Month:May 2026

Sheila Heti published Motherhood in 2018, a book that asked whether to have a child by flipping coins, tracking her dreams, circling the question until it became something else entirely—a long, unsparing look at what it means to make art. The narrator went by Sheila. She lived in Toronto, she was a writer, she had …
Continue reading How Autofiction Became the Dominant Mode and Why That Matters

There’s a particular theatre to it: the gold sticker catching the light, the announcement delivered with held-breath ceremony, the sudden scramble for reprints and the author blinking into a wall of cameras. We lean in every season, waiting for a coronation that feels both startling and fated. Lately, though, I find myself leaning back, arms …
Continue reading Why Literary Prizes Reward Safe Choices

I have a small confession. For a long stretch of my twenties, I used the Sunday New York Times bestseller list as a kind of reading conscience. If a novel sat near the top for more than a month, I assumed it had earned its place through sheer literary merit. I treated the list not …
Continue reading The Problem With Bestseller Lists as Cultural Guides

Before English grew into a swaggering world language, long before it could claim Shakespeare, Austen, or Dickens, it was a restless adolescent tongue. It wanted models, forms, a sense of weight. And so it looked outward—mostly to Greek and Latin, then to Italian, French, German, Russian, and Arabic—for something to eat. Translation didn’t just stack …
Continue reading How Translation Changed the English Literary Landscape

Something is stirring in the literary world, and it does not announce itself with the fanfare of a blockbuster novel release. There are no midnight release parties, no pre-order campaigns promising exclusive content, no billboards along the highway. Instead, the short story collection—long considered the commercial underdog of publishing—has been gathering strength in the background, …
Continue reading The Quiet Revival of the Short Story Collection