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Readings

Excerpts from the best and most bizarre new books, testimonies, government documents, journals, news reports, speeches, and letters.

Art of Living

From his introduction to a new edition of Fear and Loathing in America, by Hunter S. Thompson, which was published this spring by Simon & Schuster. In 1971, when I…

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John

From Girl, 1983, which will be published next month by W. W. Norton. Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken. There was a student I’ll call John. We went to…

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The Extremophile

From The Xenotext: Book 2, which will be published this month by Coach House Books. Astronauts fear it. Biologists fear it. It is not human. It lives in isolation. It…

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Le Drugstore

From Name, which was published in April by Semiotext(e). Translated from the French by Lauren Elkin.  Little bottles of neon-yellow liquid, the scent of pastis. Paregoric elixir, or tincture of…

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Zen There, Done That

From outgoing executive editor Jim Hicks’s essay in the Spring 2025 issue of The Massachusetts Review. Back in the spring of 2009, shortly after taking this job, I met with…

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Psalm 3

From a work in progress. You have kissed the wig. Have stood between the window and its drapery and looked out onto the street like a spy at his assassin,…

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Beyond The Grave

From a statement he prepared before his death. Shabat was a Palestinian journalist reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza, where he was killed in March by the Israel Defense Forces.…

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The Tsadik, the Roshe, and the Ugly

From an essay that appears for the first time in English in Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: A Spiritual Reappraisal, 1946–1955, a collection of his pseudonymous essays for the Yiddish…

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Little White Lies

From a Department of Justice report on the Tulsa race massacre that was published in January, before President Biden left office, and conducted by its Cold Case Unit, Civil Rights…

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Word Search

From Speaking in Tongues, by J. M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos, which will be published this month by Liveright. j. m. coetzee: I was writing something yesterday, concentrating intensely on getting into words…

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Role Models

From What Is Wrong with Men, a study of how portrayals of the American man have changed in films starring Michael Douglas, which will be published next month by Pantheon.…

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Doge with a Bone

From posts shared in February on the subreddit r/fednews, a “platform for U.S. Federal employees to discuss work-related topics, share perspectives, and stay informed.” I work in grants and since…

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Like the Circles Under Your Eyes

From The Essential C. D. Wright, which will be published this month by Copper Canyon Press. clouds jammed into the foreground     big toe in the suckhole with all our know-how…

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This Garment Called Life

By Hélène Bessette, from Lili Is Crying, which will be published next month by New Directions. Translated from the French by Kate Briggs. It’s like this, says Lili. I left…

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Answering Machine

From a press conference given in March by Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario. reporter: As you have acknowledged, a trade war is going to hurt. Food-bank use was already…

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Birds to Song

From Runagate, a collection of poems that draw on archival records of chattel slavery. The book will be published this month by Duke University Press. jack (and paul) Escaped by…

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Mortal Coils

From Earthly Materials, which will be published this month by Mariner Books. Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around…

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Heavens? No

From Issue 11 of Deadlines and Divine Distractions, which was published in December. Dearest (If I may): Do (and here I’m charitably speculating that my previous letters have for some…

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Home Front

From interviews given to a researcher by six Ukrainian women in May and June of last year and provided to Harper’s Magazine. The researcher’s identity has been withheld to protect…

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Poetic License

From “Notes on Baudelaire’s Parisian Tableaux,” which was published for the first time in English in the Fall 2024 issue of October. Translated from the French by Michael Krimper. Baudelaire…

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Eye of Death

From The Rose, which will be published this month by Graywolf Press. Me & Amanda went to see David Blaine the night of the Scorpio Eclipse. He held his breath…

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Plates of Fruit, Cut and Peeled

From Silkworm’s Pansori, which was published last month by The Song Cave. Persimmons on a leafless tree: unlaid eggs in a butchered hen. The old woman picks from the sagging…

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Cocktail Hour

From Sister Europe, which was published last month by Knopf. Demian was among the first guests to arrive, taking a taxi. He had intended to get through the evening by…

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Live and Learn

From Silent Catastrophes, which was published last month by Random House. Translated from the German by Jo Catling. Few have reflected as thoroughly as Elias Canetti upon the fateful processes…

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Speech Pathology

From Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth, by Maggie Nelson, which will be published this month by Wave Books. In speech therapy we played a board game in which…

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Something Amis

From the introduction to a reissue of Martin Amis’s novel London Fields, which was published in November by Vintage, in Britain. The curse of Englishness is something whose magnitude we…

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Dream State

From reports of dreams collected in The Third Reich of Dreams, by Charlotte Beradt, a new translation of which will be published next month by Princeton University Press. Beradt gathered…

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Johannes’s Veneer

From a lecture delivered last year by Kristian Vistrup Madsen at the University of Applied Arts, in Vienna. There’s nobody like Vermeer. Or is there? His modest known output of…

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June 2025

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