The Believer
@thebeliever.net
A quarterly literature, arts, and culture magazine. https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/the-believer-subscription-bm4 thebeliever.net
“He never meant to keep the promise. But nothing else is going on in Juan Preciado’s life.” —Peter Orner on Juan Rulfo’s ‘Pedro Páramo,’ with cover art by Liniers www.thebeliever.net/end-notes-pe...
End Notes: Pedro Páramo - Believer Magazine
Forgive me, I’ve tried to tell this before, even here in these pages. I’ll fail again. Some stories owe their existence to our inability to tell them. A decade ago now, I was at a kid’s birthday…
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“I took refuge in that embassy where even defeat—the end of a love, a family falling apart—had the right of citizenship, precisely because it was nothing special, nothing other than daily life.”
How to Dine Alone - Believer Magazine
For many years, over the course of my first marriage, I dined alone on Tuesday evenings at a trattoria. What became a tradition began as a coincidence. My wife would have dinner plans with an old high...
thebeliever.net
“I should not have gone to Art Basel Miami Beach. It was worse than a zoo; it was more like an unregulated wildlife market.”
Sacrifice Zone: Portal of Trash in Miami–Dade County - Believer Magazine
In 2008, a boyfriend took me to meet his snowbird parents for Christmas in Florida. Like most events in my twenties, this gathering left me perilously out of my depth amid people with much more life…
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“He’d felt it when he read ‘Milk Run’: Kate Braverman’s poems consumed and gutted him. But not until he watched the young poet read in person, to a packed room, did he realize the poems also consumed and gutted her.”
My Whole Life Is For Sale - Believer Magazine
In 1979, Michael Clark was in his mid-thirties, fresh off a divorce and back from a Peace Corps stint in Africa with his hair hanging down past his shoulders, teaching whatever classes the administrat...
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“I discovered that I needed to know much more about Palestine than I knew. … It is a large bite. Hence, rather than writing, I am reading.” —South African poet laureate Mongane Wally Serote, interviewed by Jeffery Renard Allen
An Interview with Mongane Wally Serote - Believer Magazine
I arrived at the Italian restaurant in Midstream, a suburb of Johannesburg, to find a familiar sight. Blacks seated at one table, whites at another, Coloureds at another, and Indians at still…
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An excerpt from Sheila Heti's interview with Joan Didion, originally published in Issue 87 of The Believer, is now free to read on our Substack. Link in the replies.
“Like anything worth its salt, a garden remembers. Ghostly imprints of what you once planted return.” —Hannah Kingsley-Ma, “Year of the Deadhead”
Year of the Deadhead - Believer Magazine
An old diary entry of mine dated “MAY ????” reads “THIS IS THE YEAR I DEADHEAD.” I wrote this with the declarative energy of a person who wants to change their life. All the various web articles I…
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“As an editor, André Gide rejected the manuscript of Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’ ... So if Gide could be wrong about Proust, anyone can be wrong about any writer.” —Sigrid Nunez, interviewed by Morgan English
An Interview with Sigrid Nunez - Believer Magazine
When Sigrid Nunez appeared at an arts venue in my hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont, in 2024, as part of the town’s literary festival, I had long been an admirer of her work. Her first book, A Feather ...
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Now free to read on our Substack: Eileen Myles at Houston’s second-largest commercial airport.
Place: William P. Hobby Airport
by Eileen Myles
open.substack.com
“Personally, any success I’ve found was because of the people I met in New York doing comedy.” In our summer issue, Abbi Jacobson discusses Broad City, voice acting, and the urge to be analog.
An Interview with Abbi Jacobson - Believer Magazine
It was 2012, and I was nearing the end of college, when I first discovered Abbi Jacobson’s comedy. One night, a friend told me—with conspiratorial giddiness—that she had something special to show me. ...
thebeliever.net
“Look, I don’t want to get all woo-woo here. The last thing I’d ever want to read is an account of someone else’s bad trip. Give me a dream, give me a shopping list. But bear with me.”
End Notes: Pedro Páramo - Believer Magazine
Forgive me, I’ve tried to tell this before, even here in these pages. I’ll fail again. Some stories owe their existence to our inability to tell them. A decade ago now, I was at a kid’s birthday…
thebeliever.net
Las Vegas is both stranger and more normal than you might imagine, and for some reason, people don’t think anyone lives there.
“My garden was loose but it wasn’t lavish.” Hannah Kingsley-Ma on fantasy, avarice, neglect. And deadheading.
Year of the Deadhead - Believer Magazine
An old diary entry of mine dated “MAY ????” reads “THIS IS THE YEAR I DEADHEAD.” I wrote this with the declarative energy of a person who wants to change their life. All the various web articles I…
thebeliever.net
“It is a gaysian chaos novel, basically, about making art, friendship, sex, academia, and money. And husbands.” What @alexanderchee.bsky.social is working on, his favorite tarot decks, and more. Only in print.
“There is something really essential to how we structure drama, which is not just instinctual, but also taught by the history of literature. Though I’m sort of like: How do you break down Proust?” —filmmaker Ira Sachs, interviewed by Chris Molnar
An Interview with Ira Sachs - Believer Magazine
Long known and respected for his low-key dramas about contemporary American life, Ira Sachs leaped into wider repute with Passages (2023) and the experimental biopic Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), both of…
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“Their cover of the Beatles’ ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ is better than it has any right to be and, in my opinion, a far cry better than the original (yes, I will die on this hill).” — @mlrio.bsky.social on the band behind the 1986 hit “Keep Your Hands to Yourself”
Resurrector: Open All Night - Believer Magazine
I bought the first two Georgia Satellites albums on vinyl on eBay in the summer of 2025. The guy who sold me the records threw in a vintage Open All Night tour tee because he’d “had it for years” and ...
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“In her eulogy, I described the thing about her that I found most distinctive: the way the air around her would transform and still, and her entire body react, when she felt something deeply.”
On Description - Believer Magazine
Not long ago, I was reading, in a magazine profile, a physical description of a person “who has a prodigious white beard, wavy gray bangs, and dark, beetling eyebrows.” A photo of the person was…
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“I think to call it ‘bio-political-capitalism’ or ‘neoliberal capital’ or ‘post-Fordist capital’ or using a modifier that has a modifier on the front of it—it just strikes me as bad poetry. It’s the kind of thing an editor would strike.”
An Interview with McKenzie Wark - Believer Magazine
McKenzie Wark is so in touch with the present that her work often comes off as futuristic. A public intellectual in her home country of Australia, she was schooled in Marxism by the working class mine...
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An unlikely duo and their quest to secure the legacy of the ferocious writer Kate Braverman.
My Whole Life Is For Sale - Believer Magazine
In 1979, Michael Clark was in his mid-thirties, fresh off a divorce and back from a Peace Corps stint in Africa with his hair hanging down past his shoulders, teaching whatever classes the…
thebeliever.net
“I took refuge in that embassy where even defeat—the end of a love, a family falling apart—had the right of citizenship, precisely because it was nothing special, nothing other than daily life.”
How to Dine Alone - Believer Magazine
For many years, over the course of my first marriage, I dined alone on Tuesday evenings at a trattoria. What became a tradition began as a coincidence. My wife would have dinner plans with an old high...
thebeliever.net
“A man who probably smoked K2 is lying on his belly, swimming. Some laugh, others ignore him. The guards cuff him and take him away. I berate myself for forgetting to bring my pen and pad.” Only in print: an annotated ramble through writer John J. Lennon’s workday at Sing Sing.
“Mutis—who himself would later also become a seminal novelist—said, ‘Read this shit and learn!’ Márquez obeyed and read it twice that same night, bedazzled.” —Peter Orner on “Pedro Páramo,” with art by Liniers
End Notes: Pedro Páramo - Believer Magazine
Forgive me, I’ve tried to tell this before, even here in these pages. I’ll fail again. Some stories owe their existence to our inability to tell them. A decade ago now, I was at a kid’s birthday party...
thebeliever.net
“I think if I hadn’t met Ilana—because that was like a lightning-in-a-bottle kind of a feeling—I don’t think I would have made Broad City with someone else.” —Abbi Jacobson, interviewed by Claire Calderón
An Interview with Abbi Jacobson - Believer Magazine
It was 2012, and I was nearing the end of college, when I first discovered Abbi Jacobson’s comedy. One night, a friend told me—with conspiratorial giddiness—that she had something special to show me.…
thebeliever.net
“Kate, it seems, was sometimes her own greatest obstacle. Around every corner you turn, there’s a story about betrayal and heroin, a screaming match, pain inflicted and suffered.”
My Whole Life Is For Sale - Believer Magazine
In 1979, Michael Clark was in his mid-thirties, fresh off a divorce and back from a Peace Corps stint in Africa with his hair hanging down past his shoulders, teaching whatever classes the administrat...
thebeliever.net
“I used to tell my students: ‘No matter how bad what happened to you was, take my word for it: No one wants to hear you whine about it.’ That’s where humor comes in.”
An Interview with Sigrid Nunez - Believer Magazine
When Sigrid Nunez appeared at an arts venue in my hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont, in 2024, as part of the town’s literary festival, I had long been an admirer of her work. Her first book, A Feather…
thebeliever.net
“I don’t love a ski town. In fact, I find them uniformly depressing.” —Claire Vaye Watkins, from the last Sundance Film Festival in Park City
One Last Run - Believer Magazine
Past Claire has fucked me again. Ignoring the Sundance Film Festival’s prudent advice not to drink alcohol until acclimated to the altitude, she enjoyed last night at a saloon a couple of beers and so...
thebeliever.net
“‘Stations’ is a beautiful novel about loss and being lost; at its center is a brilliantly drawn collection of found family, memorable people with their own ornately carved crosses to bear.” —Nick Hornby on Louise Kennedy’s forthcoming novel, “Stations”
Stuff I’ve Been Reading: Summer 2026 - Believer Magazine
books read: A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction—Elizabeth McCracken London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth—Patrick Radden Keefe The Things We Never…
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Our former interviews editor, Sheila Heti, discusses the art of the interview with Merve Emre for @nybooks.com www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...
Consulting the Oracle | Merve Emre, Sheila Heti
In the fall of 2022, I saw the novelist Sheila Heti give a presentation on her conversations with early AI chat bots. Their names were Eliza, Alice, and
nybooks.com
“At some point I told the people at Columbia that they couldn’t teach me anything further … And they then allowed me to go to Denver and study with Willie Kgositsile.” —South African poet laureate Mongane Wally Serote on pursuing his MFA in the 1970s
An Interview with Mongane Wally Serote - Believer Magazine
I arrived at the Italian restaurant in Midstream, a suburb of Johannesburg, to find a familiar sight. Blacks seated at one table, whites at another, Coloureds at another, and Indians at still another....
thebeliever.net
“Time is too short, to notice a thing or to describe it. One relies on shorthand and assumptions, and so in the end nothing worth describing gets described.” From Alfred Jung Lee’s new essay, “On Description.”
On Description - Believer Magazine
Not long ago, I was reading, in a magazine profile, a physical description of a person “who has a prodigious white beard, wavy gray bangs, and dark, beetling eyebrows.” A photo of the person was…
thebeliever.net