as you will probably notice as you continue to read, lately I’ve been into books published before 1950. someone once told me he didn’t have time to read contemporary novels because there was so much good stuff in that early window and I sort of pooh poohed that … but now I get it. I’m craving lush sentences and long, involved descriptions. I don’t even want to read crisp clean Carver sentences. I’m in an indulgent mood.

here’s what I read in november 2025

*denotes favorite

denotes book club

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

• I still think that Shteyngart is funny, which is very hard to do in fiction. however I also think it’s a big stretch for any adult to inhabit the mind of a 10-year-old girl, much less an adult of Shteyngart’s particular mien. many reviewers thought he pulled it off, but as someone who was once a precocious 10-year-old girl, I do not think it quite landed.

*Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

My girlfriends are unionizing. I want to die.

• our girl’s still got it, imo.

The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

• the protagonist of this wacky novel is a German set designer who has been working on one play for years. there’s a great scene where he deplores hanging out with artists who only ever talk about their work and never make it. he doesn’t see the irony and that is much of the delight of this pigheaded weirdo, a guy living in Berlin in the late 1930s whose main concerns are scoring coke and Brecht getting too many girls at parties. his various obsessions take him to Paris and LA, where we get some funny riffs on the real state of mid-century arts culture and also the nature of cowardice in the face of real injustice and not just personal grievance. there are a lot of good jokes in this book in an Angry Young Man kind of way — gave me a little Lucky Jim and Ginger Man at times. I also wonder if it wasn’t a bit of a shot at the Williamsburg art scene in the 2010s, but I leave it you, friends, to read it and tell me what you think.

*The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

• Christina Stead was an Australian novelist and lifelong lefty who started publishing novels in the ‘30s and isn’t read very much today. this 1940 novel was reissued in 1965 with the most enthusiastic forward I’ve ever read, and then was reprinted again in the 2010s when Jonathan Franzen said it was one of his favorite books. Louie, the eldest daughter of the titular man, witnesses her naturalist father’s obsession with perfecting the future of humanity by having a ton of children who will conveniently grow up to adore and never question him. the prose is so lush and wild, just like the sprawling compound Stead writes about in this novel. it’s a book that thrills to language even as it despairs of humanity. I am compelled to quote whole passages but that would be most of this email because the sentences are long (complimentary). here’s a teeny bit where her description of a grandfather no one likes is just taut and masterful:

  He would not sit down with them, or talk, or walk with them. He would do nothing but sit with one of his wife’s shawls round him on the bed, dejected, staring at something, or pace up and down, looking intensely bitter, ready to bite, like a dog left in charge of some property. They knew his nature so well that they left him alone at all times, to preserve themselves, and so gave him no opportunity to rave, storm, and cry woe. He wanted to be angry, his mission was to be angry, and he had nothing to be angry about; the world would not let him rave, and this was the great injustice he suffered from: he stalked up and down being angry, in futility; but this anger, little spent, had kept him young, black-haired, and strenuous for over eighty years.

• the end of this novel is also one of a wildest I’ve read in western fiction.

A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst

• press darling non-fiction book about a couple who, while sailing as a crew of two to New Zealand, were shipwrecked by a whale and survived on their inflatable raft on the open sea for months. I did find the story compelling! I wished there was more investigation into feeling and less reportage (or just let this be a long new yorker article).

A Beleaguered City and Other Stories by Margaret Oliphant

• as you may be able to tell from the rest of this email, I have been drifting away from 21st century fiction this month. I wanted to read Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks, but neither NYC library I am a member of had it, so I went with this collection of some of her short supernatural fiction. I will not go so far as to call her a forgotten genius of the 19th century (because I think her fidelity to christian moral fiction is not particularly inventive) but in the title story, about a city taken over by the ghosts of its dead who cannot manage to communicate what they really want to their living loved ones, she channels a poetic yearning that I think is impossible in contemporary fiction. she finds mysticism and not fantasy, she allows the gap between what is known and what is ineffable to exist in fiction without venturing even an imaginary explanation.

*The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

• ok this is also fiction about christianity but it’s very funny and stylistically quite inventive. the justified sinner of the title is a Calvinist who was probably born out of a preacher’s extramarital affair who thinks he’s predestined to go to heaven, therefore nothing he does, no matter how villainous, can really be considered a sin. the novel is shot at self-righteousness as much as it is at the doctrine of predestination. there’s an amazing scene where the protagonist describes a fight he gets into with a boy he wronged. he tells us that he’s so much stronger than the boy and that really the fight is unfair, except in this specific instance the devil made him weak and let the other boy punch him in the face several times. I’ve definitely heard that kind of cope on twitter.
  
  what’s also thrilling about this book, published in pieces around the 1820s, is that it started as an article in a magazine about one of the book’s supernatural twists, though it wasn’t expressly identified as fiction. Hogg played with this line, while not quite aiming for a hoax, but it’s sort of the 19th century version of the “this is a true story” card at the beginning of Fargo.