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The real question I’m trying to answer is what is the novel uniquely suited to do? In our unliterary age, the reader will be pardoned for answering “nothing.” And I agree that the novel has very little relevance today for mass culture—a relevance that will only continue to diminish over time.

And yet I believe the novel is still, potentially at least, of paramount importance, for a reason very different from the one you are likely imagining.

Our culture is in need of a religious, artistic and political rejuvenation. Those who are in a place to effect such rejuvenation, unfortunately, have been raised in the same miasma as the rest of us and are therefore without a clear idea just how this rejuvenation ought to occur. Where does one start?

I believe that the novel—not the essay, the tweet, the podcast, or the item of short for video content—is the ideal form for posing and even beginning to answer such a question. I might even go as far as to say that such question cannot be satisfactorily posed except in novelistic form. And finally, the novel’s form itself provide us the right form of the answer, as the practice of engaging with art, diminished though it is, remains the only true ritual consistently practiced by educated moderns. My rationale for these strange notions are unsystematically espoused throughout the discursive essay below.

In case the essay is to discursive, at its end I have provided a little listicle of prescriptions for the serious novelist. I call this “Dogma 26” after Lars von Trier’s 1995 list of prescriptions for filmmakers, “Dogme 95.”

What is the novel today?

Let’s look at the mundane side of things. For the American writers before my own generation—beginning with the Greatest Generation and ending with Gen X—the writing of novels was, first of all, a possible path to financial success without having to work a day job. (John Updike’s son David decided he himself wanted to be a writer when he noticed how little his father actually worked. And John Updike was one the most hardworking and prodigious of his cohort.) For writers of the Baby Boomer generation onward, the writing of novels was also a path to a sinecure at a university (for the especially famous, this started a little earlier; Robert Frost captured the gist when he referred to his position at the various universities to which he was attached as poetic radiator), where one was admired by bright-eyed young people and even got to sleep with the more adventurous of them. This is (for the most part) no longer the case, though there are still some sinecures and grants for those who tick the right boxes. Why do the rest of us persist?

Well, obviously, there is more to the writing of novels than the mundane side of things. Even among commercial authors, I suspect that very few novelists become novelists for mercenary reasons, and I suspect that none of the great novelists did so. Beyond money, fame, and sex, what is the literary artist aiming for?

At the deepest personal level, the creation of a great novel is an instance of the maxim physician, heal thyself. The novelist has a cultural or spiritual wound that he or she wishes to fix. But he or she finds a very particular and roundabout way of doing so. This is by finding the larger-scale problem that correlates with the personal wound. With truly great novels, the scale is so large as to be universal. That is to say, the artist zooms out. The insane person and the narcissist project their own personal wounds onto the world, thus transforming the world into a place that only recapitulates their own very specific sad stories. The artist takes his or her sad story and finds what’s universal in it, thereby expanding his or her vantage point enormously and breaking the spell of individual hurt.

Myth and reality

The novelist thus turns the real into myth. I realize when I use the word myth I may lose some people. So let me use a few examples to make this idea concrete. One sort of myth is that of the wounded lover. An early version of this can be found in the Italian poet Petrarch’s famous sonnet sequence—which was, at least at the moment of inspiration, about a woman who had caused him pain. But Petrarch takes this pain and aestheticizes it. “Fool, look in thy heart and write,” he advises himself in the last line of the first sonnet of the series. And that very command—to take the experience and make something artful out of it—immediately takes Petrarch out of the worm’s eye view and puts him in the bird’s eye view.1 Petrarch is seeing himself from the vantage point of someone else. This echoes the shift from Romanticism to Realism that I wrote about a few year ago on my old blog.

This process of changing one’s vantage point heals the wound by removing the ego, and in so doing Petrarch also provides the means for his reader to heal his or her own wound. This particular wounded lover myth appears again and again in Western literature. Modern instantiations that immediately come to mind are Vladimir Nabokov’s Mary and Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers (both of which are, not coincidentally, first novels). In each of these novels the narrator spends the length of the novel yearning, unrequitedly, for his beloved. In each of these novels the narrator ends the book by zooming out his perspective, renouncing his yearning and (implicitly) beginning to write the book which the reader holds in hand. The plot is not only an account of a protagonist leveling up his state of consciousness, but a symbol of the alchemical artistic process itself.

Another way of making this concept concrete is to examine the structure of Shakespeare’s plays, with the help of the poet-critic Ted Hughes’s magisterial book-length essay on the Bard, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. In his preface to this book, Hughes points out that today we tend to love Shakespeare for being a precocious realist along the lines of Dickens or Balzac and other 19th century novelists; and indeed there had been no dramatist prior to Shakespeare to inject his plays with so much earthy detail. Yet Shakespeare was also deeply mythic in his perspective, and this is why we revere him—whether we know that this is why or not.

Hughes argues that the middle and later plays of Shakespeare constitute an elaboration of a single myth, which was presaged by Shakespeare’s two early long poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece.” This myth is the rejection of a Goddess, and the Goddess’s ensuing revenge—by bringing madness, humiliation, or death to the character who has rejected the Goddess and has thus rejected Eros. For Hughes this is a perennial theme throughout the corpus of myth: “I pointed out,” he writes, summarizing his introductory chapter, “how the demonization of the Goddess, or one half of her, as a result of this rejection, was fully anticipated in the original mythic splitting of the Aphrodite figure (Mother and Sacred Bride) and a Persephone figure (Queen of Hell), in the various traditions. . . . According to this lineage, [Shakespeare’s] Equation is itself a primordial mythic structure, like an elemental law in physics.”

Hughes argues that for Shakespeare this was not only a perennial theme but a timely one: It was demonstrated by the recent anti-Erotic Puritan revolt to which Shakespeare’s plays responded. We first see this political-social theme crop up unmistakably in the person of Angelo, the strident reformer in Measure for Measure. (Within Hughes’s conception of the Shakespearean “equation,” Angelo’s incomprehensible and maddening lust for Isabella is an instantiation of the Goddess’s revenge.)

Finally, it is not too importunate to deduce some feature of Shakespeare’s biography that also aligns with this mythic and historical situation: What biographical evidence we have shows that Shakespeare abandoned his wife for many years, and the evidence from the Sonnets makes clear the author’s preoccupation with the travails of lust.

Thus Shakespeare’s Equation forming the plots of his greatest plays is derived from three separate strata: (1) historical occurrences (2) myths as they have come down to us in recorded history and (3) mythic structures themselves, which are like elemental laws in physics. This last category of inspiration is something that, presumably, any human at any time on earth can access innately, but to which Shakespeare had a particular attraction due to his sensitive artistic temperament and the circumstances of his own life.

So, when I say the novelist turns the real into myth, this is what I mean. I mean he or she accesses intuitively, through meditative exercises, through poetic trance, or through drugs or mental imbalance,2 the mythic structures behind reality which are elusive to us in our rational age. These structures are homologous with mundane reality (hence the power of symbols) while being in a deep sense are more real than it.

The novel and society

Prior to the 20th century, every society on earth was essentially theocratic. That is, every society subordinated its people’s worldly interests to some form of otherworldly interest. The 20th century was an interesting experiment, no doubt, but I believe it is safe to say that neither secularism nor material goods have produced the utopia imagined by such optimistic early 20th century liberals as H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. It is even looking increasingly unlikely that we will even achieve the kind of vaguely pleasant anhedonic post-thymos global nanny state envisioned by Francis Fukuyama.

It seems fair to me to posit that the sense of dissatisfaction experienced even by the materially comfortable can be explained by the fact that the society in which they live is insufficiently theocratic. By this I only mean that the principles that undergird religion—a sense of continuity with the past and future, a sense that our mundane world is contiguous with the transcendent, and a belief that ritual is necessary for the opening up of the membrane between mundane and transcendent—must also undergird decision-making mechanisms of those who run the society in order for that society to flourish. As odd as this may sound to the modern ear, it was a baseline assumption of earlier ages. After all, even the United States of America used to be such a country and putatively still is, which is why we still swear on the Bible and impress the words “In God We Trust” on our coins.

In a flourishing society, the transcendent must be successfully integrated into the social order, and it is through ritual that this integration takes place. It is ritual that opens up that membrane between the mundane and transcendent. Yet for modern man such ancient rituals are largely ineffective—except for art, which is to say mythic storytelling, which is the sine qua non of any religion new or old. Thus the novel is not only a tool for descriptively pointing toward an effective society, but is itself, by way of the artist’s breaking away into the transcendent and then bringing some element of it back for an audience, a ritual, and the most powerful and effective ritual still available to us in the desacralized modern world.

The ancient Egyptians maintained such an incredibly conservative art because they understood how powerful art was for influencing the people, and that the viewing of their art was a ritual action which effected the thoughts of the people who viewed it. This great responsibility lies with the modern artist, too. Even if he doesn’t create the conscience of the masses, he creates the conscience of those who still have the intelligence and imagination to read serious works; the odds are high enough that some of such people will be the leaders of tomorrow’s society.

How does the novelist enact such a ritual? Here is a brief attempt at enumerating the preconditions for doing so.

The novelist’s responsibilities

One cannot neglect the nuts and bolts, just as you can’t have a priest without a cincture. To write a good novel, one must be a good craftsman, an excellent practitioner of his or her native tongue. But this subject is covered ably in many other books.3 But there is a still more important element seldom discussed, and it is by ignoring this element that our modern novelists have largely brought the form to shame.

To write a good novel, you have to exit the reality distortion vortex that serves as the prerequisite for the emission of polite speech and for political jockeying. The novel is, in this limited sense, impolite and anti-political. And no one will write a great novel if he or she cannot afford to to embody either of these qualities. This does not apply only to matters of “political correctness.” An acquaintance with reality in general is necessary. James Joyce desperately needed to know the height of the railings at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin in order to write the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses; he required strict realism to take the imaginative flights that he did. This sounds simple enough, but unfortunately we got in such a habit of distorting reality in order to make polite conversation that it is easy for one’s work to accidentally suffer. A very simple example: In a roundup that includes a review of my own novel Stop All the Clocks, writes appositely of the reality distortion vortex’s effect on a novel by the affable British comedian Richard Osman:

First, Richey quotes Osman’s book:

Amy weighs up the odds. Kevin is around six two, must weigh upwards of 260lbs. If she can unbalance him, it’s an easy win for her. But Kevin is an ex-Navy SEAL. And Kevin knows that he is six two, and heavy, so Kevin also knows that if Amy can unbalance him it’s an easy win for her. Kevin is therefore keeping his distance and letting the gun do the work. Amy hears handcuffs. The second Kevin reaches for her wrists, he will be doomed. Once she overpowers him, she can worry about what to do next.

And then Richey responds:

I point this out because in all of the modern examples of amazing, girlboss, female fighters, I can’t remember anything as ridiculous as this. And there has been a lot of ridiculous stuff. I don’t care how well trained Amy is, or if she looks like Brienne of Tarth. She’s not going to automatically win against a 6’2” ex-Navy SEAL, if he but touches her wrists. That’s basically science fiction. In reality her chances of “overpowering” him in a straight up fight are next to zero, to say nothing of a situation where he’s got the drop on her and is holding a gun. “Easy win”? “He will be doomed”? Come on!? I can’t imagine Osman is really that blinkered. I guess it must be a trap to catch out bad people like me. If so, I guess he succeeded.

Success indeed. And Osman’s book is a bestseller. But what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?

Zoom out

How else does a novelist enact the sort of ritual necessary to guide elite opinion and rejuvenate society? Obviously, the novelist needs to write about the most pressing issues of his or her age. This was obvious to Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, and Dickens. But it has been forgotten for several reasons—of which modernism was a major contributor—which were discussed in the earlier essays in this series. I won’t linger on that. A more interesting question is how it is that the novelist’s craft differs from that of the essayist or anyone else deeply concerned with the issues of his or her age.

One unique feature of the novel is its adherence to the mythico-philosophical concept of the conjunction of opposites. Mircea Eliade notes the tendency of myths to “express on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be reconciled . . . .” This tendency is also present in the religions of today; what two Gods are more irreconcilable than jealous Yahweh and generous Christ—though they be but one and the same? Within the literary arts, the novel continues this tradition. A novel is not a novel if it merely shows a superior hero’s triumph over his surroundings; this might be an epic, or a comic book, or an item of erotica. But the great novel perfectly balances competing interests; it is a concretization of ambivalence.

The novelist is free in a way other writers are not to take a longer view of the world, and to synthesize the parts that make up our daily lives into a whole. Moreover, the novelist is free not only to tell us what he or she thinks about various situations, but to imagine what it is to feel them. There is an immense power to such a way of writing, and it is the imaginative capability that the reader of novels has historically responded to so passionately. Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book primarily about the love lives of a handful of individuals, reveals more about the sort of socialism with a human face that we encounter today in the west than a dozen dry books of history could. To make ideas concrete and to imagine their effects on individual lives is already a form of thought more effective and more thorough than that which is available to the large majority of punditry today. To be able to do so on a grand social scale, as the great novelists have done, is so far beyond the powers of the average artist of today that it sometimes feels that the great 19th century novelists were of a different species.

And yet the novel’s potential power is greater still. Beyond its exoteric aim of telling a story that portrays the passions of a large social milieu, a great novel has an esoteric aim. This is the place where poetry gets mixed in, where passages make the reader’s hair stand on end. And indeed horripilation is as good a test as any for the success of a novel or any other work of art in this mysterious realm. The novel is unique in that it is sufficiently capacious to allow for the imagining of a new world in which ritual has been revived and wholeness has been restored to society, while also being sufficiently poetic that the reading of a novel might constitute participation in that ritual itself.

To put it another way: the novel is a perfect admixture of the rational and irrational.4 The novelist in this sense is the ultimate magician: he or she on the one hand reflects reality as clearly as possible, while on the other hand simultaneously induces poetic trance, leading the reader unknowingly into a realm beyond “reality.” “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” is as much a description as it is an abracadabra.

Implicit here is a comment on the structure of reality. This comment is not “mystical” but rather requires some humility with regard to our understanding of the universe; the comment theorizes the existence of features of reality which we have not fully mapped. These features include human instincts that have been called the unconscious. I tend to agree with scholars of such psychological processes such as Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade that these unconscious instincts form a part of an objective reality which we cannot yet adequately map, and moreover that they are intimately connected with the forms of reality that we have traditionally called religion when we do attempt to make the maps. Even today when the educated west is less inclined to practice religion, these forces of reality which we have not adequately mapped break through to us in the form of neurosis or psychosis, and other irrational behavior. Or in the form of literature. As the scholar and publisher Roberto Calasso puts it, “one way or another the world will go on being the place of epiphanies.”

Meanwhile, material questions of paramount importance loom: What is a human and what is machine? What are the rules around human procreation now that much of this process can be replaced by machine? What is the proper form of government in a globally connected society? What is the role of biology now that our understanding of human biology reveals many facts unflattering to the worldview that has dominated elite opinion for the last several centuries? This is just a smattering. And perhaps most pressing of all is the question concerning humankind’s relationship to the transcendent—do we exist for the sake of anything greater than ourselves? Of course anyone can participate in the discussion of these questions but it is likely only those of peculiar temperament and peculiar capacity for leisure who will actually want to engage with them in the way that the novel allows. And, more importantly, who will be able to concentrate well enough to undergo the ritual trance that the novel may induce. My hope is that future novels may both pose the right questions and induce the right trances among the right people. If this is to be the case, then the novel may be far more important than other much more ballyhooed media.

Of course I realize people will still write entertainments and self-justifying autofiction and smut. This is fine. With this essay I only wish to indicate what, in the field of novel-writing, is genuinely worthwhile.

A Listicle (Dogma 26)

Some prescriptions for the serious novelist:

1. Your Audience is small

   You are not, primarily, an entertainer. (And yet you must be entertaining. Writing novels is hard). Your primary job is to usher forth a new era of humanity. In doing so, you will likely not appeal to distracted people reading your book on the train on their way to work.

2. Be Real

   You can’t write a worthwhile novel if you can’t free yourself from the Reality Distortion Vortex. You can’t do it if you’re trying above all be polite and win plaudits.

3. Myth-make

   You must be a mythmaker. This means you know what the realm of the mythic is, which means you must have found access to the transcendent, whether by spiritual practice or by accident.

4. Examine an Important Social Problem Deeply

   Nothing Purely Subjective, No “Slices of Life.” Your novel should convey at least some characters outside your own milieu.

5. Ambivalence is the precondition for transcendence.

   Even if, from your own point of view, the novel has a political purpose, that purpose should not be exposed to the reader. Great novelists give great lines to characters who oppose their own viewpoints (Skimpole in Dickens’s Bleak House, Ivan in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov).

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I’m also opening up a for-profit arts production corporation, The Aleph. If you’re an accredited investor or investment team and want to get in touch about that, just reply to this message.

Overview

When I began the Mars Review, my aim was to smash together the most interesting writing from online outsiders with the most stylish criticism from legacy magazine writers seeking out higher ground as publications seemed increasingly intent on scraping the bottom of the barrel in order to increase ad revenue and satisfy the new requirements of the clickbait economy. My thesis was that with the Mars Review I could create a new prestige magazine that could function like the New York Review of Books, but with a tech-forward sensibility and an openminded political persuasion that reflected the pandemic-era lack of trust in supposedly official sources of truth.

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I’ve said the above statements so often I have by now pretty much memorized them. It’s a great pitch, a beautiful dream, and a worthy endeavor.

In important ways, the thesis was 100% wrong. The good news was that in trying to prove it right, I created something somewhat different from what I had intended, which turned out to be valuable indeed. Let’s talk about what happened.

The Past

I was a little naïve when I started the Review. I thought that, in general, quality of writing was the factor that determined either approbation or disapprobation from cultural gatekeepers. I found out early on after launching the Review that thousands of readers were excited about the idea of publishing outsider writing in elegant, careful prose; what I did not anticipate is that the majority of tastemakers were not.

It turns out that what is granted prestige is granted prestige largely for political reasons. (If you want to know the political reason, simply look at the nearly uniform political opinions of our major universities, biggest newspapers and magazines, and elite policy makers.) Quality may enter into the calculations when it comes to prestige—no one wants to admit a complete schlemiel to the cocktail party, after all—but it is hardly the major factor.

I can confidently say of good writing: “that and $7.75 will get you an oat mil iced latte.” If you have not only good writing, but also a real diversity of independent viewpoints, your oat milk iced latte becomes more expensive. What can I say? The heart wants what it wants, and so does the market.

So, the Mars Review never became an insider magazine. I would not have made a very good insider anyway.

What about the outsiders? The thing is, the outsiders are inclined to resist attempts to lump them in with writers who do play politics. They have their own pressures not to support anyone with any connections to an opposing camp. Even outsiders can be cliquey, although in general they’re much less likely to grind their gears over being near an opponent’s byline.

So ultimately the Mars Review didn’t become a consummate outsider magazine either. It was never primarily a political organ, and it’s hard to be a consummate outsider without being consummately political.

We’re neither insiders nor outsiders. What about being a solid book review? Well, the thing is, publishing just isn’t the industry it used to be. I don’t believe any review will take the place that the NYRB once had—because reviewing books simply isn’t as important for the culture as it was in the 1960s, and because the ease with which anyone can share a review decreases the importance of gatekeepers—a fact felt in all creative industries. I succeeded in making the MRB a great product; but it could never have been successful in the way I imagined. I was pattern-matching to an era that simply can’t be recreated.

The Present

I’ve seen a few different entities pop up that seem to have followed very close in the Mars Review’s footsteps. (And of course MRB was explicitly following very close in the NYRB’s footsteps). This has been, in some ways, heartening to see. It’s cool that other people care. It’s cool that there are still people who love books, and people who are excited to write and read. But this seems like a case where, to quote an eminent investor and theologian, competition is for losers. All of us are fighting for scraps of a pie that is getting smaller and smaller. And, although I respect many of the people doing so, it’s getting depressing to watch.

Part of what makes it depressing is that ultimately criticism, which should be the most dispassionate and objective of endeavors, becomes, in an arena of outsiders where the only judge of quality is likes and shares, a kind of clout-acquisitions game. A true intellectual is someone who can say what he or she pleases. Legacy publications suppress true intellectuals with a top-down approach. Outsider sometimes suppress the true intellectual tendency from the ground up: Popularity becomes the diktat.

And then there’s the attendant, especially stomach-churning game of people hiding their political beliefs to be prestige, or having just spicy enough beliefs to get attention but not spicy enough to alienate the prestige world. Meanwhile, a largely pseudonymous intelligentsia on X.com continues to hold the most water when it comes to accurately and fearlessly describing the things of the world—but the incentive structure on X is so mangled that the need for ever hotter takes, ad hominem attacks, and constant vigilance over the news cycle degrades all but the steeliest minds. I should make it clear that I am not absolved from any of the faults mentioned above; I’m just trying to give an accurate rendering of the landscape.

The Future

So we found it’s not possible to repeat the past. What can be done? I think that quality cultural productions in the future will necessarily have to be small and insular. I also think that criticism alone isn’t going to do the job. I’m becoming more and more convinced that art really is the transcendently important thing in the modern world. This was once a matter of faith among the aesthetically minded, although of late it has become something many find risible. In any case, the Mars Review will lean into the production of art, while continuing reviewing, podcasting, and the like. We have a great review of If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies coming up, as well as the new episode of the Mars Review podcast, with .

I don’t want to reproduce any mainstream outlet, but to provide a lifeboat for myself and others who don’t want to live in the land of slop. The for-profit wing of this project will be The Aleph—more on this soon. If you’re an accredited investor and wish to be in touch about that, please shoot over an email.

We’re doing great as is. But really, for this project to work, we need generous people who care deeply, and that’s why I’m asking to you to give on this Giving Tuesday. As with the monasteries of yore, a handful of enlightened and generous individuals is all take takes to preserve items of limitless value, and I happen to believe such individuals exist.

And thank you to all readers and to everyone who has contributed to the MRB along the way!

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In case you missed it, check out the very same Noah Kumin, editor of the MRB, on sex, lies, and drugs in the world of competitive chess and Audrey Snow Matzke on a new novel by Olivia Kan-Sperling. The MRB has a new season of its podcasts coming. See all previous episodes here. You can read select previous bedside table series entries here:

• The Soundgeist

• Patricia Torvalds

• Camille Sojit Pejcha

• Hansen Shi

And now I’ll turn it over to Gordon:

Aside from an exhausting couple of weeks right after my dog died, I’ve been away from New York, away from home, since January 9th, 2025, when I took a flight to Europe in order to finish a novel I’ve since, due to circumstances related to my dog’s death, been compelled to start from scratch; life is so unpredictable, it never ceases to surprise.

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When I left the city on that cold, gloomy Thursday evening with my golden Labrador Retriever, Alfie, his last day ever in New York, in the United States of America, I thoroughly scanned my bookshelf on East Broadway to decide what I should take with me for the foreseeable future; who are the authors that should accompany me on this trip? This is a question everyone should ask before deciding what books they take with them when they travel, especially when they plan to travel for a while; authors are not merely a sense of intellectual entertainment or distraction, they seep into your unconscious and, often, refuse to leave—choose your literary companions wisely; they are the real people you’re traveling with, and, remember, if you travel with books you are never alone . . . even if you neglect these books to indulge in frivolous activities, sexual activities, social activities, alcoholic and/or narcotic activities, the books will be there, somber, angry, speaking among themselves, waiting for you to get home and finally give them attention. Jealous girlfriends, these books.

Through my travels, below are some of the books that have been on my various nightstands, nine in total (nightstands, not books), over this past year. Some of them left New York with me and Alfie on January 9th, while others were bought, gifted, or stolen along the way.

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux

When I’m stressed or in a particularly panicked, anxious mood, I like to relax myself by walking around grocery stores—even better in a foreign country; you can learn so much about a culture just by perusing a supermarket. I enjoy all kinds of grocery stores, everything from luxury chains to the fluorescently lit , budget-friendly options. The most fascinating, though, are the ones tailored at the lower-middle-class, that is to say, the majority of any given population.

Look at the Lights My Love, is a nonfiction work of anthropological first-person literature of the highest order. In a brief 81 pages, Ernaux keeps a diary of her experiences at a branch of Auchan, a French mega-store, in a working-class suburb of Paris. Whenever I want to gift someone a book, I tend, for whatever reason, to choose this one. I choose this one as a gift not only because it’s fantastic, but because I think it’s a good portrait of the kind of aesthetic, energy, and tone, I enjoy in literature; perhaps a way to let people know who I am, how I am. Ernaux’s somber tone of gloom, remorse, melancholy and longing has a power that’s unrivaled. This is my favorite book hers, even if some would merely deem it an essay. A good movie to accompany this book would be In the Aisles (2018) by Thomas Stuber.

Patrimony by Philip Roth

This is the first book I read after I left the U.S. in January. I think I started it on the plane, while Alfie was lightly asleep at my feet, drugged out beyond belief on doggy Xanax (this had nothing to do with his death). It was, oddly, my first Philip Roth (odd because I’m a Jew from NYC), and is a memoir about the life and death of his father, Herman.

My father, long sick with a degenerative disease called Lewy-Body Dementia, deserves one day a memoir of this caliber; either my eldest sister or I will write it (she’s a writer too, that bitch), or perhaps we’ll each write our own, then battle to see who wrote the better, more emotionally effective version; the whole scene will be grotesque and perverse, perhaps one worthy of another book in itself—any takers? I once devoted a ten thousand word piece to him, my father, but it wasn’t enough. Just as everything else, it’ll come in due time.

Though I’ve never given Patrimony to anyone as a gift, I would.

Everyone Who is Gone is Here by Jonathan Blitzer

Am I the only one who prematurely ejaculates at the thought of an excellent, long-form work of investigative journalism in the New Yorker? Am I the only one who thinks David Remnick is the sole individual responsible for a thriving, even-handed, journalistic culture, that he’s spawned multiple generations of talented writers that’ll stand the test of time? (Will Noah Kumin do the same?) I am a Remnick-head, through and through, and Jonathan Blitzer is one of those very talented journalists that the man from Hackensack, New Jersey has nurtured and brought to fruition. The 500-page long Everyone Who is Gone is Here details the U.S. immigration crisis from the end of the Vietnam War up through Joe Biden’s presidency in 2021. Blitzer follows the gut-wrenching stories of several different central-American migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to illustrate the narrative. This book, of course, provides a good load of context to better understand the present crisis we’re enduring, all that’s led us to the dreadful place we find ourselves in today. Everyone Who is Gone is Here isn’t necessarily the kind of book I’d normally buy at a shop, but was given to me, or rather lent to me (which is why I’ll label this as stolen) by my brother-in-law Simon. I can remember so vividly the period of time when I was fully absorbed reading this book, all day, everyday, with so much focus and intent, during that painful month of April when I was sick and grieving my beloved Alfie. We all remember the weeks and months of our most rewarding reads; they serve as vivid, detailed chapters of our own lives. Just as an astute journalist such as Blitzer uses individual narratives to portray larger, socio-cultural phenomena, our favorite books, the most memorable novels, serve as vehicles to rediscover our own past.

MTHFR: Gene Therapy Demystified by Dr. Robin Terranella

I have not read this book. And still, it continues to travel along with me. It was recommended by a naturopath that my mother swears by, or rather, clings to as a coping mechanism for my dad’s illness; it’s a little bit of both. Dr. Terence Dulin (chiropractor) said I should take a look at this book because it would help “partially explain” his philosophy on health. Following my dog’s death, I developed intense stomach and chest pains that wouldn’t go away. No one could figure out quite what it was despite several visits to emergency rooms in foreign countries; yes, lots of it, surely, was a physical manifestation of grief, a heightened and overactive nervous system. I was desperate to get better, to finally feel somewhat like myself again, but not desperate enough to read a dry, self-help book written by an obscure, niche doctor. I can’t speak on whether or not it has merits or is helpful, because, like I said, I haven’t read it. I’m merely including it on this list to let you know that it’s been on my nightstand for quite some time. I should also let you know that when I returned to Madrid recently, on July 14th, 2025, the very place my dog died, to write about and come to terms with his sudden, shocking death, I began, after almost five months of hell, to finally feel better, to eat normal foods again without feeling like I was about to right away drop dead.

Bonnie (Hat Trick) by Emma Stern

This is a piece of ephemera, a postcard, specifically, of an Emma Stern painting from her 2024 solo exhibition at the Half gallery in the East Village. Stern gave this to me as a gift a few weeks before I published a profile of her as part of my 12 Questions series. We got into a month-long fight shortly after. Stern was upset, I suppose rightfully so, at how she was portrayed. It took a while for us to mend our friendship, but thank God we did; she’s one of the most emotionally insightful and intelligent friends I have. Initially this postcard hung in my apartment, but now I carry it with me to use as a bookmark, a very large bookmark.

During those two weeks I was back home in New York, suffering gut issues, I met Stern at the Metrograph to see a 70mm screening of Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. We were supposed to meet for ice cream nearby before the movie, but Stern was running late, so I went to get ice cream alone. My stomach couldn’t handle it, and instead of sitting next to Stern enjoying the film’s uniquely opaque, moody aesthetic (Kirsten Dunst), I was in the ground floor bathroom of the Metrograph simultaneously vomiting and, well, spewing out a particularly awful form of diarrhea. I’ve always wanted to use Kirsten Dunst and diarrhea in the same sentence. Stern ran into one of her good friends at the theater, a famous British rapper, and while I was in the bathroom, he approached her in the middle of the movie to let her know that her friend is causing quite the scene in the “bafroom.” Stern might say this was karma for the profile I’d written, but I don’t agree; in my eyes the profile was flattering and this situation was karma for nothing. Sometimes bad things just happen.

The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera

In December I finished reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being for the first time and vowed, not in vain, to read more Kundera. I love reading the nonfiction of the several masters of fiction, and I love it even more when the very best of writers write about writing; see also Murakami’s Novelist as Vocation. In May I ordered this book online from a used book store in North Carolina, excited as ever for its arrival, only to find a massive printing error in every single one of the book’s pages: all the words are accidentally printed in what can only be described as 2pt font, and the book can only possibly be read with a magnifying glass. To avoid looking like a private investigator while reading in public, I haven’t been able to begin this book, even though I’d really like to. Carrying this book from place to place serves as a reminder that I need to order a new copy, or download a version on my iPad. Perhaps I’ll give this copy as a gift to someone I don’t like. I see no purpose in keeping it long term.

Honoré de Balzac by Stefan Zweig

This book took me over a year to finish reading. I’m a slow reader, but rarely do I spend more than a month on one book. This biography, a genre of literature I don’t read too often, was so rich, so well-researched and thought-out, every page, every sentence, that I didn’t like the idea of reading it quickly; it sounds kind of gross, but I wanted to savor every page. Now that he understood himself he did not want to be misunderstood by others. That’s just one random sentence picked up from the book, and they’re all that good, all full of psychological complexity and weight. In April, in Los Angeles, during my grief and illness, my long period of convalescence, I decided one evening to just pick it up and power through the last one hundred and eighty pages. I was up for around thirty-six hours straight, taking in every sentence to the best of my ability. And it was extraordinary. And I now mourn the period I spent with this book, and, when I eventually get back to New York, it’ll be very sad indeed to put it back on my bookshelf. I should mention that I almost lost this book on two separate occasions: once at the theater, and another time at the post-office in Williamsburg. Both times, miraculously, it was still there when I went back to retrieve it. There is a God, and he loves literature, and he loves, even more, the writers who decide to devote their lives to it.

Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig

Zweig wrote several biographies, and I’m sure they’re all great. I’ll probably spend as much time with this one (590 pages) as I did with the last. I’d also like to mention that I’m not a dumb-dumb and did, while reading the Balzac biography, read many books in between . . . it’s just that one of the books was a magnum vintage Bordeaux, while the others, in comparison, were delicious though sometimes stale packets of candy, like Hasbro gummies, to be more specific.

by Oliva Kan-Sperling

Archway Editions, 164 pp., $14.95

“Gossip is a fearful thing,” wrote the “Chinese Greta Garbo” Ruan Lingyu, before getting her revenge on the tabloids by overdosing on barbiturates at the age of 24. Or so the story goes. In the near-century intervening it’s been speculated that the note was forged after the fact, by Ruan’s tea-tycoon boyfriend Tang Jishan, who hoped to make some kind of public sense of his young lover’s suicide, and maybe clear his own name in so doing.

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“Fanfiction,” writes the novelist Olivia Kan-Sperling in an essay for n+1, “hinges on creating a difference internal to its subject, on alienating us from familiar names and images.” Her latest Little Pink Book: a bad bad novel (Archway Editions), charts the fortunes of Huang Limei, a barista and blogger-musician who—in spite of her apparently vacant nature, or rather thanks to it—is plucked from obscurity and thrust into stardom by a rapey talent agent. Odd-numbered pages are in English. Even-numbered pages contain what I’m told are their Mandarin counterparts, translated by Chen S., but I can only read the former, so I cannot confirm that it’s the same story both ways. Limei could be so much more, or so much less, than I’ve managed to read into her.

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Overview

There are at least a few views I hold that would likely inspire people to call me a conspiracy theorist. I’m pretty much inured at this point to the accusation, especially after having learned that the term itself was popularized through a CIA dispatch in a conscious attempt to quell dissent. But there was one interest of mine that I never thought would inspire people to stick me with the conspiracy theorist label: chess.

Yet that’s precisely what happened to me early last year, when I was expressing my support for the opinions of Vladimir Kramnik, the one-time chess champion of the world, and today the most controversial (that’s the polite way of putting it, but the truth is, the most hated) man in the world of chess.

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For the last several years Kramnik has been campaigning more and more vocally for “fair play” in chess. At the time when when I had the chess debate that led to my being labeled a peddler of conspiracies, in early 2025, Kramnik was considered more of a nuisance than a pariah. He had begun posting videos on YouTube detailing what he believed to be widespread cheating in online chess, implicating some of the biggest names in the game. When I, by chance, met a set of fellow chess at that evening in early 2025 and began discussing Kramnik, they let it be known that his theories of widespread cheating were beyond the pale.

Today Kramnik’s opinions draw even more ire. One of the top-ranked players whom Kramnik suspected of systematic cheating in online chess was young Grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky, who was found dead last week at the age of 29. This death is unmistakably terrible, and Naroditsky seems to have been widely beloved by those who knew him. No report on his death has been issued, but only a few days before his death Naroditsky conducted a livestream while appearing to be under the influence of drugs, and it is widely suspected that the cause of his death was unnatural.

Predictably, the blowback against Kramnik has been intense. On X.com, users have been quick to blame Kramnik for Naroditsky’s death, or to suggest that Kramnik himself should go die. This is par for the course; one expects stupidity, groupthink and calls to violence to predominate among the general public. But there’s a stranger trend around the hate Kramnik has received—one that I noticed the germ of when I first started becoming a chess obsessive during the pandemic. Nearly every chess celebrity who is well-known in the business has lined up to insult Kramnik or at the very least question his sanity, with a homogeneity and ubiquity reminiscent of Soviet professions of faith, or party line copypasta from the Me Too or Floyd eras. The story has even made national news, with Coleman Hughes in The Free Press posting a commemoration to Naroditsky, while stating that Kramnik’s claims were “baseless.” A coordinated campaign on both X.com and Reddit, complete with Community Notes and excessive moderation, seems determined to paint Kramnik as an irredeemable villain. The actual story is much more complicated.

A bit of history

It begins in 2020, when many fans, including myself, first began paying attention to competitive chess. Around this time, chess’s biggest stars such as Naroditsky, World #2 Hikaru Nakamura, and the sisters Andrea and Alexandra Botez began livestreaming their chess play and pulling in as many views as those streamings their exploits playing more high octane video games like Fortnite.

I first became ensorcelled by the game by watching videos from chess influencers who have now been someone overshadowed: the early streamers Grandmasters Eric Hansen and Aman Hambleton, who operate under the collective “Chessbrah,” and Ben Finegold, an obstreperous chess insult comic who also had the distinction of being one of the few players to receive that title at the comparatively old age of 40. And I first noticed something amiss when Hansen’s career took an unfortunate turn. Caught on stream drunkenly uttering obscenities toward the enormously popular streamer “xQC,” who had recently collaborated with Hansen’s rival Hikaru Nakamura, Hansen found himself shunned by the online chess community. In total unison, he was condemned by his peers, and it later came out that brass at chess.com, the company which is reported to be worth half a billion dollars, and which reaps the profits from the game’s biggest streamers, had ordered his then-girlfriend Alexandra Botez not to consort with him.

Next came the scandal which made national news. The greatest player of all time, Magnus Carlsen, refused to play the young American grandmaster Hans Niemann at an important tournament—leading to speculation that Niemann had cheated in over-the-board tournaments. (Niemann had already admitted to having cheated online as a teenager.) By and large, the chess celebrities took Carlsen’s side, and Niemann was suspended for several months from using the chess.com platform where he regularly streamed and made money. Niemann became a pariah, and the butt of many jokes, including the notion (first suggested jokingly by Eric Hansen) that his method of online cheating involved anal beads vibrating in Morse Code.

Niemann was an easy scapegoat for the chess world. Brash and arrogant, with a nearly permanent sneer painted onto his face, he looked and acted like someone born to play the villain. Then came Vladimir Kramnik, a man with a calm demeanor and almost forcefully bland appearance. Disturbed by online games he had played in which he felt his opponents had made strangely brilliant moves under impossible time controls, he began documenting his studies of suspicious behavior on his YouTube channel.

While casting suspicions on an incredible run of wins by top streamer Nakamura, Kramnik eventually zeroed in on Naroditsky, who was at the time a commentator for chess.com and a popular streamer in his own right. Kramnik’s studies can seem byzantine to the casual observer, but the conclusions of his observations are pretty straightforward. Kramnik begins by noting that Naroditsky had already admitted to cheating. In one episode of a series of videos known as a “speedrun,” in which a player starts his journey from the lowest possible rating and plays as many games as need be in order to get back to his proper rating, Naroditsky admitted that he used a chess engine—essentially a panacea that automatically turns whoever is using it into the greatest player of all time. Kramnik felt that where there was smoke there was likely fire, and analyzed a series of Naroditsky’s videos, one of which appears to show, through a reflection on glass behind him, an image of a chess board on a separate monitor, to which Naroditsky is toggling back and forth during his game. (The implication is that Naroditsky is using a chess engine to discover the best moves, although looking at any other board for any reason while playing an online game is prohibited by chess.com rules.)

As a chess fan, I was rapt when Kramnik began making these allegations. And of course I’m not the only one. Nothing captures attention like a scandal. When Kramnik first began airing his suspicions, his inquiries were met with intense curiosity, with the majority of chess streamers publicly commenting that they seriously doubted Kramnik’s claims but were interested to see more. When Kramnik finally followed up with his video that strongly suggests Naroditsky was looking at a chess board on a separate monitor during competitive games, these chess influencers simply went silent and stopped covering a story that had until then served as delicious clickbait.

Is Online Cheating Rampant?

What’s going on? In the world of chess, there is an unwritten rule that you do not publicly accuse another person of cheating—which is why Magnus Carlsen’s insinuations against Hans Niemann and Kramnik’s insinuations against Naroditsky were such big news. This unwritten rule made sense in a world of purely over-the-board chess where it is relatively difficult to cheat, and so an accusation is more likely than not to be a case of sour grapes. (It should be noted that it is difficult but not impossible, and reports have always circulated, most notably in the famous World Championship between Soviet supported Anatoly Karpov and dissident Garry Kasparov).

But in the world of online chess, it is relatively easy. If you play enough games on chess.com, you’ll eventually see your rating change at random intervals, as chess cheaters are banned and their wins against you are nullified. From the comfort of your own home, you can easily access chess engines. Software from the popular chess cites can detect whether you’ve gone so far as to create a computer program to automatically enter the best “engine moves” for you, but it can do little to prevent you from simply opening up a chess engine on a separate computer or monitor. Today, chess engines are so fast and powerful that even in short time controls, like the games Naroditsky and Nakamura play online, it is not difficult to enter your opponent’s moves on a separate screen and immediately receive information about the absolute best move to play next.

So is online cheating rampant, even among top players, even in chess.com online tournaments that dole out significant amounts of cash? Because I myself am not a competitive chess player, the unwritten rule does apply to me and I feel I can say outright: Yes, it is likely. This is the most parsimonious explanation for why the chess world went so completely silent when Kramnik uncovered new information about Naroditsky, whose fortunes were tied to those of chess.com, and also for why there seems to be such a coordinated effort to smear Kramnik among those who stand to benefit most from chess.com’s success.

A quick overview will suffice: Top Grandmaster Nihal Sarin wrote in a tweet last week, clearly referencing Kramnik and blaming him for Naroditsky’s death: “When respected figures spread unfounded accusations without accountability, real lives are destroyed.” Both Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and FIDE Master Qi Yu, two of the most popular streamers in the chess world, commented approvingly on Sarin’s statement, with Nakamura writing “Thank you for stating this so clearly.” Meanwhile, chess’s biggest streamer Levy Rozman also piled onto Kramnik, writing that while he does not condone death threats against Kramnik, “there needs to be a form of justice”—implying that some form of pain should be inflicted on Kramnik as a result of Naroditsky’s death.

There is a bitter irony here. If most players are doing at least a little bit of online cheating, it levels the playing field somewhat. Which means that, as in the steroid era of baseball, no one is really guilty when everyone is guilty. If there is indeed a large number of players who cheat online, I suspect they mostly do it to feed the insatiable algorithm (that is, to quickly churn out content like the speedrun for which Naroditsky admitted he cheated), rather than to win big tournaments during which they’re under far greater scrutiny. It may be that what put so much pressure on Naroditsky was not the accusations of small scale cheating, but the immense pressure from monied interest to deny them.

There is no question that Naroditsky’s recent death is terrible. But the reaction is one I’ve seen online many times before—the blaming of a scapegoat, in this case Kramnik, and deflection from the truth. So while the popular influencers of the chess world cry for justice, implying that Kramnik should be harmed, I salute him for his deeply unpopular commitment to uncovering the truth. His existence also serves as a useful hermeneutic for future pile-ons: No one is as hated as the person who consistently and dispassionately tries to tell the truth.

by Emily Witt

Pantheon, 272 pp. $23.20

New Yorker journalist Emily Witt’s autoethnographic memoir Health & Safety is part elegy for the previous decade’s NYC-Berlin rave scene, and part indictment of America in the years leading up to and including Trump’s first term. The book progresses more or less chronologically with brief allusions to her youth when, having witnessed her druggiest childhood peers succumb to a kind of cyclical “self-generated squalor,” she opted for a sobriety compatible with her ambition. At 31, having established a career in journalism but not lasting love, Witt yielded to an interminable ennui that saw her desire for risk redouble, leading to the very squalor she’d previously avoided as she became a casualty of the long 2010s.

Witt makes it evident early on that she feels tread upon—by her biological clock, her want for enduring love, Cons and Neocons, the banks, Second Amendment loyalists, socialites, selfies, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, ecological collapse, civil rights infringement, intractable secularism, and perhaps most of all, the declining relevance and grandeur of her vocation of writing. These pressures, compounded and enmeshed in the 21st century, trigger in Witt (and the rest of her milieu) a defensive pursuit of professional and personal self-optimization more conducive to neuroses than an elusive state of “wellness.”

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We also discuss my own internationally famous novel Stop All the Clocks. I’ll be reading from it in London on August 7th at Verdurin. If you’re in London, come to that and say hi. If you’ve read and enjoyed Stop All the Clocks, please give it five stars on Amazon or Goodreads. If you work for a publication or run a BookTok account or whatever, reply to this email and I’ll get you a copy.

You can read our previous bedside table series entries here:

• The Soundgeist

• Patricia Torvalds

• Camille Sojit Pejcha

• Hansen Shi

• Magdalene Taylor

• Ellie Lynch

• Alex Perez

• Default Friend

• Matt Gasda

The Mars Review may receive a small commission if you purchase books via links in this email.

Against the Gods by Peter L. Bernstein

I was told this was the book for punk rock entrepreneur freaks to understand how to properly scale risk. Filing it under business expenses.

All the Stars Electric Bright by Ian Breckon

A romance novel set in Mussolini's Italy. Marinetti is throwing a dinner party and conflicting political ideologies run wild. Crazy speeches are delivered. Over-the-top cuisine is shared.

Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein

I'm fascinated by Edie Sedgwick, the fashion icon and rising star who burned too bright. She got used and abused by Andy Warhol's factory scene to the point of death. At least that's what I've been told from people who claim they were there. I doubt that they were and must figure things out for myself.

Nietzsche: The Unmanned Autobiography by D. Harlan Wilson

My friend wrote this book and sent it to me after he read it at one of my salons. It's his fictional non-fictional account of Nietzsche's life written in a bizarre Dadaist tone. Or is it Situationist?

Guy Bourdin Polaroids

Not technically reading but I can't stop looking. Iconic avant-garde decadence with a presentation that is both gritty and pristine.

The Aleph

TLDR: The Aleph is a multi-sided marketplace and membership club for arts. We’re starting in NYC but aim to go global. We’ll have our first event in the next few weeks and plan to keep them going bi-weekly. If you’re an artist and have a project you need production & funding, or if there is a work of art you’d like to commission and produce, go ahead and fill out our form here.

But First, a Story

Before I describe The Aleph in more detail, let me first tell you a brief story. Once upon a time, in the 1950s, there was a little boy who loved cars. When he was old enough, he got the fastest one he could afford. But then he had a terrible accident. He couldn’t race anymore. The only thing he could do was dream.

And so he dreamed a lot. He told a million stories to himself in his head. And in so doing, he became deeply interested in the question of where stories come from, so he decided to study folklore and anthropology. He came across Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell said that all stories could possibly be boiled down to one: The Hero’s Journey.

So the dreaming adolescent became a dreaming young man, looking for a way to tell the story of a great hero. The young man had learned the ins and outs of film and hoped to make a movie about such a hero. But now it was the 1970s, and all the films were about crime and misery. The nation had become hopeless and so had its art. The young man dreamed of an epic, rivaling Homer and Milton, a story of good and evil and life and death, set in a distant, mythical past in which man was an intergalactic species.

But studios hated the idea. They wanted stories that reflected the grimness that was all around them. They wanted stories that were depressing, cynical, ugly. Nevertheless, the young man persisted. He got his film made.

You may have guessed by now that the young man was George Lucas, and the film was Star Wars. And with his story alone he altered forever not only Hollywood but the culture at large.

What is The Aleph?

There’s a lot of misery and grimness around us these days—especially in the arts. It’s considered a foregone conclusion that literature, film, and music will degenerate into lazy, AI-generated, algorithm-hacking slop. The institutions that still have the funds to create great works are sclerotic and overly politicized. Meanwhile, communities around Bitcoin, decentralized networks, and other tech projects have injected some new energy into these fields. But what’s lacking is an organization to collect all that energy and distill it.

The Aleph is a multi-sided marketplace and membership club for arts. What does that mean?

Whether it’s the Medicis, the Rockefellers, or Hollywood moguls, there used to be great networks of artists, producers, and patrons that were beneficial to all parties. The question I’ve been obsessed with is, how do we re-establish those networks?

I think the opportunity is there. Founders and investors are itching to form communities that are IRL, meaningful, and exclusive. Meanwhile artists are desperate for new backers. Moveable feasts like Assembly, Vibe Camp, Palestra, and the like, have proved wildly successful.

These different groups just need to be connected. That’s what the Aleph is going to do. Then, once artists and investors are in the club together, we’ll provide a platform for reaching standardized agreements, to create something like an AngelList for the arts. We may not be able to save the broader culture from slop. But we can at least build on higher ground.

That starts with getting together in the same room and having conversations. I was having a conversation with a founder and investor in crypto a while ago. I asked him what sort of art he wanted to see more of. He said, “anything that’s optimistic.” I relayed this conversation to a Hollywood producer friend. He said “I wish I understood better what that meant.” I figured I could keep playing intermediate in this game of telephone between the tech world and the arts world. Or I could build a platform to connect them. I chose the latter.

What’s with the name?

Thinking back to when I started the Mars Review in 2022, I find I achieved much of what I intended to do, but what I really needed was to dream bigger. There can be no truly dominant magazines or labels anymore. There can only be dominant platforms. The only way to dominate is to incorporate everything.

And that’s what The Aleph is for. The title comes from a story called “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges. The tale recounts how a minor poet comes across a portal in his basement, which he calls “The Aleph.” The portal affords any viewer a vision of everything that is happening in the universe, and everything that has ever happened—immediately and simultaneously.

One of the ironies of the story is that the owner of this portal, Carlos Daneri, only uses it to view scenes which he might include in the epic poem he is forever working on but will never finish. Is this not rather like the average person in the age of technology? We find ourselves with magic at our fingertips—and we use it scroll mindlessly through our feeds of slop.

It turns out, we don’t want our AIs to make art for us while we sit at our e-mail jobs, we want them to sit at our e-mail jobs for us while we make art. The plan of The Aleph is to leverage all the technical breakthroughs of last twenty years—easy peer-to-peer payments, global distribution for digital works, AI for streamlining services and training on past data—so that artists can focus on the fun stuff. But not only the fun stuff. The important stuff. The stuff that (unlike most super-serious but ultimately boring projects) actually changes the world.

The Aleph, in its final form, will be a global digital platform connecting artists and producers. However, a purely online system for funding the arts is not Lindy. Hollywood, New York publishing, Music Row: these places have always about rubbing shoulders with the best and brightest artists in the world. That’s why in-person events will be a crucial part of what the Aleph does. If this interests you, fill out the form here.

If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reply to this email.

Best,

Noah

• “a Neuromancer for the 21st century”

• “the first genuinely compelling novel of the latest US batch [of novels]”

• “funny and terrifying and strange, like life; but, unlike life, it offers something like catharsis.”

Buy Stop All the Clocks

This is the end of a long journey, which began almost nine years ago to the day. Back in 2016, I was walking around the Village, and some paradoxical lines of poetry entered my mind. I jotted them down on a napkin, and they became the lines of poetry that conclude Stop All the Clocks. Now the book is here. It’s in stores, including at the famous McNally Jackson, where in my youth I would browse the stacks and dream of seeing my own book among them, coming in right ahead of Kundera, Kunkel and Kunzru; at Book Culture in Morningside Heights, where I had my first job in the city; at the famous City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, which was founded by the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and many more. You can read an excerpt from my publishers here.

I’m having two big events for the book: a reading and conversation with KGB Lit Journal editor Carrigan Miller at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn TONIGHT Weds June 4 at 7PM, and a party at Pubkey TOMORROW Thurs June 5 at 10PM. See below. RSVP for the Thursday party here.

Nine years is a while to have a novel in the works. I’ve had a lot of time to think about what my purpose was with this novel, and what the novelist’s purpose should be in general. One could say that the novelist’s purpose is just to tell a story. But that’s not really good enough. There are many media now for storytelling. And these new media—film, TV, and short form video content being the obvious ones—often tell stories with greater immediacy and impact. For the novel to make sense as a form, there must be some other reason for it to exist. There must be something the novelist can do that other storytellers cannot.

Buy Stop All the Clocks

I’ve never really been a manifesto sort of guy. But I also can’t produce art blindly without knowing where the whole process is going. (I deeply envy the sorts of people who can.) I need reason to follow my intuition. And a sufficient number of early Stop All the Clocks’s early readers have told me that the book is refreshing in some way—perhaps new in some way, though the principles behind it are very old—that I thought it would be worth it for me to examine what principles guided my own writing and to suggest them as principles for other novelists to follow if they so choose.

I wanted to have this piece on principles of novel-writing ready for you today, but it has proven to be a difficult piece to write, being a summation of pretty much everything I’ve learned as a novelist and a critic. And I needed to send you this email so you’d know about these events. So consider this a preview, and a promise.

Hope to see you tonight and/or tomorrow.

—Noah

Filmed a little while ago at Pubkey studios. Hope you enjoy.

PS: A lot has been going on lately. I should have announcements soon about the MRB and about another big project. My own novel, Stop All the Clocks, which Library Journal recently called “a Neuromancer for the 21st century,” comes out June 3rd. On June 4th I’ll be talking about it with the lovely Carrigan Miller at Unnameable Books. Free to the public. Come on by if you’re in town. Here’s the flier below.

Also, if you want an advanced e-copy to review it, reply to this email. And if you’ve already requested a copy, please rate it on Amazon and Goodreads!

Check out our new YouTube channel.

is a writer and critic of culture and sex, and the author of the excellent Many Such Cases newsletter.

Magdalene and Noah discuss a possible recession, X.com/Twitter vs. Substack in 2025, dangers and benefits of AI for writers, advice for younger writers, Anthony Weiner, dick pics, Osho, the 4G Movement, “becoming the sucking,” Ashley St. Clair, Elon, polygyny, Andrew Tate, macroeconomics and the sexual marketplace, the “Stripper Index”, OnlyFans, Lily Philips, microchimerism, London vs. New York, writing for a “soy boy liberal men’s magazine,” the reemergence of Playboy, Magdalene’s “pay pigs,” what’s good for the wallet and what’s good for the soul, whether there’s a chance today for young people to be normal?, advice for Zoomer men and Zoomed women, Tumblr, love. At the end Noah remembers that he doesn’t believe in advice. We begin and end with a Morrissey quotation.

“Left-wing or Right-wing, I’m in favor of violence”

—Yukio Mishima, Debate at the University of Tokyo, 13th of May, 1969

A few years ago when I was a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University, I spent Thanksgiving in the Baltimore suburb of Roland Park where Luigi Mangione graduated from the Gilman School as valedictorian. I was struck by how serene, quaint and architecturally pleasant the neighborhood was, and its resemblance to the idyllic scenes of American suburbia I’d seen in many films. It stood in stark contrast to where I was subletting a room not too far down the road in Hampden, near what I assumed was an addiction clinic for opioid addicts. Not being able to drive, and much to the shock of some colleagues, I often walked to the university and sometimes into the city. Some mornings when walked past the clinic, I would briefly exchange pleasantries with some patients congregating outside chatting and smoking. They seemed a very heterogeneous group of people, and not entirely conforming to the popular perception of drug addicts. I surmised that many had come to addiction and immiseration through the pharmacological route, through medication mis-prescribed by unscrupulous doctors for debilitating pain. I’ve only briefly experienced the type of pain for which such medication is necessary, after a minor surgery, so I can well understand how more constant, intense and unabating pain could lead to desperation for respite, or the mere ability to function day to day.

Pain is something that psychically transported Mangione from the plush upper-class surroundings of Roland Park to the wretched realties of Hampden and other parts of the city—that is to say, from one insulated and exclusive American existence, to one more exposed, vulnerable and universal. The manifesto which Mangione wrote expresses opposition to the parasitism of the health insurance industry, while on another level conveying some degree of loyalty to authority. He was educated at Ivy League institutions, worked in the tech industry and seemed to have been committed to physical fitness, self-improvement and self-actualization. It’s doubtful we will discover his actual motivations, and its likely there will be a concerted attempt to moderate them. Yet we know that a marked change in his personality and fortunes occurred when he began to suffer from debilitating chronic pain from a spinal injury, with many speculating that he experienced callous treatment by America’s obscene and byzantine health insurance system, and its recent turn towards Artificial Intelligence to assess claims.

In the perplexing case of Mangione we find ourselves confronted with two perennial themes—Pain and Violence, two fundamental features of human experience that are related but distinct, which we scarcely seem to fully understand. They nonetheless hold the key understanding the mollifying nature of modern technological society, and why it increasingly drives men toward acts of extreme retribution—and by looking at a rather odd collection of sources which will include, amongst others, Ernst Jünger, Peter Thiel and Yukio Mishima—we might be able to better understand the nature of the problem.

In his prescient essay On Pain (1934), Ernst Jünger wrote of how an emergent technological society sought to abolish pain and inculcate boredom and complacency, even while demanding greater personal sacrifice to a ruthless economic logic. For Jünger it was a shift from his vaunted aristocratic virtues of honor, pride, and duty to a bourgeois worldview of bare life, self-preservation at all costs:

The growing objectification of our life appears most distinctly in technology, this great mirror, which is sealed off in a unique way from the grip of pain . . . . We are too deeply immersed in this process to comprehend it to its full extent. If one gains even a little distance . . . the claim on life becomes more visible.

For Jünger technology was embodied in the unreality inculcated by the dominance of the photograph (a precursor to our more advanced image culture) which functions as an “expression of our peculiarly cruel way of seeing . . . a kind of evil eye, a type of magical possession.” Drawing on his experience of the First World War—a technological war which brutalized and exterminated an entire generation of young men, leaving countless others maimed physically and psychically—Jünger proposed that the future would be determined by the men who could gain mastery over “pain,” and thus over technological anomie. Pain is the

only measure promising a certainty of insights. Wherever values can no longer hold their ground, the movement toward pain endures as an astonishing sign of the times; it betrays the negative mark of a metaphysical structure.

He continues:

The amount of pain we can endure increases with the progressive objectification of life. It almost seems as if man seeks to create a space where pain can be regarded as an illusion, but in a radically new way.

Despite clearly once being in thrall to the ideas of tech-utopians and despite being fully immersed, like we all are, in this virtual sham existence, perhaps Luigi Mangione could no longer regard his very palpable and excruciating pain as illusory in the accepted palliative ways. Perhaps it began to assume a state conducive to certain insights capable of jolting him from stupefaction into action. In his will to transgress the law, putatively in the service of a higher Law, this brutal assassination ties into what philosophers on the left and the right have long acknowledged forms the basis of “Divine Violence.”

Franco Berardi’s Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (2015) attempted to inform us of the perturbing effects of technological alienation on the contemporary male subject. The epic hero, Berardi maintained, subjugated nature through strength of will and courage, imposed order, fended off chaos, and founded nation-states. Yet this epic form of heroism has, since the advent of technologies of mass communication in the 20th Century, receded as “the complexity and speed of human events overwhelmed the force of the will”:

When chaos prevailed, epic heroism was replaced by gigantic machines of simulation. The space of the epic discourse was occupied by semiocorporations, apparatuses for the emanation of widely shared illusions. . . .Here lies the origin of the late-modern form of tragedy: at the threshold where illusion is mistaken for reality, and identities are perceived as authentic forms of belonging. It is often accompanied by a desperate lack of irony, as humans respond to today’s state of permanent deterritorialization by enacting their craving for belonging through a chain of acts of murder, suicide, fanaticism, aggression, and war.

While Berardi’s analysis is somewhat compelling, his call to be conscious of the “simulation at the heart of the heroic game” through the use of “irony” is not at all convincing. The reason for this is generational. Berardi belongs to a cohort of thinkers for whom irony served as the supreme form of radical dissent, or as Richard Rorty suggested, a key concept of “liberal hope” that fosters understanding within democratic societies. The current moment is, however, one oversaturated with irony. It is an irony evident even in its rare expressions of earnestness. But amidst the chaos and detritus of contemporary digital culture, its profusions of “content” and masses of data, its near compulsory principles of self-abjection as self-expression, its multiplicity of subjective forms of “justice,” and its hyper-politicized public sphere where political engagement for some reason lacks efficacy, there still exists a singular and burning desire for authenticity.

According to a certain chronology, the modern era of the mass shooter began with the spectacle of Columbine in the late ’90s. Back then, the perpetrators of mass shootings once came from America’s cultural hinterlands, before moving increasingly into the cultural centers. Now they are increasingly found beyond its physical borders, and the reach of this anomic male violence is as vast as the internet itself; its perpetrators’ capacity for violent retribution unbounded and seemingly objectless. Deranged by a slavish addiction to technology, incapable of distinguishing between virtuality and actuality, the political class has complacently assumed that these young men will continue to commit ever more horrific acts of mass violence, but instead of attempting to address root causes, have instead made them part of a cynical calculation. They were aided in this calculation by the fact that the psycho-sexual motivations behind these atrocities seemed so incoherent, paltry, and completely undeserving of sympathy.

One of the most influential works of political philosophy in the twentieth century is George Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908), which inspired revolutionary movements across both the left and right in the volatile post-WWI era. In the course of his career Sorel was associated with liberalism, conservatism, the reactionary ideas of Action Française and Charles Maurras, latterly with Marxism, and eventually with Anarcho-Syndicalism. Sorel believed violence to be the primary creative force of history, the best means to counteract the complacency of bourgeois centrist plutocracies and their favored ‘democratic’ forms of government. The General Strike was for Sorel a highly aestheticized form of symbolic violence, motivated by a sense of divine justice. In contradistinction to the violence of the State:

Proletarian violence, carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of class struggle, appears thus as a very fine and heroic thing; it is at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization; it is not perhaps the most appropriate method of obtaining immediate material advantages, but it may save the world from barbarism.

Significant here is that Sorel considers this potent form of violence symbolic. The distinction was further elaborated by Walther Benjamin as the difference between “mythical” violence and “divine” violence, in which we may find echoes of recent events:

God is opposed to myth in all spheres, so divine violence runs counter to mythic violence. Indeed, divine violence designates in all respects an antithesis to mythic violence. If mythic violence is law-positing, divine violence is law-annihilating. . . . Mythic violence is blood-violence over mere life for the sake of violence itself; divine violence is pure violence over all of life for the sake of the living.

A little more recently, Slavoj Žižek responded to Benjamin’s critique:

Divine violence should thus be conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei . . . as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision. . . . If it is extra-moral, it is not “immoral.”

Many view Mangione’s action through the prism of this type of revolutionary “divine” violence: Yet its brutal characteristics—far removed from the symbolic violence of the General Strike which for Sorel served Civilization—bear some resemblance to the mythical variety of “blood-violence over mere life for the sake of violence itself.” In this sense, Sorel’s choleric work still has much to say about the present, evidenced by the sophisticated social, political and technological controls still used to counteract revolutionary violence.

Some of those responsible for upholding these controls regard the current era of the mass shooter in the terms of a “Sacrificial Crisis” as described by René Girard in his Violence and the Sacred (1972). Girard maintained that mimetic violence and vengeance—i.e. copycat violence—would proliferate when the rites and rituals once used to keep them in check no longer functioned. In the absence of the surrogate sacrificial victim—or a system of ritual or religious practice which can mimic this function—the “contagion” of reciprocal violence would spread mercilessly through human communities, eventually leading to their implosion and destruction. The sense of distance from this brutal atavistic reality created by technology in advanced “civilized” societies has, according to Girard, lulled us into a false sense of security:

We have managed to extricate ourselves from the sacred somewhat more successfully than other societies have done, to the point of losing all memory of the generative violence; but we are now about to rediscover it. The essential violence returns to us in a spectacular manner— not only in the form of a violent history but also in the form of subversive knowledge. This crisis invites us, for the very first time, to violate the taboo that neither Heraclitus nor Euripides could ever quite manage to violate, and to expose to the light of reason the role played by violence in human society.

In this enigmatic conclusion, Girard’s essentially pessimistic worldview comes to the fore. Significantly it is one which continues to exert significant influence on contemporary thought. In 2007 the entrepreneur and writer Peter Thiel penned an essay in an obscure academic book series dedicated to René Girard, whom he had followed in his Stanford days. Written in succinct and eloquent prose, “The Straussian Moment” gives Thiel’s account of the impasse presented to the West by the terrorist attacks of September 11th as seen through the work of John Locke, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss and Girard himself. Thiel contends that the central assumptions of the Enlightenment were forms of retreat. Forged in the long shadow cast by the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia, the emergence of liberal democracy resulted from a compromise. The enlightenment values which underpin contemporary democratic ideas are based upon an agreement to defer fundamental questions about the truths of human nature, rather than a system of optimum governance modeled on those truths:

From the Enlightenment on, modern political philosophy has been characterized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central: What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this? For the modern world, the death of God was followed by the disappearance of the question of human nature.

In his brief discussion Thiel also takes account of Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (1932) focusing on Schmitt’s discussion of the concomitant processes of hyperpoliticization/depoliticization that precede the later emergence of a “Total State”:

[I]f civil war should forever be foreclosed in a realm which embraces the globe, then the distinction of friend and enemy would also cease. What remains is neither politics nor state, but culture, civilization, economics, morality, law, art, entertainment, etc.

For Thiel, the Total State which Schmitt describes is, from one perspective, something to aspire to, and one eminently achievable through the intervention of technology:

The world of “entertainment” represents the culmination of the shift away from politics. A representation of reality might appear to replace reality: instead of violent wars, there could be violent video games; instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides; instead of serious thought, there could be “intrigue of all sorts,” as in a soap opera. It is a world where people spend their lives amusing themselves to death.

Thiel recounts how Schmitt regarded the potential emergence of such an artificial world through technological faith as the malevolent work of the Antichrist; a world of tenuous peace and security that will briefly reign before “the final catastrophe.” Although conceding that the “price of abandoning oneself to such an artificial representation is always too high,” what are we to make of Thiel’s involvement in funding and supporting various companies that have helped engender the contemporary supremacy of these same artificial representations? The answer is to be found in the tension that exists between the thought of Leo Strauss and Girard in relation to the role of violence in human societies. Strauss, Thiel maintains, does not necessarily disagree with Girard—but is in no way bound by Girard’s Catholic universalism, and is loyal only to the interests of an initiated elite. It is, Thiel maintains, a question of timeliness:

For Strauss as for Nietzsche, the truth of mimesis and of the founding murder is so shocking that most people, in all times and places, simply will not believe it. The world of the Enlightenment may have been based on certain misconceptions about the nature of humanity, but the full knowledge of these misconceptions can remain the province of a philosophical elite. The successful popularization of such knowledge would be the only thing to fear. . . .

Thiel ends on a note of ambivalence. The modern age may well not be “permanent,” but it has not yet come to an end and there is no telling how long it will endure. In the meantime, it is better to “side with peace” over violence. And even though one day “all will be revealed,” and all injustices will eventually be “exposed” and the perpetrators “held to account”—the decisions made by those who rule will “determine the destiny” of the world to come. In one reading, Thiel’s proposition advocates for the technological Total State and its various forms of entertainment qua mass deception and control as a means to hold back the “limitless violence of a runaway mimesis,” thereby ensuring the rule of a powerful esoteric elite. In another it reads as a noble and benevolent strategy aimed at preventing wanton violence for the maintenance of peace and order for as many people as possible, for as long as possible. In both readings what is clear is that Thiel, in his dual role as religious pessimist and libidinal engineer, is unequivocal in his belief that the sine qua non of any form of elite domination over the masses is the ability to place controls upon violence.

An examination of Luigi Mangione’s Goodreads account is telling for a number of reasons. Yet little attention has been given to the clear disparity between the books he read, and those which he aspired to read. The former, less numerous, category is filled with work of popular sociology and psychology, economics, dietary advice, meme-tier cultural criticism, self-help, and genre fiction. The latter contains some dense philosophical and literary, work which can be regarded as “improving” in the best sense. The difference speaks to the struggle faced by many in distinguishing between virtuality and actuality, between a stultifying and immiserating technological society that only offers the consolation and justification for pain, against the hope for a world in which the suffering of Pain is to be endured if it approaches higher principles.

Mangione’s review of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, curiously located in the former category, is telling on many levels:

While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.

And further, apparently paraphrasing a “take” he found online, he states that Kaczynski:

Had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and at the end of the day, he’s probably right. Oil barons haven’t listened to any environmentalists, but they feared him. When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.

To understand the import of these statements, it would be useful to turn to an excellent yet obscure philosophical text written in 1998 by Eric Krakauer, erstwhile philosophy scholar and now a physician and Professor of Medicine at Harvard medical school. In this text, Krakauer provides a valuable diagnosis of the insurmountable problem posed by the dialectic of technology:

Technology has progressively turned the technologically generated autonomous human subject into a heteronomous object for technological domination. This reversion has occurred as the technologies of the culture industry have totalized a certain mode of thinking. The same technological or “dispositive thinking” with which the subject masters nature now enslaves the subject as it totalizes both itself and society.1

The only possible antidote to such a grave prognosis will come by embracing what novelist and firebrand Wyndham Lewis’s called the stalled revolution of the Luddites. The Luddite movement was not a mere paroxysm of lumpen discontent, borne of fear and ignorance, and misdirected towards what Karl Marx dismissed as the “material instruments” of production rather than its modes. The Luddites’ primary grievance was not with the form of machinery itself, nor towards a technology they did not understand (indeed many of them were highly skilled machine operators). Rather, it was with the ways in which the threat of technology was being exploited by a parasitic ownership class to degrade working conditions. Over the course of time, within the popular imagination, as is evident in Mangione’s reference, the term has become derisory. To be a Luddite is to be ignorant and fearful of technological progress whilst nostalgic for an illusory past. For Lewis, however, the technological revolution began not with the invention of machines but with the Luddites’ demand that the machine be subjugated to human needs. He saw within their attacks against modes of production which favored machines, the struggle for human subjectivity over heteronomous technological subjugation.

Lewis’s first-hand experience of the First World War cauterized his opposition to what was previously a fascinated ambivalence toward technological advancement. In common with Lewis, I believe that an insistence upon the fundamental incompatibility of man and machine does not signal a naïve desire to return to a mythical prelapsarian past. It is rather a weary insistence that all fantasies of machinic desire spring from a profoundly damaged consciousness, that any temporary easing of the burden of human existence that comes from elevating machines to sentience, will never replace what will be irrevocably be lost.

I believe we must draw a strong distinction between what I call the “normative” and “recidivist” forms of masculinity, the former eminently worthy of repurposing and revitalization—the latter immeasurably transgressive and destructive. A public discourse which refuses to make such distinctions and relies instead on journalistic platitudes will mean that an honest, and necessary, account of masculinity’s relationship to violence will continue to elude us. Most seemingly cannot break free from a form of analysis that views all expressions of an (undifferentiated) masculinity as retrograde and inculpatory ad initio; something to be acknowledged only grudgingly, if not eventually effaced and dismantled altogether. Social constructivist perspectives such as these are widespread, but they will find difficulty in explicating the rise in chaotic violence as more recidivist subjects are created by the untrammelled anomie of the technological quotidian. An honest account will derive only from a re-consideration of violence itself and its role as a form of symbolic power which can, if properly conceived and sublimated, potentially be made to serve productive ends.

The grim alternative can be envisioned by considering the enigmatic pronouncements of Yukio Mishima, who declared himself in favor of violence whether of the left or the right. Mishima’s statement was no mere provocation but an attempt at mediation. Speaking to a packed auditorium of communist and socialist student radicals—some of whom openly declared that they only came to see him beaten to death—Mishima’s comment alluded to the power of violence as (divine) potentiality, as a point of commonality between the radical students’ struggle for revolution and his own quest to make his life into a work of art. It remains a difficult lesson for us to grasp, but an essential one nonetheless. Arguably one of the most gifted aesthetes in the modern Japanese tradition, from a young age Mishima expressed a morbid fixation with death, which he was ultimately unsuccessful in containing only within his remarkable body of work. In the lead up to his theatrical coup d’etat in 1970, Mishima had himself photographed by Kishin Shinoyama in a series called “Death of a Man.” He posed in various mythically violent scenarios; drowning in mud in one, with a hatchet embedded in his head in another; crushed under the wheels of a truck in the next, then as Saint Sebastian dying in ecstatic agony from his arrow wounds which evoked the famous renaissance painting by Guido Reni, and finally as a Samurai committing Seppuku. In the end Mishima chose the mimesis of profane violence. This is the path of recidivist masculinity. Self-reflexive, self-aggrandizing and self-mythologizing—we must always remember that he could only attain his so-called “beautiful” death under the camera eye of technological subjugation, a maddeningly cruel gaze which today has become an all-encompassing panopticon. Against the power of this monstrous inhuman monolith, death may seem like a welcome reprieve. But it is always much harder for a man to keep living, to preserve life, than it is to destroy it. It remains possible to harness the symbolic power of “divine” violence, to reject the call for mythic violence which exists only for its own sake. The solution might be found in Sorel’s view of the General Strike, an act of collective symbolic violence which ultimately serves the interests of civilization, and prevents the descent into barbarism.

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You can read our previous bedside table series entries here:

• Patricia Torvalds

• Camille Sojit Pejcha

• Hansen Shi

• Magdalene Taylor

• Ellie Lynch

• Alex Perez

• Default Friend

• Matt Gasda

County Highway

The County Highway has become one of my consistent joys. Every six weeks or so, I can expect a new issue at my doorstep. The wide array of topics covered and the personable style of reporting provide a depth that’s lacking in more mainstream magazines. I’ve especially been enjoying the contributions from writers like Chandler Fritz, along with the variety of guest contributors they bring on. Plus, being a publication available only in print gives it a quality I can’t help but call “lindy.”

Port

Close friends and acquaintances know I have a sweet tooth. During COVID, I had a wonderful dalliance with mead, but lately, my fancy has turned to port. One aspect I especially appreciate is that, while wine and whiskey have no ceiling for top-end bottles, some of the best ports are available at a much more accessible price point. In the evening, you can often find me deep in the throes of meme-making with a vintage port by my side.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’m revisiting this novel, which I believe is Ishiguro's strongest work. I find it especially relevant today, as its core centers around the protagonist reconciling whether his life’s work and service amounted to anything—or perhaps even proved a detriment to his nation and the world. It helps put into perspective what we want to spend our days on.

1969 Omega Constellaton

Consistently placed on my nightstand each evening, my vintage Omega serves me well as a dependable timepiece. I often toggle between the creative (aka overly online) and corporate worlds, so having a watch that satisfies both camps is valuable. It works for watch comparisons (think American Psycho-style business card swaps) that are commonplace when fraternizing with the various flavors of white-collar professionals, while also fitting right in at the more bohemian watering holes of Dimes Square and Brooklyn— typically populated by those sporting gold Casios, patch tattoos, and mullets. It’s the best of both worlds, I tell myself.

Wabi Sabi, Volumes I & II by Leonard Koren

Lately, I’ve been especially interested in design. Wabi Sabi, in a compressed definition, refers to design that is imperfect and impermanent, with its basis in nature. In English, “rustic” is a translation that gets you close to the ballpark. I’ve found that being conscious of design themes has helped with content output, so I’ve been motivated to dive deeper into studying design principles and theory. Funny enough, according to the philosophy, something can’t be Wabi Sabi if it’s online—but I’d argue that certain organic internet occurrences could qualify.

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

I have a background in the classics and the humanities, and that part of my education has stayed with me as a predisposition in the media I consume. Glorious Exploits follows two unemployed Syracusan potters who enlist Athenian prisoners from the Peloponnesian War to produce a play by Euripides—all told in a contemporary Irish voice. It’s a fun read and a testament to the connective power of the arts.

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by Matthew Davis

Arcade, 288 pp., $21.84

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You can read our previous bedside table series entries here:

• Camille Sojit Pejcha

• Hansen Shi

• Magdalene Taylor

• Ellie Lynch

• Alex Perez

• Default Friend

• Matt Gasda

The Mars Review may receive a small commission if you purchase books via links in this email.

Here: The books that live or have very recently lived on my bedside. Some of them look a bit chewed on because they also live in my work backpack. I do most of my reading on the G train. I am a relentless dog-earer but I do not write in my books. Aside from the Mars Review, I'd like to recommend lit.salon, a pretty little website dedicated to book reviews. Goodreads prizes mediocrity and I won't publish any of my thoughts there, so my Instagram story and Lit Salon present a valuable alternative.

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

A thousand-page historical fiction novel about a woman in 14th-century Norway, published in three segments from 1920 to 1922. A major success at the time, now more under the radar. It's so compelling and Undset writes the 1300s with such perfect ease. While there are about 500 years between this and Little House on the Prairie, there are weird parallels in the simplicity of language and reverence for nature as well as the timeless harmonies in love stories (or stories about confronting the cruelty of love and bonds of family). I was always such a Little House girl. Currently, I'm reading this.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Like the oldest literature. This consumed me. I was super weird about this one and kinda bugged people out. I was being obsessive about again like this enduring eternal humanity even from 5,000 years ago. I finished it recently.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton

Lewis made me believe in God. Being called to serve a higher power deeply resonates as I reflect on the actions I am most proud of in my life which seem guided by a love more powerful than I know myself capable of, which I can only attribute to God. I read this in the last month or so. He's such a generous writer and so given to the task of explaining Christianity. Also: Chesterton, which I picked up after reading Lewis reference him multiple times. Both of them converted to Christianity in adulthood. Hearing that kind of feels like when you hear "Thomas Edison was 50 when he invented the lightbulb," or whatever, like there's still time to get it right.

Annihilation: A Novel by Michel Houellebecq

This was a birthday gift from a dear friend who knows very well my love for Houellebecq. Maybe the only novel of his I hadn't yet read aside from Lanzarote and Possibility of an Island—ones no one ever talks about. (Are they the same book or not? Real question.) I love when he gets speculative, sci-fi adjacent. I greatly enjoyed Elementary Particles which I read prior for that reason. They're all special. Hopefully not his last one although by the end of this one, he seems pretty much done. Just finished this.

Accounting All-in-One For Dummies by Michael Taillard

I got this because I'm about to work on an accounting product at my job and I don't know anything about accounting. Accountant wife, lawyer husband. The most boring people you've ever met!

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard writes with a consonance that you must read to believe. I read it earlier this year and it just lives in the background of my brain now. Cenotaph—catafalque—cataphract. All in the same chapter!

Omegas and Leo

Bonus bedside watch pic of my Omegas who also tend to live on the table. Gifts from my fiancé. I love a boxy little gold watch. Thank you Leo the cat for being here too.

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Some quick hits:

• I’m in SF briefly. If you’re here and want to say hi, reply to this email

• I’ll be reading at an event at Sovereign House on Feb. 21st with Bruce Wagner (author of The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers), Matthew Davis (author of Let Me Try Again), Emmalea Russo (author of Vivienne), and David Fishkind (author of the upcoming Don’t Step into My Office).

• Pre-order my novel, Stop All the Clocks, here. If you’re a reviewer and want a galley, shoot me a email.

• In case you missed, I had a great conversation a few weeks ago with Thomas Pacchia, proprietor of Pubkey, a great local bar and a Schelling Point for Bitcoin in NYC. We talked about how he invited both Trump and Harris camps to visit his bar, but only Trump did. Also about the case of Ross Ulbricht, whom Pacchia urged Trump to pardon. First half free. Pacchia explains what Bitcoin is, if you’re curious. Watch now.

• Check out some great recent reviews on Garth Greenwell, on Emmalea Russo, on Peter Vack, and on John Cowper Powys.

• I had a fun live chat with about Tarot, literary magic, and his own novel Major Arcana. Watch here.

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Without further ado: This past summer we did a number of Mars Review x Patricia Swim shoots. This was a collab with the talented designer Patricia Torvalds. This started when Sports Illustrated folded and I thought the MRB should take over swimsuit editions. But then we had fun with the shoots, and people seemed to like them, so I think we’ll do more. We’re just all busy. Anyway, we were doing a shoot at Sov House with a very cool model, and then Lord Miles showed up. He was doing an event later. So I figured we had combine forces somehow. The photo we got is something that no one has ever seen before. Offensive to good taste? Possibly. I don’t think so, but we’ll let you decide…

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