May 12, 2026 On Books Sheila Heti on Andrés Felipe Solano’s Gloria By Sheila Heti I love a novel that tells you why it was written, a novel that has a bit of backstage to it. It’s like sitting at the edge of a row of theater seats, in a cheap seat that reveals an actor standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I hate that in the theater, but I love it in a book. Gloria, written by the Colombian novelist and journalist Andrés Felipe Solano, and elegantly translated by Will Vanderhyden, is that kind of novel. It is the story of one long night in the seventies, during a brief spell when the author’s mother lived in New York. She was twenty. It was before her marriage to his father, and before Solano was born. But the story of a young woman (not yet a mother) becomes, through a series of very delicate, very sparingly placed interruptions in the telling, also the story of a son imagining the life of a mother he can never meet. He lingers in the shadows, brings her to life, withdraws, and then returns again in brief passages, or stray sentences, offering little hopes, a bit of wonder, tiny narrative gifts, as if from a god in the sky. 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
May 6, 2026 On the Internet Rotten Dot Com By Dena Yago Henri-Charles Guérard, Composite print of Japanese masks and a death’s-head (1888), from the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Public domain. “Wanna see a dead body?” Milo asks from the back seat. The 5 is a white blade under the Valley sun, everything bleached flat, overexposed as we fly toward Fry’s Electronics. It’s 1999. The Acura’s sweating leather sticks to my thighs. My skin feels amphibian, a tween-age Geico gecko blinking too hard, raw in the new light of too much consciousness. Even at eleven, Milo likes to pull out provocations sourced from some dark aquifer on the internet not yet known to me. Unlike Milo, I don’t have a PC in my bedroom. But we’re on our way to fix that. Now Milo pivots, unzipping his backpack like a schoolyard dealer to flash two CD jewel cases. Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe (1998): an X carved into his gristly forehead flesh, chrome flames across the plastic. Busta Rhymes’s Extinction Level Event (1998): a world on fire, his mouth mid-detonation. “Which one?” he asks. I don’t answer, reluctant to admit I know neither. Noah, my brother, at the wheel, picks Busta in the rearview. “If you want it, let me hear you say it (gimme some more),” Busta belts. I, too, am eleven. A child of a recent bicoastal divorce, spending the summer in the Pacific Palisades, being driven to Fry’s to assemble my first desktop PC—my twenty-three-year-old brother’s gift in the key of fraternal benevolence, pedagogical duty, and Californian techno-optimism. A deal struck with my dad: if we can build it, I can keep it in my room. Milo—my surf-tanned, platinum-blond, Point Dume–living, feral best friend with an Insane Clown Posse fixation and a household parrot that mimics his mother’s laugh—is along for the ride. He’s beautiful and hectic. I want to live in his house. I want to live in his brain, his skin. I’m high on his confidence the way only a young girl without much of her own can be. So yes, sure: I want to see a dead body. Read More
May 5, 2026 On Art The Ignorant Art Historian: Ice Floes By Hal Foster Claude Monet, Ice Floes, 1893, oil on canvas, 26 x 39 ½ inches, via Wikimedia Commons. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, licensed under CC0 1.0. The Ignorant Art Historian is a series by the art critic Hal Foster, in which he tries to “demystify the viewing of art a little, not to deskill it exactly, but to suggest that anyone can do it.” You can read his introduction to the series here and the first installment here. The next two entries will appear later this month. Almost everyone passes right by this Monet at the Met. Unlike the paintings of his iconic Haystack or Rouen Cathedral series, examples of which are nearby, this bluish-white blur is easy to overlook. You have to wait on this picture, attend to it, in order for it to appear at all. Read More
May 4, 2026 On Books Wolfgang Koeppen’s Structural Musicality By Joshua Cohen © Suhrkamp Verlag, courtesy of New Directions. Wolfgang Koeppen, the maestro dirigent of the post-Nazi German-language novel, was born in the cold old Prussian port of Greifswald in 1906, a bastard, as they used to be called, the out-of-wedlock son of a seamstress who moonlit as a theater prompter and an ophthalmologist father, who dabbled in winter sports and competitive ballooning and refused most contact. Mother and son moved around a lot, from Koeppen’s grandmother’s house to the house of his mother’s stepsister. In 1912, the year Death in Venice (not Death in Rome) was published, the pair settled in Ortelsburg, Masuria, which is now the Polish city of Szczytno, where Koeppen attended Realschule. Mother and son fled west with World War I, heading along the Baltic coast until returning to Greifswald, where Koeppen made efforts to resume his schooling before dropping out totally and working as a deliverer for a bookstore, a cook, a ship’s cook, an assembler in factories, a theater usher, a movie theater usher, a projectionist, an ice maker and deliverer, and a tester of light bulbs. Each of these occupations, it might be argued, is a metaphor for “novelist”: delivering the books, preparing nourishment, et cetera. They certainly provided what in German industrial circles is called “material.” Read More
May 4, 2026 First Person My Friend Bambi By Brontez Purnell Bambi is in the front, to the right. Photograph by Daniel Nicoletta. Bambi Lake had come into my life like a specter or apparition, at first, faintly present, but something that would grow in intensity at every conversation had thereafter. I was go-go dancing at this bar in San Francisco on Polk Street called Club Rendezvous for a bygone SF night called Club Macho. The party had spilled out of the club and onto the street up near the doughnut shop and I remember dancing naked in the street and in the background, I saw her looking at me, Bambi. Like, tall, EVOCATIVE blond bob, vintage mid-century baby doll dress and, like, a fur coat. I was wasted and dancing but I just remember her being burned into my retina, the way you could look at someone and just know they were somebody; the word is striking—every time I saw that woman she was well dressed and just visually striking. Her fashion sense alone could melt fucking lead. Read More