"Helen starts listening to the ambient music of Brian Eno, whom she learned of 'from crossword puzzles.'" It was a joy to return to Grouse County in 'West of Loveland,' Tom Drury's best and most expansive novel since his 1994 debut. My review for this weekend's WSJ: www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Fiction: ‘West of Loveland’ by Tom Drury

Tom Drury returns to the world of Grouse County, whose denizens are getting older yet still maintain their human idiosyncrasies.

wsj.com

"Culture and literature are hard, if not impossible, to contain. What’s repressed tends to return." I enjoyed Christian Lorentzen meditation on the waxing and waning of literary reputations in our age of revivals and cancelations. jacobin.substack.com/p/on-canceli...

The afterlives of literary reputation

Literary reputations are continually revised through political conflict, changing tastes, and rediscovery. What can contemporary disputes about writers tell us about that process?

jacobin.substack.com

A satisfyingly meaty new issue of Bookforum is out. It's a mark of what a first-rate critic Sarah Nicole Prickett is that she has been able to write a really interesting and insightful piece on Rachel Cusk's pointless squib of a novel, 'Life of M'. www.bookforum.com/print/3302/t...

The Lady Vanishes

Rachel Cusk’s game of Celebrity – Sarah Nicole Prickett

bookforum.com

After observers lawfully filmed ICE in a public parking lot, the agents followed their car, boxed them in, and slashed their tire in retaliation. The observers bravely caught the whole thing on video.

Terrific Adam Fleming Petty piece on the prolific horror writer Brian Evenson, whose use of language is so vivid and whose imagery is so disturbing that it got him booted out of his teaching job at BYU defector.com/brian-evenso...

Brian Evenson Will Mess With Your Head | Defector

Brian Evenson’s first book, a story collection titled Altmann’s Tongue, came out in 1994. It was not widely reviewed. The few notices the book did receive in the media ranged from the curious, to the ...

defector.com

"No previous century of human life has had a more generous and knowing portrait than the one Chaucer gave to his own time in the pages of The Canterbury Tales." Steve Donoghue on a new biblio-biography. openlettersreview.com/posts/chauce...

Chaucer's England by Nicholas Orme — Open Letters Review

A wide-ranging survey of Chaucer’s 14th century

openlettersreview.com

Meghan O'Gieblyn with a perceptive assessment of the seductiveness (and, let's face it, the tedium) of Claire-Louise Bennett's fiction, which reproduces "with a fidelity that is nearly intolerable, the well-worn circuits of the mind’s engine" www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Unfinished Business | Meghan O’Gieblyn

Claire-Louise Bennett’s novels have found a new language to evoke the often circular, abstracted nature of human consciousness.

nybooks.com

In the new issue of Harper's there is a quite beautiful essay by Nicole Krauss on Walter Benjamin and his Angel of History, who is "born only to be extinguished, though not before singing to God" harpers.org/archive/2026...

In Angel's Care, by Nicole Krauss

What a small print knows about the end of the world

harpers.org

Here's a thoughtful piece by Kevin Ng for the Baffler on the contrasting approaches of these two musically oriented novels thebaffler.com/latest/an-al...

An Almost Classical Mode | Kevin Ng

The Eurocentric elitism of classical music offers rich terrain for the social novel.

thebaffler.com

Sam Sacks@ssacks.bsky.social · 2w ago

Two novels take on the mysteries of music! In 'Partita,' the intangibles of the form helpfully undercut Barbara Kingsolver's usual didacticism. www.wsj.com/arts-culture... Yiyun Li's elegant but fatalistic 'Music Against the Night' dwells instead on the vanity of art. www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Dwight Garner has been on a good run recently, doing well to find a lot of books he likes, and he focuses enjoyably on the good parts of Chad Harbach's 'The Brightness,' a "more gothic and moonstruck" follow-up to 'The Art of Fielding' www.nytimes.com/2026/10/26/b...

A Bold and Ambitious Campus Novel, 15 Years in the Making

Chad Harbach’s “The Brightness” explores the fraught politics of college life and the precarious years that come after it.

nytimes.com

A wonderfully written piece by Kate Riley (known from last year's great debut novel "Ruth") about the art of Japanese body suit tattoos and the people--including the author--who get them: nowvoyagermag.com/reporting/fu...

Here is @emilybregel.bsky.social’s story. CW: self-harm 38yo Andreea Marin is brain dead on life support, her brother says, after not getting the medication she needed for her mental illness in ICE custody. Yet her wrists and ankles are chained to the hospital bed. tucson.com/news/local/b...

ICE causes man to wreck while his children are in the car, then tries to pry his kids from his arms. They got the wrong guy. Toward the end of the video, an ICE officer says law requires the person recording to back up 25 feet and threatens with pepper spray. (There is no 25-foot law.)

Gift link www.wsj.com/world/ukrain...

Exclusive | Musk Ordered Starlink Slowdown That Blindsided Ukraine

The SpaceX founder authorized the move and has been discussing Ukraine with Trump, but the president has denied ordering the restrictions.

wsj.com

Our editor Edwin Frank doing an AMA tonight at 7pm eastern. www.eventbrite.com/e/nyrb-class...

NYRB Classics Q&A with Edwin Frank

This event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public.

eventbrite.com

I really wanted to love it but did not. rohanmaitzen.com/2026/10/13/i...

In My Hands: Rebecca Perry, May We Feed the King

I found his scant entry in the ledger almost immediately–it was in my hands, as if I had manifested it, with no knowledge of what came before. The single page dedicated to his reign was now a…

rohanmaitzen.com

I've been neglecting to mention my weekly fiction column on this site for a while now. So for any interested parties, here's a brief thread with gift links to reviews of some autumn novels.

'“Who’d read a book about a fucking guards barrack?” asked one old friend when McGahern invited him to the pub to help spend the £100 advance he’d just received from Faber & Faber.' I reviewed Frank Shovlin's biography of John McGahern for @ftweekend.com:

John McGahern: A Writing Life — banned, lauded and a late success

Frank Shovlin writes a commanding biography of the Irish writer whose work won praise and condemnation for telling the truth about life and his country

ft.com

Oh, this is awful. Ann was such a wonderful critic and a lovely person, too. Awful awful. www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2...

Ann Hornaday, longtime Washington Post film critic, dies at 66

Ann Hornaday, who helped Post readers understand the enduring magic and occasional disappointment of movies, died Sunday at her home in Baltimore. She was 66.

washingtonpost.com

"there needs to be a bipartisan reckoning for Mr. Trump’s budding alliance with the Kremlin against Ukraine, Europe and American interests." @wsj.com editorial board

Opinion | To Russia With Love, Signed Donald

Trump waives sanctions and tariffs under the Lindsey Graham law.

wsj.com

"It was the saddest thing ever. What he did for this community for the past 14 years. He made sure that people in need had food on their tables for their families." The pantry serves between 7,000 and 8,000 people each month... They said if he does not return, the pantry will close indefinitely.

🌊@randym77.bsky.social · 2w ago

bronx.news12.com/bronx-food-p...

“When it happened to Jose.” For my latest story, I went to Paris Illinois to talk with residents about the Main Street Cafe’s owner being taken by ICE and the pain that brought to town. Please give it a read. @chicagotribune.com www.chicagotribune.com/2026/10/18/p...

In Paris, Illinois, Trump’s ICE raids came home ‘when it happened to Jose’

Paris, Illinois, a town that voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump, is contending with its support after one of their own was arrested by ICE.

chicagotribune.com

NEW: ICE is trying to deport a mother of 4 while her husband is at Fort Benning in Army basic training. When she went to pick up the family's military IDs, Navy personnel turned her over to ICE. She's been in the US since age six. With @nancyayoussef.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

He Joined the Military. They Reported His Wife to ICE.

When a soldier’s wife went to pick up her military ID at a base in Texas, ICE officers showed up.

theatlantic.com

I'm seeing a lot of this passage from a Wired article on LLMs in publishing and I'm sorry, it's the most obnoxious kind of anti-reporting. What exactly did Reynolds say about AI? Was he contacted for comment? There were multiple anonymous attendees who said he was 'seemingly baffled by critiques'?

An ICE agent struck a Mexican construction worker with a vehicle in Houston over the weekend. Texas prosecutors are considering criminal charges against the agent, officials said. nyti.ms/4sa9tXo

I completed my ‘Booker decades’ overview by writing about ten of the best long- and shortlisted novels from the 2010s - featuring memories from shortlisted authors and judges from the decade, inc Tan Twan Eng, Sunjeev Sahota and Robin Robertson:

The Booker Prize in the 2010s: 10 novels that are well worth rediscovering | The Booker Prizes

This decade in Booker Prize history belonged to the heavyweights with wins by Hilary Mantel and Marlon James. But it was also a time of innovation, with plenty of bold, boundary-pushing books to add t...

thebookerprizes.com

Jim Knipfel has died He wrote this obituary More to come

Jim Knipfel Obituary Oct 7, 2026 - Simply Cremation of GB

View Jim Knipfel's obituary, send flowers, find service dates, and sign the guestbook.

simplycremationgb.com

Can't stop thinking about this kid, man. Five years old, watched his dad get shot in the neck and taken away. Now no one knows where his dad is, what sort of condition he's in, any of it. All across the country, every day, we are destroying children's lives.

Andrew Couts@couts.bsky.social · 3w ago

The man shot by ICE in NYC yesterday has disappeared after he was admitted to the hospital, and his lawyer reportedly doesn’t know where he is. www.courthousenews.com/ice-shot-a-m...

An ICE member shot and injured someone in the Bronx of New York City: "A grey vehicle with a bullet hole in the windshield could be seen in the middle of the road."

ICE agent shoots person in the Bronx, law enforcement sources say

A person has been hospitalized after being shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx on Thursday, law enforcement sources said.

cbsnews.com

It happens that Anne Carson was a talking head in the 1995 PBS series "The Nobel Legacy," on science laureates. Tom Shales called her "the so-called poet" & said her comments "border on the imbecilic." Carson called it one of the worst experiences of her life. www.washingtonpost.com/archive/life...

THE NOBEL LEGACY': NO PRIZE WINNER

washingtonpost.com