and wondering: Should I have added more sex?

The bad

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Here on the Gulf Coast, the butts are smoking. That’s not an obscene comment. Smoked pork butts are a favorite at Memorial Day and other barbecues in the South. To do them right, you have to smoke them for hours in the Big Green Egg or other smoker on your deck or patio. My sympathies to all of you who arose at 5 a.m. to start the cooking!

Did you start celebrating early enough to miss the terrific exposé of all the holes in Belle Burden’s hit memoir, Strangers, that the The New Yorker did earlier this weekend? It’s so good, I devoted my entire Letter from a Reader 5.23.26 to it instead of doing my usual roundup of shorter items about books and journalism.

Burden’s book has gained traction with book clubs as far from New York as my small town in Alabama. And a point in my last newsletter bears repeating if your group is considering it. No book club should do Strangers without reading Jessica Winter’s eye-opening investigative report on Burden’s finances on the Page-Turner blog for The New Yorker.

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You know the big deal Burden has made in her book and interviews with stars like Oprah about how she was afraid of losing her homes because of a bad prenup she signed voluntarily after having worked as a lawyer for a high-prestige New York firm?

She had $63 million in ‘Financial Assets and Interests in Trusts’

Winter unearthed a copy that prenup and found that on it, Burden tallied her “Total Financial Assets and Interests in Trusts” at roughly $63 million. Some of that money was tied up in trusts and inaccessible. But Burden scraped together enough to buy an apartment in Tribeca for just under $4 million. She also bought a second home on Martha’s Vineyard for $5.4 million, “minus a small mortgage,” which turned out to be $3 million.

Yes, Burden could have been reckless enough to blow all her wealth by the time her husband walked out on her. But if that’s true, how do we know she wasn’t also reckless with facts in Strangers? That was my question after reading it. Or, as I put it in the title of my review of the book, “Is Belle Burden’s Strangers another fake memoir?”

Incredibly, the New York Times keeps falling all over itself to rave about the book. Days before The New Yorker story broke, the Times interviewed Burden about her dining habits for a Where to Eat column called, “ ‘Strangers’ Author Belle Burden Doesn’t Want Eggs Outside Breakfast.” Editor Nikita Richardson begins by calling Strangers “one of this year’s most thoughtful and heart-wrenching books.” It gets worse when Burden responds to: “Where did you enjoy your favorite meal this year?” Burden named an Italian restaurant in Paris where she took her daughter and four friends that she found “amazing.”

This might read like satire if you’ve read about Burden’s fears of losing her homes during her divorce. Or you might see it as simply more tone-deafness on the part of a first-time author.

Journalists and publicists may have a different view.

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As a rule, I try not to waste my prayers on the follies of U.S. book publishers. God has better things to do than listen to my banging on about why they spend so much money on celebrity memoirs and novels about people who have sex with Minotaurs when so many writers die broke.

But for months my most fervent publishing-related wish has been that somebody would do for Belle Burden’s Strangers what the New York Times did for another book from the same editor and publisher, Amy Griffin’s The Tell: Expose all the holes in it. And now somebody has.

Jessica Winter of The New Yorker dug into suspicious claims Burden makes in Strangers, her blockbuster memoir of what happened after her husband of 20 years walked out and wanted no custody of their three children. What she learned appears today on the magazine’s Page-Turner blog. And it’s a blockbuster in its own right.

Winter talked to divorce lawyers, listened to podcast interviews with Burden, and obtained court documents mentioned in Strangers, including the couple’s prenuptial agreement and divorce settlement. The result isn’t literary criticism but a much-needed, first-rate investigative report on a book reportedly set to become a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow.

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Line by line, John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do is the most enjoyable new novel I’ve read this year. It’s full of lines you might want to quote to friends on topics from sex to TV writers to fashionable restaurants with waiters who say things like, “Can I explain about our thirteen-course small-plate tasting menu concept?”

Only after finishing the novel did I realize that for all its pleasures, much of it made no sense. It’s a literary tasting menu rich in bite-sized treats that—however delicious—amount to a less than fully satisfying meal.

Look What You Made Me Do is ostensibly a dark comedy about the simmering hostility between boomers and millennials as exemplified by two well-off, well-educated couples in post-Brexit, Notting Hill–adjacent London. The novel, Lanchester’s sixth, doesn’t lack for wit but does lack for plausible avatars of the two groups at its heart. It’s perhaps more useful to think of it as an exploration of how an “an age imbalance and a power imbalance” in a relationship can affect any generation, to borrow a phrase that a main character uses in another context.

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Kate and Jack Hittlestone are a retired art historian and her architect husband in their 50s. Phoebe and Tony Mull are a TV writer and her schoolteacher partner, both a quarter century younger. Each couple seems to have enjoyed unblemished happiness until Jack dies, as Elvis did, on the toilet.

Newly widowed Kate learns that Phoebe has incorporated into a Netflix hit some of the private language she and Jack shared, including the line “Want your body, disco doll.” The much talked-about series is called “Cheating.” Were Phoebe and Jack having an affair? If so, to what lengths will Kate go to seek revenge? And how far might Phoebe go to stop her? The answers emerge in chapters told from the alternating viewpoints of Kate and Phoebe, each of whom has a mean streak wide enough to suggest that nothing is off limits.

An Australian critic hinted at a problem with this setup in the TLS: “Kate reads like a boomer imagined by a millennial…and Phoebe reads like a millennial imagined by a boomer.” In fact, Kate hardly qualifies as a boomer. Most people who went to Oxford in the mid-1980s, as Kate did, were Gen X. So were most people who were in their 50s when Brexit took effect. Kate is so atypical of boomers that Phoebe seems to direct unearned fury toward her cohort with lines like, “You boomers always think everything is about you.” This might matter less if the novel didn’t characterize Phoebe with that publishing cliché, “the voice of a generation.”

For someone who works in TV, Phoebe also seems remarkably unaware of realities faced by British boomers that might have tempered her malice toward them. Homosexual acts between consenting adult men didn’t become legal in the U.K. until 1967. Women couldn’t get a bank account without their husband’s or father’s consent until 1975. The AIDS crisis struck in the early 1980s. All of the boomer-era gay men and underpaid women—and, in the U.S., Vietnam war veterans—hardly amounted to “an entire generation driving the metaphorical Volvo of self-awarded entitlement,” as Kate sums up a popular knock on her supposed peers. Lanchester’s portrayals of boomers and millennials reflect tropes that stop just short of having Phoebe call Kate a “Karen” or having Kate call Phoebe a “snowflake.”

Some of this may reflect an attempt to satirize generational misunderstandings. But Look What You Made Me Do isn’t primarily a satirical novel. It’s a revenge tragicomedy yoked to a psychological thriller that, in its last pages, turns into a courtroom drama. As such, it ends with a startling miscarriage of justice after implausible twists. The last chapters deprive the story of an expected reward of novels about real or suspected crimes: the satisfaction of seeing miscreants’ behavior aptly punished or explained in a way that makes it comprehensible.

What, then, makes the novel enjoyable? Lanchester has written for National Geographic and in this novel resembles a travel writer who may misrepresent the standard-bearers of a tribe but deftly evokes its haunts, including its shops, restaurants, smart homes, and more. He sets the tone in the first chapter at a dinner party attended by the Hittlestones. Kate lacks others’ enthusiasm for the real-life London restaurateur and cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi, known for dishes like sumac guinea fowl with za’atar, a Middle Eastern spice blend:

“Sumac—nobody has a clue to how to use it. Za’atar—nobody knows what that is. Is it a leaf? Is it a terrorist organization? Is it the main villain A Thousand and One Nights?”

Only a dozen pages into the novel, Lanchester shows that at his best he can satirize worthy targets ruthlessly. We learn later that the Hittlestones’ sex life at times included “kinky treats” such as a threesome. It leads Kate to note:

“To a comic, perhaps even slightly ludicrous extent, this was something we saved for special occasions. ‘Christmas Eve and Ho Chi Minh’s birthday’ was Jack’s joke on the subject.”

In a more serious vein, Phoebe explains an allure of her work in TV:

“Writing is all about control. Nothing happens that you don’t want to happen: if you want it to rain it rains, if you want the characters to drop dead or burst into flames or emigrate to Mexico or fall in love with a fire hydrant, you can do it in a sentence. You can set the story underwater, you can set it in your neighbor’s hot tub. Then there are all the fights you go through to actually get the thing made, which is a completely different story. But I don’t think I’ve ever had such a pure experience of control as I did when I was writing my spec script.”

A proliferation of smart and funny passages keeps you reading the story as the plot creaks, the main characters lack plausibility, and the novel heads toward an ending unfair to an innocent. Among its unexpected rewards, Look What You Made Me Do may hold a bonus for anyone disappointed by Belle Burden’s bestselling Strangers, a self-justifying memoir of her life after her unfaithful left husband her. Both books deal with the stories couples tell themselves about their marriages. But Kate’s realization that Jack may have cheated on her with Phoebe prompts much more thoughtful and persuasive reflections on the subject than you find in Strangers. Unlike Burden, Kate appears neither naïve nor willfully blind to the possibility that what happened may have something to do with, among other things, sex.

@JanHarayda is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book editor of a large newspaper and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle.

You might like my earlier story on why much of Burden’s Strangers doesn’t ring true.

Here’s a fact that may sober you up fast if a defining memory of your youth is that you know where you were when John F. Kennedy, John Lennon, or Kurt Cobain died. A different event has imprinted itself on the minds of the classmates of Theo Baker, who will graduate next month from Stanford University. Or so Baker said in a New York Times essay over the weekend.

Baker wrote in “What A.I. Did to My College Class”:

“Most of my friends remember where they were and what they were doing when ChatGPT came out on Nov. 30, 2022.”

Baker’s essay offers a head-turning account of the preoccupation with money and power at a university where “tech chief executives are something like rock stars.”

ChatGPT landed on campus about two months after Baker and his classmates did. And the students’ abuses of artificial intelligence led Stanford to return to the proctored exams it had banned to show “confidence in the honor of students.” Other media have noted that colleges are bringing back blue books and human watchdogs for tests. But Baker’s essay gives the best student’s-eye-view I’ve seen of what A.I. has wrought among the dweeb elite.

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Baker is the son of Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, and also wrote new How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University (Penguin, 2026). And the Times lists Theo Baker’s book among its “most anticipated nonfiction books” and “The Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Talking About” in 2026. Can you take the Times at its word that the son of a star reporter has written a book “everyone be will talking about”? I can’t, given how often I’ve been burned by its overheated recommendations, which tend to read more like marketing hype than journalism or literary criticism. If you’d prefer to see for yourself, you can read an excerpt at this gift link.

What I’m reading: A classic story by Ursula Le Guin

What’s the kinkiest way you’ve found a title for a story you’ve written?

Few of us might top Ursula Le Guin (1929–2018), the science fiction and fantasy writer whose The Left Hand of Darkness was the first novel by a female author to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards, an honor she claimed a second time for The Dispossessed. Longtime Oregonian Le Guin saw the name of Salem, Ore., spelled backward in a car mirror. It inspired the title of her “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

I learned this at a recent meeting of a classic-short-stories group I co-lead, which had just read “Omelas,” winner of the 1974 Hugo for the best short story. Le Guin’s brief tale centers on a utopian town that has bought happiness for all at a scalper’s price: the perpetual torture of a child by means including starvation, medical neglect, and solitary confinement. Faced with that moral conundrum, some residents “walk away” from Omelas.

Critics often read this classic as a commentary on the philosophy of utilitarianism, the view that societies should do what promotes “the greatest good for the greatest number.” But you don’t need to know the work of Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill to enjoy the story, first published in New Dimensions 3 (Doubleday, 1973). One member of our group asked as we talked about Omelas’ practice of isolating someone for others’ benefit: “Isn’t that what we do all the time?” You can also read this one as you can Shirley Jackson’s ”The Lottery”: as a scapegoat story. You can read for free here.

Quote of the day: John Lanchester on birdsong

Some endings of novels make you say, “Wow.” Others make you say, “Wait! What?! Did I miss something here?”

John Lanchester’s psychological thriller Look What You Made Me Do had the second type of ending. I’d planned to review it today. But the last couple of chapters seemed to involve such a miscarriage of justice that I wondered if I’d read them incorrectly or overlooked clues that might explain them. So I need to reread it to find out if—even with pages of handwritten notes—I’d missed a bit of foreshadowing.

In the meantime, in my case one quote might have made the book worth reading. A TV writer in the novel wakes up every morning, as I do, to extravagant birdsong, and her view of its sounds reflects mine. Phoebe Mull observes:

“Some people, maybe most people, say that they hear music when they’re listening to birdsong. I don’t. It’s not a chorus, it’s reality TV. What I hear is competition, argument, a struggle for supremacy. They’re not singing, they’re shouting Me! Me! Me!”

Those words perfectly describe what seems to go on in the oaks and palmettos beyond my deck. It’s “Survivor” meets “American Idol” every day among the titmice, blue jays, fish crows, cardinals, brown thrashers, Carolina wrens, and mourning doves. None seems beyond the reach of the mockingbirds here in Harper Lee country.

In Look What You Made Me Do, Phoebe says she looked up her birds on an unnamed app. I’ll happily tell you mine: the Merlin Bird ID from the Cornell Ornithology Lab. If you like to know what you’re hearing, this is a treasure in your pocket.

is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book editor of a large newspaper and vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. She has written for many print and online media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Glamour, and Salon.

Selected Notes

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/opinion/chatgpt-ai-college-school-graduation.html

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/760317/how-to-rule-the-world-by-theo-baker/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/books/review/most-anticipated-nonfiction-books

https://classicsofsciencefiction.com/2024/02/13/the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas-by-ursula-k-le-guin/

https://www.nytimes.com/by/peter-baker

When was the last time you flinched at the price of a hardcover book and decided to wait for the cheaper paperback? I stopped doing it after buying an iPad, where I do a lot of my reading on a Kindle app. If you still wait for a paperback, your days of being able to do that may be numbered.

Paperback editions used to come out a year or so after the hardcover. These reissues did more than offer readers relief from sticker shock. They gave writers a second chance to boost their sales with the help of a splashier cover or fresh approach to marketing.

But you can no longer count on seeing a paperback edition of a book, the Wall Street Journal reported early last year. These days, publishers often skip it, focusing their attention on hardcover or other editions.

“The shift reflects changing reader habits, the popularity of audiobooks and ebooks, and the power a few major retailers hold over the publishing industry,” Jeffrey Tractenberg wrote in the WSJ. He added:

“Publishers, authors, agents and retailers all earn more on hardcover titles than they do with paperbacks. The typical hardcover’s retail list price is about twice that of the paperback list price. And authors usually get royalties of about 15% of the hardcover price, but only about half that share on paperbacks.”

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A second blow to paperback fans came later in the year when ReaderLink, the largest U.S. distributor of mass-market paperbacks, stopped distributing them to big box and other stores. But that double whammy doesn’t mean that worthy paperbacks have vanished. Or so I realized when I saw one of my favorite 2025 memoirs, Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare (Vintage, 2026), listed recently as “New in Paperback” on book blogs.

The survival of high-quality paperbacks like Dalton’s Women’s Prize finalist and Rick Atkinson’s award-winning The British Are Coming (Holt Paperbacks, 2020) is good news for anyone who will travel this summer to spots where you can’t easily recharge a tablet or phone loaded with ebooks. It’s all the better for those of us on the Gulf Coast who are bracing for the start of hurricane season and power outages on June 1.

Quote of the day: A prosecutor’s ‘erection’ test of porn

“I put my feet up on the desk and start reading. If I get an erection, we prosecute.”

Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the British barrister who led the prosecution of Penguin Books in 1960 after it published Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in explaining the grounds for action, as quoted by Frances Wilson in a recent Spectator review of Lady C: The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Yale, 2026)

Are Elizabeth Strout’s books getting schmaltzy?

The Yiddish word “schmaltz” refers to rendered chicken or goose fat, and critics often apply it to treacly or sentimental novels like those of Mitch Albom and Nicholas Sparks.

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Ask a Cranky Book Critic is column for paid subscribers. You may ask questions in the Comments or by private message, and I’ll try to answer those that might have wide appeal.

Dear Jan,

A dear friend has written an awful novel he wants me to review on Amazon. The plot makes no sense, the characters are stereotypes, and the book is full of grammatical errors. For example, my friend writes “alot” instead of “a lot.” I mentioned this to him after he showed me a draft, thinking the mistake might involve an auto-correct issue. He said “alot” is his “style.”

I love this friend, but I don’t want to praise this embarrassment on Amazon. What should I do?

S.L., Winnetka, Ill.

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You need an antidote to despair when even the Pulitzer Prize Board is feeding journalistic ethics into a wood-chipper. I found mine in books and articles about cheerier subjects than the Board’s latest awards: Queen Elizabeth’s fashion sense, “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” and a new thriller about people who say things like, “Want your body, disco doll.”

A new book about Queen Elizabeth’s style

I saw Queen Elizabeth II in the mostly covered-up flesh only once. It happened at a Highland games in Braemar, Scotland, as I waited for a kilted hunk to throw a caber end-over-end and have it land as close to him as possible without killing him.

Well, the Games organizers don’t put the goal quite that dramatically. They downplay the potential-death aspect. But you might wonder why if you’ve seen someone hurl a 100-pound wooden log that looks like a telephone pole, as I have.

I’d taken the train up from Edinburgh for the Braemar Gathering, knowing that the Queen often attended during her summer holidays at Balmoral and it might be the only time I’d ever see her. It was, but “see” is perhaps the wrong verb.

Amid thousands of spectators, I stood too far from the Queen to observe her closely after she stepped from a claret Rolls-Royce and onto the grass at Braemar. I can’t tell you what she wore. But I know more about her fashion needs and tastes after reading about a new exhibit, “Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style,” at the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Place, which marks the centenary of the queen born on April 21, 1926.

On view through Oct. 18, the show gathers hundreds of items the queen wore for occasions grand or fleeting. They range from her christening robe and wedding dress to what modern designers might call athleisure wear: “jodhpurs and tweed for Windsor, green serge and tartans for Balmoral,” the English interior designer and author Nicky Haslam writes in the latest issue of the Spectator.

“A major problem in dressing a queen is that—except for a papal audience and state or family funerals—black is never an option; though, as on the occasion of her return from Kenya on accession, she always travelled with a black ensemble,” Haslam says.

In her later years, the queen wore less formal hats, even “wonky double-tier toppers Boy George would kill for,” he adds.

The tall hats were for added height as the queen grew smaller with age. But she never gave up her white gloves, black handbag, and sensible shoes.

“This deity may never have worn Prada,” Haslam concludes, “but the exhibition shows that the Queen wore her calling with pride—and her heart not merely on her sleeve.”

If Buckingham Palace isn’t in your travel plans, the exhibit has a just-published companion volume Queen Elizabeth II: Fashion & Style (Royal Collection Trust, 2026), by Caroline de Guitaut with a foreword by Anna Wintour. Shown in sumptuous detail, her clothes look more elegant than you might expect from wire-service photos and CNN news clips. If you have royal-watcher on your gift list, I’d check this out.

Quote of the Day: Meryl Streep on ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’

“The first one was a Cinderella story, and this one is more like Pilgrim’s Progress with better clothes. This young woman is going through the Stations of the Cross, every crisis of conscience and betrayal.”

Meryl Streep on how the original film of The Devil Wears Prada differs from its sequel in “Dressing Up for a Fashionable Reunion,” in the New York Times, May 3, 2026

Books I bought this week

Look What You Made Me Do: A Novel by John Lanchester (Norton, 2026) A line in the British novelist John Lanchester’s new psychological thriller seems destined to become a meme: “Want your body, disco doll.” It refers to an old New Yorker cartoon and became a well-off London couple’s private code for: “please hurry up, we’re going to be late.” But Jack dies on page 24 of Look What You Made Me Do, and soon afterward, Kate hears their secret language on a TV show called Cheating, written by the sexy Phoebe Mull. Had her husband been having an affair she hadn’t suspected? I wasn’t looking for another thriller so soon after Tana French’s disappointing The Keeper or for a book about the aftermath of adultery in the wake of Belle Burden’s evasive memoir Strangers. But I’d found Lanchester’s first novel, The Debt to Pleasure, smart and well-written, if imperfectly plotted. So I downloaded the free Kindle sample of Look What You Made Me Do, billed by its U.K. publisher as a “black comedy,” and bought it after enjoying the first chapters. Reviews have suggested that it has a few limits, but I plan to read it and hope to give my view soon.

“Books I Bought This Week” is a regular feature of that appears in weeks when I bought books instead of getting them from the library or elsewhere.

Why I refuse to review the 2026 Pulitzer fiction winner and finalists

My reading about Elizabeth II’s Boy George-worthy hats was a lot more fun than learning that a Pulitzer fiction juror took money in the form of a book advance from the publisher of a novel the jury chose as a finalist. I’m sure the Pulitzer people would say—aren’t you?—that the thousands of dollars¹ the juror took from Riverhead played absolutely no role in its giving another Riverhead author a $3000 finalist’s prize! That was a coincidence! Because that finalist wrote a great book worthy of the honor!

Perhaps it’s my tragedy to have had as a mentor a Pulitzer winner who instilled higher standards in his students, or to have known many others who shared his. But I refuse to review any 2026 Pulitzer fiction honorees or future ones selected by an untrustworthy and conflict-of-interest-riddled jury. I try to review books soon after they come out, before they win awards, and I might unintentionally do one that will later show up with a gilt sticker on its cover. But who knows? I could get lucky, as did that Riverhead-linked juror and finalist last week.

1 This is my guess, given that Penguin Random House authors typically receive advances of at least a few thousand dollars, often vastly more, for their books

@JanHarayda is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book editor of a large newspaper and a vice president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle. She has taught journalism at two major U.S. universities and written for national media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Commonweal, Glamour, and Salon.

I do not take free books or advance reading copies from publishers but get books I review either from libraries or the independent distributor NetGalley, which provides ARCs with no monetary value to working critics. Paid subscriptions help to support not just the fearless reviews I aim to do but authors whose books I buy for this newsletter. Thank you!

Selected Notes

https://www.rct.uk/collection/exhibitions/queen-elizabeth-ii-her-life-in-style/the-kings-gallery-buckingham-palace

https://www.royalcollectionshop.co.uk/queen-elizabeth-ii-fashion-and-style.html

https://www.amazon.com/Queen-Elizabeth-II-Fashion-Style/dp/1909741949

https://spectator.com/article/how-to-dress-a-queen/?edition=us

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/movies/devil-wears-prada-meryl-streep-anne-hathaway.html

https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324131342

Do the Pulitzer Prizes for books need an ethics overhaul?

You might think so given the alarming conflicts of interest the Pulitzer Board failed to disclose when it named the winners of its annual awards for journalism, books, music, and drama.

Columbia University has administered the prizes ever since the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer provided for them in his will more than a century ago. But the Board names the winners and finalists. First it selects a group of preliminary judges, which the Pulitzer organization calls “the jury,” for each of its 23 awards. The jurors nominate three finalists in each prize category, and the Board chooses the winner by a majority vote.

This two-stage process, in theory, provides checks and balances that help to keep ethical lapses from tainting the prizes. What happened on May 4 shows that it isn’t working.

In my Letter from a Reader 5.7.26, I wrote about a disturbing imbalance on the five-member 2026 fiction jury: It included no working journalists for the first time I can recall in decades of covering the prizes as journalist and observing them as a former vice president for awards of the National Book Critics Circle. Four members of that jury have teaching jobs at U.S. universities and the fifth, the novelist Elizabeth Strout, has had them in the past. The five jurors chose such a narrow range of fiction finalists that you might think the odds were stacked from the start in favor a certain kind of book.

After sending the 5.7.26 newsletter, I learned from a tip that the problems with those fiction awards ran deeper than I’d realized.

The Pulitzer Board rightly doesn’t reveal the names of jury members until after announcing the winners of the prizes. This helps to protect jurors from efforts by others—especially authors and their publishers—to influence their decisions.

But the Board failed to disclose an obvious conflict of interest when it named the fiction winner and finalists and the jurors who chose them. Or, rather, it failed to disclose several conflicts involving David Treuer, one of the fiction jurors: Treuer is an editor-at-large for the Pantheon imprint of Penguin Random House and is published by another PRH imprint, Riverhead. And he served on the jury that named as a finalist another Riverhead book, Katie Kitamura’s Audition.

The Pulitzer Board identified Treuer as: “Writer, Editor and Professor of English, University of Southern California.” It didn’t mention that his 2019 National Book Award finalist, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, shares a publisher with Kitamura’s Audition.¹

Pantheon and Riverhead are high-quality imprints of PRH, working out of the PRH headquarters at 1745 Broadway in Manhattan. But if Pantheon and Riverhead are sister imprints at the world’s largest trade book publisher, they are also sibling rivals. Their books may compete directly for awards and indirectly for bestsellerdom, media attention, and other recognition, and their editors may move among imprints in corporate reshuffles.

Pantheon and Riverhead editors and the agents they deal with “all know each other” in a figurative if not literal sense. They see one another in lobbies, at book launches and awards ceremonies, and at the Penguin Random House displays at trade shows. Their ties can be deep, messy, and incestuous. A Pantheon editor might lose a book at auction to Riverhead, but later hit up its author for a blurb, making contact via the author’s editor or agent.

All of this helps to explain why it would have been shockingly naïve—if not willfully blind—for the Pulitzer Board to imagine that no conflicts would result from appointing Treuer to a jury when he has financial ties to two prestige imprints. Books from such imprints are likely to come up for awards, and not just because of their quality. Their publishers know how to position books for prizes and can afford entry fees such as the $75 per book for a Pulitzer.

The Board hasn’t said how many entrants its fiction prize had this year. But Treuer might have had to evaluate dozens from Pantheon and Riverhead along with others from PRH imprints that often win awards, such as Knopf and Doubleday.

You might argue that Treuer could have recused himself from judging any PRH book he saw as involving a conflict of interest. But that would have raised other issues.

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You may notice something curious if you pore over the reviews of the fiction Pulitzer winner and finalists, as I’ve been doing since Monday. Critics have described all three books in terms like “genre-bending” or “genre-blending.”

Is this just another sign that reviewers need to kill the clichés? Or does it suggest that the Pulitzer organization wanted to stack the deck in favor of a certain kind of winner?

Here’s my response as a critic who’s known at least a dozen past jurors and served as the vice president for awards of another major U.S. prize-giver.

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Tana French’s The Keeper came out in late March, which tells you her publisher sees it not just as a beach book but as a potential Mother’s Day gift. This raises a question. Which would Mom see as better proof of your devotion: a book that uses “fuck” 334 times, “shit” 210 times, and “piss” 31 times¹? Or a bouquet from Teleflora?

This question is no knock on the word “fuck,” which Philip Larkin used to brilliant effect in a poem I regard as a masterpiece of 20th century literature, “This Be The Verse.”² I quote French’s use of it rather to suggest that in her 10th book, the Vermont-born Irish crime novelist is repeating herself in ways that may tax the patience of her most ardent fans.

The final book in her Cal Hooper trilogy finds her retired Chicago cop still living in a down-on-its-luck Irish farm town where it rains a lot. At least, it does in November, when the intended fiancée of a local power broker’s son turns up dead in a river. Did the roughly 21-year-old Rachel Holohan kill herself after a lover’s quarrel? Or did someone want to silence her after she’d learned of a dirty business involving the land deals of her future father-in-law, Tommy Moynihan? Before the answer emerges, French has used the variations on words like “gray” and “rainy” almost as much as some of her characters’ favorite expletives.

You can see her heavy repetition as essential to the plot of The Keeper. You can say: It does rain a lot in Ireland. That’s partly why it’s so green, you “feckin’ eejit,” to use another phrase French’s characters like. You’d swear a lot, too, if you were scraping by on land your family had worked for generations and now faced threats from the industrial megafarms colonizing your country. You could argue that I was just lucky to have visited Ireland in June when it was sunny every day and nobody called me a “feckin’ eejit.”

One problem with those arguments is that French’s repetition helps to make for a book that, with some exceptions, has a lugubrious pace. A critic for the Irish Times rightly said that The Keeper “is not a page-turner in the urgent, modern sense.” And the plot itself isn’t particularly strong. It’s full of twists that make little sense and take too long to start moving.

‘Plotting is not my strong point’

In The Searcher, the first novel in the Cal Hooper series, French waits more than 150 pages to say that someone is missing, the critic Hillary Kelly noted in the Atlantic. In the second, The Hunter, a body doesn’t appear until almost page 300. You might see it as an improvement that in The Keeper, Rachel turns up dead on page 63. But before that comes protracted scene-setting, including an image on the first page of cows that “lie chewing the cud in slow, somnolent rhythms under a gray sky.” It sets the tone for much of what follows.

French has been admirably candid about the trouble she has with structuring her novels. “Plotting is not my strong point,” she told the New Yorker in 2019. She was talking about novels published before The Keeper, which included The Witch Elm and the Dublin Murder Squad procedurals that brought her international fame.

But the baggy structure of The Keeper shows that plotting remains a weakness not helped by a change in her narrative style. After writing in the past tense for her most honored book, In the Woods, and others in the Dublin Murder Squad series, French has switched to writing in the continuous present tense. The Keeper reflects mainly Cal’s point of view and to a lesser extent, Lena’s. And its present-tense narration limits them to what they can observe in the moment. They can’t condense events in ways that might have made for a tighter plot or quicker pace.

Other limits on the story come from Cal’s approach to crime-solving. Cal works out of a tumbledown house he’s restoring in Ardnakelty, the fictional town on the West Coast of Ireland where he’s settled. He lacks a crime lab and the high-tech forensic tools seen on TV shows like “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” And his low-tech methods impose other restrictions.

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