August 6, 2026 On Books No More Missionaries: Shiva Naipaul’s Jonestown By Andrew Holter Courtesy of The Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University, via Wikimedia Commons. From the outset there seemed to be little mystery as to the facts of the case at Jonestown. The victims included over nine hundred men, women, and children of People’s Temple, the majority of them Black Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area (which matters). The scene of the crime was an agricultural commune in the South American nation of Guyana (not a coincidence). The murder weapon (the word “suicide” here would be imprecise) was a blend of poisons mixed into a powdered drink called Fla-Vor-Aid. The culprit was the Reverend Jim Jones and his motive was simple: to spare his flock their impending annihilation at the hands of the United States government. Jones had talked about this prospect incessantly, obsessively, for a long time. There had been rehearsals. If the question is why so many people decided to kill themselves, the first answer has to be that a lot of them didn’t. Many syringes were found at the scene among the plastic cups. There was no meaningful notion of choice at Jonestown; Jones’s command to take the poison was enforced by men with guns. A third of the victims were children. Atrocities of that scale tend to have world-historic causes. But in the aftermath of that awful night on November 18, 1978, public inquiries mostly focused on the morbid explanations (cultology, groupthink, leader-worship, etc). Whatever else Jonestown was, it was the result of an accretion of human choices, many of them rational, and yet few writers investigated the political circumstances that had allowed a mad cleric to assume such earthly power in the first place. Read More
July 20, 2026 On Books Charles Brockden Brown Declares Independence By Ed Simon Fire (circa 1805), William Blake, The Morgan Library via Wikimedia Commons. The philosopher’s stone, desired by alchemists for its mythic ability to transmute lead into gold, was once in Philadelphia. Johannes Kelpius—mystic, monastic, and magician—supposedly came into possession of said stone shortly before his death in 1708. But rather than letting it be acquired by less reputable occultists, he dispatched a confidant to throw it from Germantown’s banks deep into the water of the Wissahickon Creek or the Schuylkill, depending on which account you believe. The German-speaking Transylvanian was a character from a gothic novel—an apocalyptic wizard who (so it was claimed) lived in a cave where he transformed “darkness into light, death into life,” and “metals into gold.” At the very end of that revolutionary century another Philadelphian had similar occult ambitions, albeit of a literary sort, in generating something new and glowing from the base materials of gothic literature. Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale—frequently claimed to be the first novel published in the United States—begins with a religious iconoclast not unlike Kelpius who spontaneously combusts while worshipping in a temple overlooking the Schuylkill. Brown describes how a “faint gleam suddenly shot athwart” the temple, seemingly the result of some occult experimentation. “In a moment,” he wrote, “the whole was reduced to ashes.” Read More
July 9, 2026 On Books César Aira’s Art of Not Editing By Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer Photograph by Nina Subin. César Aira coined the term “the flight forward” (huirhacia adelante) to describe his deceptively simple writing process. Every morning he writes for one hour at a local Buenos Aires café and then in the evening he types up that morning’s work on his computer, and once that’s done, there is no editing or revision—no polishing, no going back to fix continuity errors in retrospect; there is none of the labor of “the writer’s craft.” About his morning routine, he explained in an interview why a noisy café is perfect for him: The coffee shop is the ideal environment to write because I can write there for an hour (it’s all I need to complete the day’s work) since I only have my Montblanc and my notebook with me, while at home I have books to read, music to listen to, movies to watch, my wife to chat with … In my house there is always something more important to do than write. They ask me how I can concentrate in a coffee shop full of noise and movement and with the spectacle of the street on the other side of the windows. It happens that to write, to write what I write, I need to de-concentrate. Concentration would lead me inexorably to the tedious subject matter of my own boring life. And, given the stipulation in the flight forward against revision, mistakes cannot be fixed but must be incorporated into the whole as the novel progresses, making an Aira book always surprising, even (or especially) to himself. The resulting pull of his fiction’s compulsive, ever-fresh flow along unusual narrative channels feels somehow at once both organic and precise. Perhaps it is Aira living so fully in the moment—catching his thoughts in midair as he writes his scenes—that makes life itself, in all its random strangeness, come so startlingly alive on his pages. And while Aira’s process relies on improvisation and incorporates chance events—a bird, for example, once flew into the café while he was writing, and he worked it into a story—the fruits of his technique fell far from haphazard. If Raymond Roussel’s feverishly detailed machines are a touchstone for Aira, so is the rigorous observation of Balzac’s Comédie humaine. Aira combines an innate genius for fiction with a humbling erudition—he’s read everything, and translated much of it, from Shakespeare to Stephen King—which is how he can, before our very eyes get away with his flights. Any process is, in theory, replicable, but applying Aira’s would end the career of most writers. Read More
July 6, 2026 On Books Hélène Bessette and the Novel as Arc Lamp By Kathryn Scanlan The spark for Hélène Bessette’s third book came while she was on holiday with her two sons on the northern coast of France. One night, they heard a gunshot in the hotel where they were staying; Bessette later read in the newspaper that a boy had shot and killed his father. She continued to follow the case, and at some point began to reconstruct her findings on the page. A reader will quickly realize, however, that Bessette is not interested in anything like a straightforward true crime story; what burned in her were questions, and the book’s resulting form could be called an interrogation. Can we say she departed from the facts in the service of fiction, or should we say instead that fiction enabled a looser and truer vision of the crime? She published the book in 1955 as Vingt minutes de silence (newly translated as Twenty Minutes of Silence) with Éditions Gallimard, the home of her editor and champion, Raymond Queneau. It’s not surprising that Queneau admired Bessette’s novels, which resolutely ignore norms of grammar, typography, plot, character, and narrative, and look something like long, erratic dialogue-poems. In the introduction to the English version of his Exercises in Style, Queneau’s translator Barbara Wright describes the Oulipo cofounder’s interest in spoken French, citing a passage from his Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (1950): “I came to realize that modern written French must free itself from the conventions which still hem it in, (conventions of style, spelling and vocabulary) and then it will soar like a butterfly away from the silk cocoon spun by the grammarians of the 16th century and the poets of the 17th century.” Written language could be reformed by the spoken, and “the first statement of this new language should be … to put some philosophical dissertation into spoken French.” Twenty Minutes of Silence, though a novel, can also be read as a cacophonous speech-collage-turned-philosophical-investigation of crime and punishment, of social and familial mores, and of the genre of the novel itself. Read More
June 9, 2026 On Books The Vanishing Library: Timothy Ely’s Odd Little Book from Outer Space By Max Ross Borderline by Timothy Ely, front (left) and back (right) cover. Photographs by Max Ross. Late in the week I got an email from one of my book dealers. He was at a fair in New York and thought he’d found a buyer for Timothy Ely’s Borderline, a unique artist’s book I’d placed with him on consignment. It was welcome news; we’d been trying to sell Borderline for two years. Before traveling to New York, he’d asked if we might lower the price, from ten thousand dollars to seven thousand and five hundred, and I’d agreed that it seemed like time. Nothing was finalized, my dealer said, but he was optimistic. The prospective buyer had asked to be looped in if anyone else made an offer, and also wanted to know more about the book’s provenance. In my reply I explained how it had come into my possession: My father, a lawyer and book collector, had done some legal work for the founder of Granary Books, a publisher specializing in artists’ editions. As payment, he was able to buy titles from Granary at cost. He’d acquired a dozen or so through this arrangement, and Borderline was one of them. I’d inherited it when he’d died, about four years earlier. I didn’t want to sell Borderline, exactly. Like all the books I’d inherited, it was a little holy to me. To let it go would be to let go of another part of my father. I didn’t want to let more of him go. I’d begun to feel I was erasing him, forsaking him. He’d built his collection over four decades: a few hundred titles—first editions, special editions, illustrated editions—that, taken together, expressed him as vividly as a self-portrait. I knew who my father was because I’d worked to understand his tastes. His shelves held Joyce, Borges, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery; invention, philosophy, sensitivity, sensuality, beauty. (He’d joked once, after coming out, that he’d never been in the closet but between book covers.) Read More
May 22, 2026 On Books Barthelme, the Houstonian By Susan Choi Donald Barthelme, via Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Public domain. Barthelme was a Houstonian. To me this is the single most salient fact about him, though the competitors for that distinction are many: that he was a contemporary-art-museum director; that his childhood was spent riding in an open-top car through the undeveloped Texas prairie; that his friend and neighbor in New York City was Grace Paley; that his students called him Don B. and associated with him the powers of a mystic or shaman, if one prone to sarcasm. Barthelme was a genre unto himself, the rare writer who never wrote toward or against any previously recognized form but simply, somehow, took his own form, which is always instantly recognizable as its inept imitations are also instantly recognizable. All these qualities attest to his home city, at least for me, who shared the city with him for a while in the mid-eighties. Houston is a city of unexpected adjacencies. Because it has no zoning regulations, it has no zones. Instead, things are put places—a church, an ice house, some houses for living in, a place for strippers, a place to buy your fishing boat, a place to eat chilaquiles—in whatever way they happen to go, as if the city has said, collectively, Let’s not get too hung up on formalities, we’ve got enough room not to worry about it. Even now, Houston is a city like a prairie, its urbanity thin as a threadbare quilt tossed onto the grass, a playful indication of the urban. And this is also very Barthelme, this playing with category rather than dutifully seeking to conform, this ignoring of the very many conventions—of living, thinking, and certainly of writing—with which the rest of the world seems to unquestioningly preoccupy itself. Read More