June 1, 2026 Bookmarks Perfectoid Spaces By Tarpley Hitt and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor Kevin Hartnett’s The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine is Transforming Math and AI (Quanta Books) tells the story of Lean, a proof assistant program. Here, an extract from a series of work messages from an ebullient but erratic expert in “perfectoid spaces”: Kevin Buzzard: This is going to be so much fun Kevin Buzzard: Lean is made for this sort of stuff Kevin Buzzard: Mario, this is what real maths looks like … Kevin Buzzard: it is a million miles from anything that has ever been formalized Kevin Buzzard: and it will be easy to formalize Kevin Buzzard: Lean is a big puzzle game Kevin Buzzard: and we will be able to make some really cool levels for this game … Kevin Buzzard: the type is the level, the term is the solution Kevin Buzzard: All the old levels are boring Read More
May 7, 2026 Bookmarks Elegant Dirty Diary Entry By Tarpley Hitt and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor An excerpt from Maïa Hruska’s Kafkaesque: From Jorge Luis Borges to Primo Levi, Ten Writers Who Translated Kafka and Transformed Twentieth-Century Literature (Ecco), translated from the French by Sam Taylor: Let us consider, for example, Kafka’s elegant diary entry on 2 August 1914: ‘Germany has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon.’ From Xiao Hai’s memoir Adrift in the South (Granta Editions), translated from the Chinese by Tony Hao: A few years ago, I wrote a poem titled ‘Production Floor #2’, which was inspired by my time in Sino-Nokia. The first stanza of the poem reads: The assembly lines are its arms The computer screens are its eyes My brain its engine, running day and night Light bulbs the sun, beneath which we dream in exhaustion Oh, my production floor This place is not my home My home is three thousand li away And so it was, in the dazzling metropolis of Shenzhen, that I experienced many firsts in my life: my first time getting trapped on an illegal bus; my first time cutting open a finger with a blade on an overnight shift; my first time washing under a tap after an evening shift in winter; my first time waking up from a wet dream in pain, not knowing what at happened; my first time picking wild lychees and mangoes in the woods by the factory campus with coworkers … My life was unfathomably enriched in the big city. My teenage years were like those wild lychees, growing larger and redder as the weather got warmer. I was oblivious to the time silently slipping away from me. Read More
April 2, 2026 Bookmarks A Bubbly Ambivalence. . . By Tarpley Hitt and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor From Opera Fever (Wave Books), a new poetry collection by Chelsey Minnis: What should be said in poems. . A bubbly ambivalence. . . Or a mirror seen through bullet holes? Read More
March 4, 2026 Bookmarks Weird Things Occurring There By Tarpley Hitt and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor From Antoine Volodine’s novel The Monroe Girls (Archipelago), translated from the French by Alyson Waters, an encounter in a hospital for schizophrenics: The comment led to a silence. Everyone was trying to imagine the dark street, unknown, with weird things occurring there. The guy near the door pushed the light timer and the central globe lit up, first with a red glimmer, then a sickly glow. It was an energy-saving lamp and, for thousands of hours, it had been saving its energy and diffusing a light for the dying and sustainable development. When we were in this bedroom, Breton and I, we generally preferred the slightly brighter light from the two streetlamps in the courtyard. “No point staying in the dark,” commented the guy, as if to excuse himself for having modified the lighting. Read More
February 1, 2026 Bookmarks Eggs Delicately Balanced By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor From Ann Rower’s Lee & Elaine (Semiotext(e)), first published by Serpent’s Tail in 2002: For months after she’d put her signature bubblegum vaginas on his mailbox. From Daniel Poppick’s The Copywriter (Scribner): “I’m done,” Ruth says over a quarter of a plate of roasted cauliflower, delivering the words like a lithe boxer elegantly working a punching bag. One of our cats, the bullseye tabby, jumps on the table and in a single motion I mindlessly pick him up and throw him on the couch, where he emits a soft meep upon impact. Lucy reaches for Ruth’s plate. “Oh, I meant I’m done with poetry,” says Ruth. “But you can take the plate. Thank you, it was delicious.” Read More
January 5, 2026 Bookmarks The Great Empty Cup of Attention By Sophie Haigney and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor From Jérémie Koering’s Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images (Zone Books), translated from the French by Nicholas Huckle, a description of the Egyptian Statue of the Healer Djedhor (320 B.C.E.): The statue includes a wide variety of magical, biographical, and dedicatory inscriptions, and we find a dual system of basins carved into its plinth. The first of these, running around the main figure, allowed for the collection of water poured over both it and the stela, while the second, sculpted deeper and connected to the first by a channel, formed a sort of reservoir into which a container might be dipped. The two basins were clearly intended to be the statue’s magico-medical end point. From evidence pointed out by Lacau, we can see that the object was intended primarily for a procedure of “washing” rather than for reading. … The magical inscriptions are generally positioned so as to face the healer figure, notably so with the second basin, in such a way that they appear intended to be read not so much by the officiating priest, but rather by the statue itself. … The artifact was principally activated by the running of the water that the sick person, or an intermediary, would then draw from the basin. The liquid poured over the surface of the object is a substitute, therefore, for the ritual of incantation. But how are we to understand this piece of legerdemain? What could authorize such a slippage? It is hard to believe that the invocation, whose importance is so well known in ancient Egyptian culture, might have been entirely sidelined, at least conceptually. The solution is most likely to be found in the analogy one could make between the act of reading and the running water. The contact and the movement of the water were possibly likened to the experience of reading: the physical action of the water, running from top to bottom and adapting itself to all the reliefs and hollows of the engraved object, must have seemed equivalent to the work of the reader’s eyes, moving down the sculpture from the top to the base, activating the magical potential of the written story. … The liquid, as it is poured over his body and over the stela of Horus, might be likened to the flow of a murmured voice. Essentially, the water would be called upon to activate an always possible, potential reading. … The water running over the stela carries out a process that reading aloud is unable to achieve, mixing image and text in a flow that makes no distinction between these two material parts of the object. It gathers the trace of the images and writing into a material, dynamic, and continuous substance, creating thus a remedy that, still active and in motion, could then be taken and given to the sick person. Read More