Imranwrites — Notes & Observations Reviews, recommendations, and essays for serious readers.

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

There was a time, not so long ago, when the short story collection was treated like the novel’s poorer relation—something you wrote on your way to a real book, a proving ground rather than a destination. Publishers hedged. Booksellers tucked slim volumes spine-out on dust-gathering shelves. Readers, we were told, wanted long. They wanted immersive. …
Continue reading The Quiet Revival of the Short Story Collection

Something has gone quiet in the architecture of modern novels. Walk through the fiction section of any bookstore and you will find competent prose, sensitive characters, and carefully rendered settings. What you will struggle to find is a book willing to dismantle its own form in service of its vision. The contemporary novel, by and …
Continue reading Why Contemporary Fiction Needs More Structural Ambition

The Moment Everything Shifted You’ve probably noticed it too. There’s this palpable shift happening right now in how we talk about books online, and it’s messy and complicated and honestly kind of wonderful if you’re willing to sit with the discomfort of it. By late 2024 and into 2025, something unexpected happened: the very platform …
Continue reading The BookTok Backlash of 2025 Is Actually a Gift to Literary Fiction—Here’s Why the Numbers Prove It

The Numbers That Surprised Everyone I need to tell you something that made me actually gasp when I saw it: US print book unit sales hit 767 million in 2025. Let that number sit for a second. That’s the highest we’ve seen since 2010, and it represents a 4.3% jump from 2024. When I first …
Continue reading Physical Books Are Winning Again: What the 2025 Data Reveals About Reading in the Age of Screens

The Year We All Got Scared (And Started Reading) I need to be honest with you from the start: 2025 was the year I stopped pretending to understand what people mean when they talk about AI, and I started actually reading about it. Not the Twitter explainers. Not the think-piece headlines that promise to make …
Continue reading Reading the AI Debate: The Best Books Published in 2025 That Actually Explain What Artificial Intelligence Is Doing to Society