I’ve never much liked horses. The first time I meet my sister-in-law is at the stables, where she keeps an enormous bay stallion with the same name as her brother, my husband. When the two of them were younger, this caused confusion: it was hard to tell which Václav she was talking about; which one, horse or boy, had behaved badly. Playing willing is a newcomer’s role in any family scene, so I ride my sister-in-law’s horse when she insists. This Václav is old, gentle, and toothless. Still, I cling to the reins. I’m much too afraid of falling. Later, in the car on the way back to the city, my sister-in-law tells me about the astronomical sums of money the animal consumes each month and the two jobs she juggles to pay for his keep, and I think of the opening of Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds, in which a father, Strepsiades, listens to his son, Pheidippides, as he sleeps and dreams of chariot races, and laments that “his madness for horses has shattered my fortune.”

I prefer to encounter horses at a safe distance. The difference between the immaterial horses who have galloped through my reading and the material horses that surprise me on walks in the countryside, big and breathing heavily, sidling up to fences with their long tongues lolling and buzzing with flies, never stops surprising me. Like death in a tragedy, the horses in Greek theater always seem to be happening offstage. In the final scene of Euripides’s Hippolytus, the battered body of the eponymous subject is hauled out for us to see; after being terrified by Poseidon, Hippolytus’s horses dashed his chariot against the rocks. The gravely injured boy then reconciles with his father, Theseus, before giving up the ghost. A messenger lets us know that the horses themselves have disappeared. He doesn’t know where.

The Clouds was first staged at the City Dionysia in 423 B.C.E., where it came last in the competition, much to Aristophanes’s disappointment. (A year later, in The Wasps, he lambasted the undeserving audience, putting a stirring self-defense in the mouths of his chorus: “Last year you betrayed him, when he sowed the most novel ideas … none ever heard better comic verses.”) Throughout the play, a satire of the rampant philosophizing of the time, horses and ideas are opposed, the earthly arena of the former contrasted with the celestial flurry of the latter. When Strepsiades first encounters Socrates, the thinker is suspended in the air in a basket; the status of contemplation is literally lofty. As Strepsiades watches, Socrates beseeches the clouds, which carry our thoughts, to grant the bankrupt man the gift of philosophy (which will help him escape his creditors). In this novel cosmology, there is no Zeus, no Helios and his horses to pull the sun across the sky, just the Whirlwind that sets bloated, colicky ideas thumping up against one another. Strepsiades learns what Socrates has to teach him and is so taken by the philosopher’s ideas that he sends Pheidippides to study in Socrates’s stable of disciples (for which Aristophanes invented the word phrontistērion, meaning “place of pondering,” and which is often translated, hilariously, as “thoughtery”). The dialogues that follow leave the spectator suffering from a kind of rhetorical whiplash, surrounded by absurdities on all sides. The satire is so punishing that in his Apology, Plato, Socrates’s real student, portrays Aristophanes as partially responsible for the negative public image that led to the execution of his mentor some twenty-four years later.

By the end of The Clouds, Pheidippides has been transformed into an adroit reasoner. During his time in the Thoughtery he becomes pale and emaciated and equivocal; his warm-blooded, horse-loving nature disappears for good. It turns out that, for Strepsiades, a son who doesn’t love horses is a son who doesn’t love anything. Soon after his great alteration, Pheidippides beats his father and uses his newfound reason to justify doing so: “When I thought only about horses, I was not able to string three words together without a mistake, but now that the master has altered and improved me and that I live in this world of subtle thought, of reasoning and of meditation, I count on being able to prove satisfactorily that I have done well to thrash my father.”

After listening to my sister-in-law describe her own financial ruin, I decide that if I ever have a child, they will never know that a horse is a thing you can have. I hope that for them horses will be mere scenery, as innocuous as hedgerows, barely worth comment. My distrust of horses goes beyond the desire to save some money, because in some essential way I agree with Aristophanes’s Socrates that what’s most interesting is the world that we have fabricated, the figures that we set against one another. The horses worthy of attention, I will insist, are the horses that carry our metaphors. I’m not convinced that this is true, but I have always struggled to recognize animals beneath their coverings of meaning. They are always more useful to me that way.

***

I would describe Turgenev’s “The End of Chertopkhanov” as a story about the difficulty of recognizing a horse. It’s possibly the saddest story I know.

The first description of its protagonist arrives one story earlier in A Hunter’s Album, the collection in which this work appears. In “Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin,” Chertopkhanov cuts a ridiculous if endearing figure, with puffy cheeks and glassy eyes darting about “as if he were drunk.” When the narrator visits Chertopkhanov in the village of Bessonovo, he is described shuffling around his gloomy dwelling in a greasy dressing gown, with his wasp-faced lover, Masha, and penniless confidant, Nedopyuskin. (I imagine something like the decaying Beale family home of Grey Gardens, only Russian and sometimes mirthful.) By the time “The End of Chertopkhanov” comes about, Chertopkhanov’s lover has disappeared and his friend has died, and he falls into ruin soon after. The only thing that lifts his cloud of despair is the appearance of an excellent horse, whom Chertopkhanov calls Malek Adel.

This horse is the unexpected reward for a good deed, and he arrives like something from a fairy tale, ridden into town by the scruffy little man, known only as “the Jew,” whom Chertopkhanov had earlier saved from being murdered by a group of anti-Semitic peasants. When Chertopkhanov sees Malek Adel for the first time, his heart starts “hammering in his breast.” Like Pheidippides, “he was a passionate devotee of horse-flesh and knew a good horse when he saw one.” He accepts the Jew’s ridiculously low price, and takes the horse. Malek Adel becomes the center of his small world. The nature of his value is not made clear: Though the narrator assumes that Chertopkhanov prizes Malek Adel for how splendid he makes him seem to his neighbors, Turgenev’s description of how the horse appears through his owner’s eyes is so emotional, so full of feeling. A more generous reader might think that the down-on-his-luck aristocrat has found something to love at last.

Then Malek Adel vanishes. Chertopkhanov is woken up from a bad dream by the sound of distant neighing. His loss has a formal, strident quality: confronted with the empty stable, “Chertopkhanov’s head began to spin just as if a bell had begun to toll in his skull.”

It’s funny that the story is called “The End of Chertopkhanov,” because what makes it tragic is Turgenev’s refusal to end on any of its gradually escalating losses. Chertopkhanov is not finished by the disappearance of his lover, the death of his friend, or even by the theft of Malek Adel. If he were, the story would merely be sad. Instead, Chertopkhanov is broken by the return of his horse and his growing fear that this horse, although in all aspects the same, is not in fact Malek Adel.

After a yearlong quest and the fairy-tale-ish recovery of Malek Adel from a distant marketplace, a story that he recounts to his astonished groom, Perfishka, Chertopkhanov falls into a pattern of obsessive doubt and compulsive behavior. There is not only something implausible about Malek Adel’s reappearance but something newly strange in his character. He begins to worry that this horse is not Malek Adel after all: “He almost constantly … subjected Malek Adel to examination, riding off a great distance and then testing him, or, creeping into the stable, locking the door behind him and standing right in front of the horse’s head, he’d start looking him in the eyes and asking in a whisper: ‘Are you he? Is it you? Is it you?’ and then he’d either study him, intently, hour after hour, or, in an access of joy, he’d mutter: ‘Yes, it’s him! Of course it’s him!’ or then again he’d be doubtful and even be covered in confusion.” His former happiness gives way to torment: the renewed presence of the horse is even worse than its absence. The endless demand for certainty that the challenge of loving again necessitates for Chertopkhanov slowly crushes him. The story is what the philosopher Stanley Cavell might call a tragedy of skepticism, and it ends much as can be expected: Chertopkhanov shoots the horse that he can no longer bear to be around.

But I try to make myself remember that the story isn’t just Chertopkhanov’s tragedy but Malek Adel’s too. All these troubled ways of looking—associative, symbolic, allegorical, skeptical, suspicious—enact their own peculiar violence on whatever they take as an object. The projection leaves a trail of destruction in its wake.

***

Soon after I read Turgenev’s story for the first time, my friend Veronika takes a photograph of a horse during an unguarded moment on the Sussex Downs. I like it so much that it becomes my desktop background for the next six years. Whenever I look at it, I feel as if I’m seeing an animal for the first time. This horse is so obvious, so absolutely unselfconscious. It’s so much realer than any other horse I’ve encountered, even the ones that I’ve ridden. At first I think that my impression must come from the positioning of the horse’s head in the center of the frame or that it belongs to the strange brightness of the image, but then I decide it’s just a great example of what a photograph can do. In The World Viewed, Cavell describes the way that photography levels hierarchy, reducing the primacy of the human figure: “Photographs are of the world, in which human beings are not ontologically favored over the rest of nature, in which objects are not props but natural allies (or enemies) of the human character.” Perhaps if Veronika were to spend her life photographing horses, I’d find it harder to dismiss them. It would make for a more crowded world, at least.

In the end it turns out that I need the real horse, too. After my daughter is born I feel as if just about anything could happen to her. My friend’s wife suggests that I put iron underneath her crib. Following tradition, this is supposed to protect a baby from witchcraft, but she says it might help with all the other stuff too. In the absence of certainty, a newly dangerous world, this seems better than doing nothing. I text my sister-in-law and she brings me one of Václav’s iron horseshoes the very next day. Together we stand by the crib and look at it. The shoe is so ugly, the metal is corroded and, in some places, rusted through, and there’s a flaky white substance on one side that I think must be either glue or old keratin. It’s nothing like the smooth, lucky symbol I imagined, just matter, something material at last. We put it there anyway.

Quotes taken from the following translations: Aristophanes: The Eleven Comedies (1912), trans. unknown; Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (1990), trans. Richard Freeborn.

Missouri Williams is a writer and editor. Her first novel, The Doloriad, was published in 2022 and won the Republic of Conciousness Prize. Her second book, The Vivisectors, is out now.

I began growing kumquat trees after my German hairdresser—who fixes BMWs and fills his salon with large, flapping plants—pulled a pale fruit off one of his containers’ branches and told me to keep it in my pocket for three days to ripen. I wrapped the kumquat, the size of my thumb pad, into a Kleenex to be transported in my winter coat. It was a new year. I drove back to a house built in the 1700s—owned by a woman in her nineties who worked full-time and kept a fridge filled with Celsius energy drinks—where I was living in the attic. The pocket kumquat, forgotten until I unpacked from the holidays, tasted like a flower.

A year later, no longer attic-bound, I bought three varieties from a nursery recommended for its eclectic catalogue, which includes honeyberries, yerba maté, oyster leaf (which tastes like oysters), and a sweeter, stronger blackberry developed by the University of Arkansas that has the “potential to change the blackberry market.” The happiest plant of my life was an unspecified citrus tree that I rescued from a greenhouse sale at age eleven. The citrus and I grew equal in height until I went off to college and it surpassed me, and though it never bore fruit, its leaves were glossy and in wintertime it towered at the end of my childhood bed, which was also in an attic.

Citrus trees have always stalked me, with a meaning similar to what can be read in Saint John Climacus’s The Ladder of Divine Ascent: “The natural property of the lemon tree is such that it lifts its branches upwards when it has no fruit, but the more the branches bend down the more fruit they bear.” In humility and trials, fruit can emerge. In the time between when my German hairdresser gave me a kumquat to put in my pocket and when I received three varieties of kumquat trees in the mail, my childhood home, with its citrus tree and attic, burned down, and was rebuilt.

***

For Hildegard of Bingen, the famous twelfth-century Benedictine abbess and mystic, the earth produces goods commensurate with every need of the human body. This conviction was rooted in her broader theological framework of viriditas, or “greening power,” a divine life force that animates all creation and expresses itself in various ways, including in the healing properties of plants. In her encyclopedic book Physica, she sought to codify the natural world—plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds, animals, reptiles, and metals—according to each component’s effects on the four temperaments. Citrus trees (more “hot than cold”), signify chastity. When boiled in wine and consumed daily, their leaves alleviate daily fevers. Radishes cleanse the brain. Horseradish makes a lean person strong. Chamomile is calming to the intestines, and mullein is good for those who are sad. Wild lettuce, whose milky sap would later be studied in the nineteenth century for its mild sedative quality, extinguishes “uncontrollable lust.” It can be made into a kind of lettuce soup, the liquid of which is to be poured upon hot stones in a sauna while placing the cooked leaves on one’s belly.

The four temperaments, originally defined by the Greeks but interpreted by Hildegard in a more spiritually inflected way, are no longer reasonable medical categories, though I would be considered melancholic—the “iceberg temperament.” If not careful, I might be brought down by poisoned daydreaming. In the arduous process of rebuilding the house, we discovered that it had already burned down years before we moved in. My father recalled finding what may have been an arm bone when he dug around the side yard. The year of rebuilding was a task of inventorying and replication; insurance requires that the new house be the same, more or less, as the house that has been demolished.

To Hildegard, spiritually, we are not far from Paradise. God leads us there, through the thick walls of our earth. “I was no longer the center of my life and therefore I could see God in everything,” wrote the Venerable Bede. When I experience instability in the world I at first try to find stability in myself and am told, by a woman at church, about Hildegard’s “cookies of joy,” made of spelt, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves, the warming spices meant to strengthen the heart and lift the spirit from its frozen, weighted state. Hildegard concocts entire recipes designed by these principles, including violet wine for melancholy and a fennel-based tonic to stabilize vision and digestion. At the market, I’m happy to enter into Hildegard’s definitions of celery, ginger, and horseradish. And why not? Don’t our symptoms and decisions have vast implications across many simultaneous systems? Isn’t it a kind of arrogance to believe that anything can be exempt from the deeply tangled and patterned networks of reality, what Hildegard simply called the mind of God made visible in matter?

***

Also known for nostalgia, house fires, and recurring fruit (most of his films feature apples) is Andrei Tarkovsky, whose films I watched over the course of Great Lent, the yearly stretch when Christians, deliberately fixing their eyes on the Cross, decrease through fasting so that God can increase. The idea to watch Tarkovsky each week was presented to me by a friend, as a means of consuming media that is demanding and contemplative instead of entertaining. There are seven films for seven weeks, which we moved through chronologically: Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), and finally The Sacrifice (1986), which was completed months before his death. Each film grows longer and stiller and airier, as though he were gradually removing something from them to allow for an immensity to emerge, which is also the logic of Lent. It is better to watch his films in a group, the way it is easier to fast in a community. When I was a teenager, Tarkovsky was screened in an abandoned temple with a live synth score. After Stalker, a friend turns to me to say that watching it is the most ascetic thing she’s ever done.

Tarkovsky himself was fixated on sculpting in time, his phrase for cinema’s unique capacity to preserve the texture of lived moments via the pressure of duration itself. The idea is resonant with Hildegard’s viriditas, her sense that divine life is not an abstraction but rather a quality that saturates matter and can be felt, tasted, and in Tarkovsky’s case, seen. His filmography ends how it begins—in war, in a robbed childhood, and with a slivering possibility of rebirth. Both his first and last films end with an image of a tree.

On the fourth week of Lent, during which we watch Mirror, the kumquat trees arrive, and I pot them in large planters with a soil mix for citrus. There is a Nordmann variety, thin-skinned and sweet; a variegated centennial, for its juiciness and striped leaves; and, for its sweetness, a small Meiwa, which looks most like the citrus tree from my youth—wiry and spare, sensitive to little winds.

Fire irreversibly consumes, but also purifies and delivers. After Easter Sunday comes Pentecost, the descending of the Holy Spirit, embodied as tongues of fire. The fruits of the spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) are inaugurated through flame, then produced through the ordering of one’s life, over time. The house I currently live in has no attic, and my reconstructed childhood home—now built according to code—no longer does either, but it is ten feet taller than it used to be. On the second floor, where my childhood bed would have been, through a window that would have been my window, I can see a wide spot of Lake Erie and into a neighbor’s yard I’d never been able to glimpse before. It is filled with strange pieces of wood and potted plants.

Nicolette Polek is the author of Bitter Water Opera, Imaginary Museums, and the forthcoming novel Ackermann.

I grew up being told that reading makes you a more empathetic, nicer person; more recently, I’ve heard that “deep reading” (which means, essentially, reading a book) is the best way to reclaim your atrophying attention span. For some, who might prefer to outsource the activity and receive a quick description of what it was like, it’s an anachronism. Headlines say that children are spending less of their spare time with books—in Britain, the problem is a “relentless” focus on literacy, which sounds particularly Roald Dahl. What all these conversations are missing, of course, is the fact that reading is one of the most mysterious, pleasurable pastimes we have—which is why we have put together a Summer issue that we believe will fill you with a strange feeling of yearning, like a dog at a tree stump who would like to stay longer than is feasible. So it was after my colleague Dennis passed me Shuang Xuetao’s “God’s Arrow,” which appears in print for the first time in our pages, in a translation by Jeremy Tiang, and is named after a weapon with magical powers. “If it flies through the air,” says an enigmatic benefactor of the kind we could all use, “hold in your mind what you want to happen, and it will come true.”

That’s not to say that the writing in these pages will give you what you think you want. Lucy Ellmann’s “MT” launches itself at the reader in the form of a sixteen-page catalogue of the nefarious activities performed by “men together” (“Men together, tear-gassing protesters. Men together drilling for oil. Men together shooting people in Bible-study groups. Men together itching to finger any control panel going …”). And Chigozie Obioma’s “The Yellow Leaf” takes us into the apartment of a couple who have recently fled Nigeria for Italy, where each finds themselves trapped in a different way. As Frederick Seidel has it in his new poem “Deadheads in the Dark,” “There’s nothing to sing except a song / Because it won’t be long. It’s all gone wrong.”

The image of a broken rainbow on the issue’s front cover is by Alex Da Corte. Some readers—especially, Da Corte recently said, “friends of Dorothy”—might recognize the rainbow as lifted from the cover of Mariah Carey’s 1999 album, where it’s spray-painted across her chest. The artwork’s title is The End—which, of course, is constantly receding. As a sage called Kermit once sang from his swamp, “Have you been half-asleep / and have you heard voices? / I’ve heard them calling my name. / Is this the sweet sound / that calls the young sailors? / The voice might be one and the same.”

—Emily Stokes

Emily Stokes is the editor of  The Paris Review.

In an apt omen of things to come, the first prefight press conference for UFC Freedom 250 opened with an AI-generated promotional video and ended with an unplanned altercation. It was early May; the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s “D.C. Takeover”—the culmination of Donald Trump’s promise to bring the UFC to the White House—was still more than a month away. But UFC President Dana White convened the event’s stars for a quick Q&A in Newark, New Jersey. Most of the fighters came dressed in suits, button-downs, or athleisure, but heavyweight Josh “the Incredible Hok” Hokit arrived wearing a long black cloak, an American-flag-themed skullcap, and matching gloves—candy cane stripes trailing down every finger, a solid blue block across his knuckles, an eagle glaring out from the back of each hand.

Hokit, a former NFL player who transitioned to MMA because he “wanted to do a real man’s sport,” has a penchant for answering journalists’ questions in rhymes. This presser was no exception. He aimed his insults at Brazilian fighter Alex “Poatan” Pereira, in an attempt to goad him (and White) into setting up an official bout, now that the former middleweight champion had moved up to Hokit’s weight class. (“Alex gained some weight and now he thinks he’s King Kong / but his girl said the steroids killed his ding dong.”) When a reporter asked Hokit about going face-to-face with Pereira, he escalated:

I come to devour.
You will know the day, you will know the hour.
I’m gonna give Pereira a golden shower!

(In case anyone missed the subtext, he went on: “I’m not just gonna win. I’m gonna PISS ON HIM.”) But as Pereira, only two seats away, calmly responded to the poem via translator, Hokit seemed to grow more agitated (“He speaks English!”), pointing and yelling at Pereira—and, soon, at a third fighter, Ilia “El Matador” Topuria, for trying to mediate this too-long exchange between two people who weren’t even scheduled to fight each other. In the end, Hokit was thrown out, forcing the press conference to finish less than half an hour after it had started.

The energy was more subdued when the athletes reconvened a month later for the kickoff press conference in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where local children, in UFC Freedom 250 T-shirts, ushered the fighters to their seats and the reporters noticeably avoided asking Hokit questions. The heavyweight, leaning into the caricature of a person with a dissociative disorder à la M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, replaced his cloak with a black suit and a boonie hat and introduced himself as “Josh,” apologizing for the past behavior of the “Incredible Hok.” Josh, who frequently interrupted questions directed at others, was no better than his alter ego. In response to the last question—again, not directed at him—he cut in, ostensibly to apologize, then called Topuria’s ex-wife a “stripper from Miami.” The second his mouth left the microphone, White—whose podium was perfectly situated in front of Abraham Lincoln’s statue—concluded the press conference.

***

The MMA promotion’s “once-in-a-generation” event promised fighter meet-and-greets, a ceremonial weigh-in, and a live concert featuring a country-rock band. The weekend would end with a seven-bout fight card on the South Lawn, simulcast on Paramount subscribers’ screens across the Americas. Headlining the main card were two championship bouts: for the lightweight title, interim champion¹ Justin “the Human Highlight” Gaethje—who once asked an opponent to break his nose so that the UFC would cover surgery for his deviated septum—ended Topuria’s undefeated streak by technical knockout after the fourth round. The heavyweight interim title, meanwhile, went to Ciryl “Bon Gamin” Gane, who finished Pereira via knockout in the second round.

Every bout on the main card, save for Gane and Pereira’s, featured an American-born fighter, many of whom had lobbied for an opportunity to fight on June 14, posting Instagram videos and giving podcast interviews about what an honor it would be to represent the country in such a historic event. Notably missing were the UFC greats (and liabilities) Jon Jones—the youngest champion in history, whose near-perfect record shows one loss (for illegal elbows) and one no-contest2 (for a doping violation)—and Conor McGregor, who once flew from Dublin to New York to throw a dolly at a bus.

The collaboration had been in the works since at least last July, when, at the kick-off event for America’s yearlong birthday celebration, Trump had first teased the idea. “I even think we’re going to have a UFC fight,” he told the Des Moines crowd, a plan later confirmed by White, as well as by Karoline Leavitt, who claimed the president was “dead serious.” Cue the dream cards and the campaigns. Jones renounced his two-month retirement from the Octagon, and McGregor—who had visited the White House for Saint Patrick’s Day four months prior—announced his return after a five-year hiatus, even claiming he’d signed a contract to fight in what was then being referred to as “UFC White House.” (No one believed him.)

Over the following months, amid escalating military conflicts, details gradually emerged. The date moved up from Independence Day to Flag Day, or the U.S. Army’s birthday, which this year also happened to be a Sunday,3 Trump’s eightieth birthday, and the first day of the G7 Summit. (France ultimately delayed the summit’s schedule by a day to accommodate Trump.) There would be weigh-ins on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial; walkouts from the Oval Office to the Octagon. Renderings showed an outdoor arena on the South Lawn for an exclusive, invite-only crowd of five thousand, and a stadium in the Ellipse for up to eighty-five thousand members of the general public. The total production cost, upward of eight figures, would all be on the UFC’s dime.

White has always cast Trump as a kind of UFC savior. The organization, cofounded in 1993 by the entrepreneur Art Davie and the Brazilian jiujitsu Grand Master Rorion Gracie, changed hands twice within its first decade—a side effect of John McCain’s nationwide campaign to ban what he called “human cockfighting.” Nearly insolvent by 2001, the franchise’s beleaguered owners sold it off to a casino-executive couple and their childhood friend, Dana White. By then, the legal tides were starting to turn: the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board began creating a regulatory framework for the sport, in the process, permitting some fights in-state. One month after the sale, the new owners held their first event, UFC 30, at the only venue willing to host them: the Trump Taj Mahal. To hear White and Trump tell it, the fight launched a decades-long friendship that even survived the latter’s short-lived partnership with a rival MMA promotion. But the truth is that Trump’s casino had already hosted the UFC under its previous ownership, and, according to the former executive James Werme, UFC 30 had been arranged prepurchase. Also: Trump was absent from both events. But the watered-down story—about White’s ingenuity and Trump’s generosity—sounds better than the reality of their transactional partnership and the benefits they’ve stood to gain from it.

Fast-forward to 2016, during the Republican National Convention, when White extolled the nominee—who would later earn the dubious distinction of becoming the first sitting president to attend a UFC event while being impeached—as a “fighter who will fight for this country.” (Also in 2016: the sale of the UFC to Ari Emanuel, Trump’s former talent agent.) Eight years later, as the crowd celebrated Trump’s second win in Palm Beach, White spoke again. By 2024, the UFC had already elbowed its way into the mainstream, having widened its audience when it became the first professional sports organization to bring back live events during the pandemic. After congratulating the president-elect, White thanked the podcasters who had endorsed Trump during his campaign, including the “mighty and powerful” Joe Rogan, a UFC commentator who—you guessed it—called the fights at UFC Freedom 250.

White, who has repeatedly denied any political allegiances, has both transformed the UFC into something of a meeting place for Trump and intertwined it inextricably with members of his circle. The former DOGE leader Elon Musk, for example, joined the board of directors of the UFC parent company Endeavor in 2021; that same year, the Oracle CEO Larry Ellison became a shareholder after the company’s IPO. Four years later, Ellison’s son, David, acquired Paramount Global with approval from Trump’s FCC. Then the newly merged Paramount Skydance signed an exclusive, seven-year, $7.7 billion deal with the UFC—a risky break with the pay-per-view model on which the game had always relied.

Last Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who’d attended UFC 327 in April in lieu of attending peace negotiations with Iran—signed, in a televised ceremony, a vague memorandum of understanding with White to “mark a new public-private partnership” to “collaborate on the global growth of mixed martial arts,” indicating that perhaps this will not be the last time we’ll see the Claw at the White House. Two days later, the UFC commentator Daniel Cormier posted, then deleted, screenshots of direct messages from Donald Trump Jr., who had asked him for insider betting information—namely, whom he was rooting for and which fighters had injuries. (“I’ll cut to the chase,” he allegedly wrote. “Are any of the fights tomorrow rigged?”) The son of the president later denied having ever contacted Cormier.

UFC Freedom 250 was a spectacle—a “gimmick,” as Trump called it—that gave two showmen the opportunity to publicly flex their might and turn a profit while doing so; one need only look at the UFC and the Trump Organization’s websites, where you can purchase a gold medallion featuring Trump’s profile or bid on the name card Hokit used in the very press conference from which he was thrown out. But commemorative memorabilia aside, all of this peddling and pontificating about the UFC’s value would be for naught if Trump had no real skin in the game. Three months ago, as he talked up UFC Freedom 250, the president reportedly purchased “between $15,001 and $50,000” worth of stock in TKO Group Holdings, the parent company of Zuffa Boxing, the WWE, and, of course, the UFC.

Stephanie Cuepo Wobby is a writer and a former U.S. Army combat medic. Her work has been published by The Baffler, The Point, and Guernica, among other publications.

Friday, March 27, 2026

When I waded into the Florida humidity, Mom and Mimi were waiting for me at curbside pickup, three hours after the worst airport security I’d ever experienced. The TSA line at JFK had snaked around the sidewalk. I’d cut shamelessly.

I hugged my mother first, then her mother. I’d last seen Mimi at Uncle Dan’s funeral almost two years before, and I hadn’t been down to Florida in ten. I used to spend every spring break in New Smyrna Beach, poking lizards and watching late-night TV in a room covered in glow-in-the-dark stars. I liked to watch my mother be mothered by a grandma who would never let us call her that.

Mimi asked what I wanted to do now, by which she meant, did we mind stopping at an antique mall nearby. This was my childhood, Mom said. Mimi had been a Boston antiques dealer, a detail covered in Mom’s memoir in progress, which I’ve read and Mimi hasn’t. The book is about being raised by hippies, and how you can feel loved without feeling safe.

I’d conceived of my role that weekend as moral support in general, and specifically in the project of locating lost paperwork involving dead men. Such items included a trove of love letters sent to Mimi in the early sixties, which Mom wanted for book research, and stock certificates belonging to Dan, who, despite practicing as a Manhattan lawyer, did not have a will—thus rendering Mimi, his sister, the executor of the estate. She’d come into the role after Dan was murdered on a spring afternoon, while walking on a bike path outside of Albany. We still don’t have answers. In the fall, a twenty-five-year-old man was charged with one count of second-degree murder—seemingly not premeditated, a random act of insane violence against a practicing Buddhist.

That was also the reason for the one activity I’d added to the itinerary. Sometime in the past decade, someone told me that there is a Psychic Capital of the World. The Psychic Capital of the World happens to be an unincorporated community in central Florida called Cassadaga, and is twenty-three miles from Mimi’s house. She’d been there before, by virtue of living nearby and being the kind of person who would go to a Psychic Capital of the World, which is one of the ways that we are alike.

But she hadn’t gone in years and thus could not vouch for the currently practicing psychics. (Many of them, at Cassadaga and elsewhere, are quacks lacking the gift, she said. Not all are as talented as the tarot card reader at the Russian Tea Room in Boston who once predicted that Mimi’s two daughters would each birth two daughters.) She once went to a Sunday-morning séance with Dan, actually, which doesn’t surprise me. He was very spiritual, if not a Spiritualist, the belief system at Cassadaga: an understanding that individuals continue to exist after the change called death, and that it’s possible to communicate with them.

According to an online calendar, there would be a séance at Cassadaga on Saturday. I called the number and the medium answered. I felt compelled to tell him everything about us, but I worried he’d google things like Dan’s case, tainting the experience I wanted to believe could be legitimate. Anyway, he was all business; he’d hold three spots. We talked about it over drinks at the Sea Vista Motel and Tiki Bar, with a view of the part of the beach where cars are allowed to drive, and beyond it, the rolling Atlantic. Mom and Mimi said they’d go, mostly because they love me. Admission was twenty-five dollars in advance and thirty at the door. Mimi said that if he really was psychic, he’d already know we were coming.

That night, we stayed at Mimi’s new house in a development atop a swamp, bought with Dan’s lawyer money. Her old house, which she still owns and Mom thinks she’ll never sell, is a shrine to a life’s worth of stuff that once was valuable, materially or sentimentally, but has been tarnished by rat shit and smoke damage. The new place has a screened-in porch Mimi calls the lanai, and we watched a family of ducks line up in a row, then peel off one by one, while she dragged on a cigarette.

Inside, on Mimi’s bed, we went through little sacks of jewelry. She let me take a sterling swordfish charm, a spiral chain bracelet, a jewel-encrusted costume ring, and a frog whose mouth hinges open—a roach clip. There’s a silver walnut pillbox that I really wanted, but Mimi wasn’t ready to give it away. This exasperated my mom; she had me point it out again so she’d know, for when Mimi dies.

Saturday, March 28, 2026

I dressed in all black, which Mimi said would let the spirits know who to come to. Around my neck I wore a brass whistle. It belonged to Dan and had been issued by the army, and it slotted into the hollow of my throat. Should we take some of Dan with us? Mimi asked. So I scooped a thimble of his ashes into a rinsed-out anchovies jar and he rode shotgun in the pocket of the door as we headed west, when the storm started. The windshield wipers were no good. We sailed along as if in a submarine.

Cassadaga was gray and dripping wet. In the Seneca language, Cassadaga means “water beneath the rocks,” according to some people; to others, it’s “rocks beneath the water.” I spied a few figures huddled under awnings. We got our bearings at the bookstore and welcome center, which offered crystals and merch, and in the back was a bulletin board, on it a yellow paper advertising the Saturday Night Live Séance, limited to twelve participants. Come and join with people of like minds and you may receive a message.

Two women behind the register were talking about the weather. One singsonged, Weird energy today. What do you mean? I asked. It’s not good or bad, she said, it just feels weird, like it does sometimes.

A block over was Horseshoe Park, featuring a spiral meditation walk, and the Fairy Trail, a tiny jungle of trinkets and carved trunks. Inside a heart of white rocks, we scattered our bit of Dan. We kept crisscrossing another family: three kids running around and a woman who seemed to be their grandmother, scolding them. I couldn’t hear exactly; the Spanish moss seemed to soak up the sound.

We were due at the Slater House, a meeting venue that hosts a library of Spiritualist texts, at 7 P.M. We had a couple hours to kill and headed to Sinatra’s Ristorante, Cassadaga’s only restaurant inside its only hotel, owned by Frank’s grandniece. In the lobby, freelance psychics lounged on couches, making meaningful eye contact. There was a wooden Meditation Station, which looked like a confession booth missing the priest’s side. We ate but didn’t drink, adhering to the pamphlet’s warning that attendees under the influence of mind-altering substances (alcohol / drugs) will not be admitted.

It was still light out, but the lamp was on above the door of the little white house, which we opened to meet Reverend Phil. The front room was sparse and also white. Unsmiling and dry, the reverend stepped aside to let us pass into a dim and carpeted room, and I saw he had a white ponytail down his back.

Eleven chairs were arranged in an oval. Three people were already sitting, all tattooed millennials in selvage denim, who told Mimi the comfy armchair had her name on it. After us entered another threesome: middle-aged women I recognized from Sinatra’s, where they’d been at the bar with goblets of red wine. A wide-eyed woman sat with her feet planted firmly on the floor. She introduced herself as Angel, amazingly, and said she was training under the Reverend, who entered last, big and barefoot.

Phil first told us about the origins of Spiritualism in New York in the 1840s, when two sisters reported rappings on their bedroom walls. He showed us a conical horn two feet long and known as a ghost trumpet. If the energy was strong enough, it would supposedly hover off the floor, though I worried we were all too green and skeptical for anything to happen. Phil gestured for each of us to go around and share. Mimi, to his left, kicked us off, but said only her first and last name, refusing to give a crumb. So that was all that I, and the other seven, gave too. (I felt the bloom of shame that people would assume my last name had been chosen rather than inherited. Of course a girl named Rainbow would be at a séance on a Saturday night.)

We turned off the lamps and the room was bathed in red, from the ceiling lights. The Reverend led us in a guided meditation. You are walking through a forest. You reach a beach. You walk ten steps. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. An animal joins you at your side; that’s your spirit animal. You come to a bonfire. A figure emerges from the flames and hands you a crystal. They retreat. Another figure emerges. They walk with you. Open your eyes.

It was hard for me to meditate. The whole time I thought about how I was supposed to be not thinking. In trying to let go I grasped what was right in front of me tighter. My spirit animal did join, a little tabby cat brushing my ankles, though it might have been only because Phil told us that, if we felt called to speak aloud a message from Spirit, not to let the cat get our tongue. I saw Uncle Dan in the flame, but it might have been because I wanted to see him there, because I don’t know many people who have died, because, at that moment, I might still have had his remains on my hands.

Phil asked Mimi, first again, if she would share what she saw. She described a green crystal and the cat that had been her spirit animal, too. Then Phil and his apprentice riffed on that. They stepped into her vibration. They saw an older gentleman; he was slapping his knee. He had a boisterous laugh. He was cracking Phil up. It’s not Dan, Mimi said. She saw their father instead. Phil asked Mimi if she had a bucket list, because her father wanted her to do everything on it. It’s a pretty short list, Mimi said.

Angel described Mimi as independent, leery of people—like a cat. But loyal, once she lets her guard down. Angel said: You don’t need people. Or rather, you don’t want to appear like you do. I stole a glance at Mom.

ANGEL: I also feel that you have an archangel that’s watching over you. Gabriel, possibly. A strong, strong white spirit.

MIMI: I feel protected all the time by the spirit world.

When it was my turn, I froze up. I described the red hair of my mom’s friend Holly, who I had seen in my meditation. She is still alive, but Reverend Phil was describing her like she was dead. I started panicking that the red hair was about my little sister, whom I worry about constantly. I crossed and uncrossed my fingers and my toes. Dan appeared to me as a shock of white, smirking. I understood that he knew everything but was reticent to reveal it. Phil said some platitudes about how Dan was proud of me, but the expression I’d seen was more bemused.

Angel felt a lot of love surrounding and coming from me. Thank you, I told her. This was about making us feel good, I realized. The sign in the welcome center had advertised healing services. One of the Sinatra’s girls saw a green orb hovering in the corner of the room. Yep, that would be Uncle Dan, Phil said. I didn’t see anything in the corner of the room.

At the beginning, Phil had told us that the other séance participants might begin to appear differently to us, the features of the deceased projecting over faces or blending in. By the way, he told me now, you’re transfiguring. You’re a Victorian queen wearing a crown. Someone else transfigured too and she said she could feel it in her face, she was taking deep breaths and rocking back and forth. I thought maybe it benefited the experience to come under the influence of drink.

I preferred Angel. She could read people. She identified an unresolved pain in Mom, which I agreed with—not in a catastrophically tragic way, just in that she carries the weight of everyone she loves within her. Phil, meanwhile, described Uncle Dan as some kind of honky-tonk who was knocking back forties in heaven, when Dan would never—he was always very concerned about inflammation.

It took more than two hours to go through the nine of us, and the last three still felt rushed. By far the most time was spent on Mimi, Mom, and me. I think Phil wanted to convince us. At the very end, he said he was getting one more message. It was Uncle Dan. He’s asking you—Phil turned to Mimi—have you found the letter yet?

Sunday, March 29, 2026

It was too cold to lay on the beach and I wanted to go to Mimi’s hoarding house, to see if it matched up with my memory. A hurricane had destroyed the treehouse in the backyard. Inside, there were stacks of paper everywhere, which we three picked up and shuffled through and put down again. We left without finding the love letters from long ago, nor the certificates we’d need to access Dan’s corporate shares that had gone missing only because Mimi had misplaced them. I had no sense of what kind of letter Dan had wanted us to find.

In the evening, we talked about the séance, remembering phrases, wondering about the other people there. No, the Reverend might not have had the gift, but I liked him, by the end. I think that, after hearing a stranger describe what Dan wasn’t, I understood a little better what he was. Mimi didn’t like Phil. She said, He should get a haircut and a real job.

But I do feel angels watching over me, Mimi said. Do you think that’s true for everyone?

I considered. I think everyone feels special. I think you have to, to survive. Because why else get up every day, if you’re not living a unique life? Maybe not every soul is looked after by someone who holds power in the universe. But does everyone believe they are?

Greta Rainbow is an editor of The Creative Independent, an arts columnist for The New York Review of Architecture, and a lead contributor to Blank, a literary newsletter from Dirt Media.

Early on in Opera Fever, her newest collection of poetry, Chelsey Minnis asks: “Is this a poem or the back of a shovel?”—something that can literally take off the back of your head. This January, I read a dozen or so noir novels from the thirties and forties. People were smothered with towels, bludgeoned in bathtubs, beaten to death with glass decanters, and killed by stray bullets at dance marathons. Some weeks, I watched a noir film every night. I watched YouTube videos about noir. Noir, one video explained, was a reaction to the Depression and the war: it gave form to a cynical vision of American life, depicting an amoral and violent world that many had come to think of as the dark reality underlying ordinary experience. The darkness feels revelatory and “real,” yet this effect was achieved through surreal German Expressionist-influenced artifice. Noir is highly stylized—chiaroscuro lighting, rain-slicked streets, hard-boiled speech—and yet it is one of the twentieth century’s great visual languages for representing “reality.”

When I first became interested in literature at fourteen, I was obsessed with realism in the form of “authenticity.” Writing, I thought, was self-expression. The more “honest” it was—and the more devoid of “unnecessary” flourish—the better. I liked Kmart realism and so-called alt-lit, in which authors expressed their bleak worldviews simply, in a seemingly unmediated manner. I listened to rap music, where being “real” was the archvirtue. But the older I got, the more “realness” as an aesthetic value felt pale and inadequate, if not deluded and impossible. Art that had once seemed to me, naively, to express real life, increasingly felt like an elaborate construction that used “authenticity” as a kind of crutch. Every so-called realism implicitly made claims about what counted as real, and what didn’t. But more obviously artificial modes know what noir’s aestheticized “realism” inadvertently shows: that the world isn’t simply there, but stylized into visibility.

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My youthful view might be forgiven, considering that many foremost practitioners of literature seem to agree that poetry is rooted, more or less, in “authentic” feeling.

“Poetry,” Wordsworth wrote, “is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Rilke counseled Franz Xaver Kappus, a young poet, to “Write about your sorrows, your wishes, your passing thoughts … with fervent, quiet, and humble sincerity.”

“Poetry,” Robert Frost later offered, “is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

But for Chelsey Minnis, poetry is “a frying pan full of diamonds” and “humorous like a crotch sparkle.” It is “like lickable mink”; “like crying while trying on different outfits”; “meat colored candy”; “a black letter in a black envelope,” “like getting your cage pushed from room to room”; “a fresh sheep’s heart in a mirrored box.”

⋆˙⟡˙⋆˙⟡ ˙⋆

What is poetry? Chelsey Minnis has been asking and answering this question since 2001. For the past twenty-five years, she has waged a sustained assault on the ideology of poetic sincerity—the belief that poetry becomes more truthful as it becomes more emotionally direct. Hers is one of the most exciting and ambitious contemporary literary projects that I know of. Her poems are blackly comic and hypnotically dense, filled with jarring juxtapositions and metaphors; they pressurize language until it becomes shiny and sharp, like the synthetic diamond from which her first collection, Zirconia, takes its title. With relatively few key words—fur, poem, baby, love, among others—her poetry achieves what all great poetry achieves: the creation of a world, with its own internal energy and logic, that permits nothing outside it, and feels new again upon rereading. Self-aware and playful, many of her poems describe themselves. They are “like waking up drunk in a lemon yellow room” or “like being slapped with a fish.” Feelings appear most authentically when dressed up in diamonds and fur. Minnis exposes poetic sincerity as a genre convention, then replaces it with a more honest fakery.

Zirconia (2001) establishes the linguistic and thematic tropes that still occupy her: sex, violence, glamour. The speaker in one poem opines:

someone should knock me down…and press me against blue tile……………. ………….……………………………………and shuck……………………..a gold sheath off me………………………………………………………….…..……….and push………….……………………… …………………………………………………… ………………………………………………..a shiny buzzer…………………………………………………….to make me slide down a glistening chute…………………

In her second collection, Bad Bad (2007), the conventions of the genre are foregrounded only to be perverted. The book includes no less than sixty-eight prefaces, many of which emphasize poetry’s status as an activity of leisure and object of luxury: “Poetry careers are a bad business…” (#2); “I would rather have a Gucci bag than a poem…” (#6); “If poetry is dead…then good.” (#9). As in Zirconia, pages at a time are made up primarily of ellipses. These poems never let one forget that one is reading a poem.

Poemland (2009) extends this metapoetic conceit, repeatedly redescribing poetry with imagistic metaphors: “This is a cut-down chandelier…”; “This is a seeping crystal…”; “This is soft baby clumsiness… / And the balls roll loudly across the floor…” The “This” that repeats across each page slips between the poem, writing the poem, and poetry itself. The cover of Poemland doesn’t display the author’s name, only a barcode against a backdrop of bright pink fur. Baby, I Don’t Care (2018) shifts Minnis’s focus to the conventions of romance. Like poetry, love, in Minnis’s work, is not deep feeling but inherited, theatrical speech. The collection repurposes Turner Classic Movie lines, film noir, and other Old Hollywood tropes. “Darling, pull yourself together.” “You’re a tigerskin rug of a man.” “I am a thing. A thing to be loved!”

Her most recent collection, Opera Fever, published in April by Wave Books, achieves a total synthesis of all her work so far. It gathers her major materials and sharpens them: the damaged glamour of Zirconia, the antipoetic self-awareness of Bad Bad, the recursive ars poetica of Poemland, and the cinematic address of Baby, I Don’t Care. Everything returns with a kind of late-style grandeur. Her speaker loves “with a vileness. . . / And all the nuance of uranium. .” Death is a “mirrored headboard”; “a man with doll’s eyes. . / And everyone topless in diamond necklaces. . .” Luxury objects, gendered violence, fake-old-movie-sounding dialogue, commentary on poetry itself—all are raised to the level of opera: more melodramatic, more death-haunted, more musical, more artificial.

In all her poems, language has an immediate effect that is perhaps even more important than its literal meaning. It’s vital and surprising. Every poem has an electric, I-want-to-share-this-right-now quality. “Minnis is endlessly quotable,” Dwight Garner writes in his New York Times review of Baby, I Don’t Care, “so one has to work hard not to quote her endlessly.” But then: “Sometimes the only way to talk about this poet is to let her talk.” I’d like to let her talk here, too. Here is an excerpt from Opera Fever:

I don’t go around popping balloons with my cigarette. . .
I like to look at you through my drink. . .
I never wrote anything on a mirror with lipstick. . .
I sat at my abandoned poetry booth. .
While autumn burned down like scenery

Do you think poetry is mud on your pillow?
For someone very deserving of flavored syrup. . .
What do you want with a lot of filthy roses?
I loved you like a floating explosive. . .
So I wrote a letter with a broken clasp. .

Because each collection works as a whole, her work is difficult to render well out of context, and difficult to write about. Another Wordsworth quote comes to mind: “Every great and original writer … must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.”

Minnis stages a world in which feeling is manufactured through inherited aesthetic forms. Through a kind of alchemy of artifice, she illuminates the depth and the transcendence of the surface, and creates a fugue in which images glitter, collide, and collapse: love is violence, and poetry is artifice, and love is artifice, and violence is poetry, everything’s ironic, and … what emerges is an esoteric system of near symbols in which image and impression, simile and sensation merge into a dazzling, demented, often hilarious performance. Her poems are not “emotion recollected in tranquility.” They are “like a clear vinyl raincoat over you.” The thing is, “you can still be stabbed through the raincoat.”

Jordan Castro is the author of the novels Muscle Man and The Novelist. He is the deputy director of the Cluny Institute and is on the board of the DiTrapano Foundation of Literature and the Arts.

Late in the week I got an email from one of my book dealers. He was at a fair in New York and thought he’d found a buyer for Timothy Ely’s Borderline, a unique artist’s book I’d placed with him on consignment. It was welcome news; we’d been trying to sell Borderline for two years. Before traveling to New York, he’d asked if we might lower the price, from ten thousand dollars to seven thousand and five hundred, and I’d agreed that it seemed like time.

Nothing was finalized, my dealer said, but he was optimistic. The prospective buyer had asked to be looped in if anyone else made an offer, and also wanted to know more about the book’s provenance. In my reply I explained how it had come into my possession: My father, a lawyer and book collector, had done some legal work for the founder of Granary Books, a publisher specializing in artists’ editions. As payment, he was able to buy titles from Granary at cost. He’d acquired a dozen or so through this arrangement, and Borderline was one of them. I’d inherited it when he’d died, about four years earlier.

I didn’t want to sell Borderline, exactly. Like all the books I’d inherited, it was a little holy to me. To let it go would be to let go of another part of my father. I didn’t want to let more of him go. I’d begun to feel I was erasing him, forsaking him. He’d built his collection over four decades: a few hundred titles—first editions, special editions, illustrated editions—that, taken together, expressed him as vividly as a self-portrait. I knew who my father was because I’d worked to understand his tastes. His shelves held Joyce, Borges, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery; invention, philosophy, sensitivity, sensuality, beauty.

(He’d joked once, after coming out, that he’d never been in the closet but between book covers.)

I’d sold most of his collection indiscriminately. Idiotically. I’d had only a long weekend to clear his house after he died. I was in a fugue state of grief and made decisions rashly. An edition of Animal Farm that I sold for five hundred dollars was listed by its buyer for twenty-five hundred the next month. I accidentally included a copy of Lysistrata that was illustrated and signed by Picasso in a grocery bag of detective novels I dropped off at a Goodwill. Now, four years later, I clung to the books of his I still had, afraid I would squander them, too.

But I couldn’t keep Borderline. It didn’t belong to me. I mean this metaphysically. I’d made a rule early on that, in order to keep one of my father’s books, I needed to be able to make it mine. A simple process: I would pick up a book, and, if it vibrated with magic, it was mine. Some did, some didn’t. I knew instantly. An early edition of Lunch Poems. A custom-bound Ulysses. Arion Press’s Trout Fishing in America.

Borderline was inert. It’s less a book than a book-object. Published in 1989, its pages are filled with maps, charts, drawings of landmasses and planets. I think it’s supposed to be an atlas of an imagined universe, but it’s hard to say for sure. There’s no narrative; there’s nothing to read. It’s sixteen pages, about as thick as my pinky. The few words it contains are indecipherable, of no language. (The letters look Hebrew—if you don’t know Hebrew and have never seen Hebrew letters before.) The artist, Ely, created his own system of glyphs, which he derived from his studies of ciphers, cryptographs, hieroglyphs, calligraphy, alchemy, Kabbalah, UFO communications in sci-fi novels, and other synthetic languages. Flipping through Borderline, you get the sensation you’ve uncovered an artifact from another dimension, somewhere both ancient and futuristic.

My father, I knew, responded to this type of artistic obsessiveness. He was drawn to the idea that Ely had spent years building a world that wasn’t really meant for anyone else: an exercise in absurdity and rigorousness and care. He also admired the book’s craftsmanship, how Ely had dyed the paper and tied the spine. The mastery appealed to him and he liked examining it with his own hands. But when I handled Borderline, my only thoughts were about how valuable it was and how careful I had to be with it. All it meant to me was that it had meant something to my father. This wasn’t enough, I’d learned, to make it magic.

***

All weekend, as I took my daughter from playground to playground in Berkeley, I waited to hear if the sale had been finalized. Thoughts of my father popped in and out of mind.

He’d been a private person, his interests had been solitary interests: reading, running, computer chess. I’d taken after him and was one of very few people who could share his privacy. We went running together and played chess together and read together, different books in the same room. But in my late twenties, shortly after finishing a graduate program in writing, I’d created a schism between us. I published a novella about him in a literary magazine, centering on his sexuality. It included what he’d told me about his first encounters with men, in his early forties; his ongoing relationship with my mother; his struggle to figure out why it had taken him so long to understand himself. It wasn’t a mean portrait, but I exposed him in ways he had no choice over; I turned his privacy public. We both lived in Minneapolis then and still got together every week for dinner, but he was more guarded after the novella came out, wary I would mine him for more material.

One evening I went to his house and we played a few games of chess at his dining room table. He was a stronger player than I was and in one of our games he dismantled my position, removing pawn after pawn, so that my king was vulnerable to multiple lines of attack.

“There,” he said, reaching across the board and tapping my king. “That’s about how I feel.”

“I know,” I said.

“I know you know,” he said. “So that’s that. And now, we play again.”

It’s a lousy thing to write about people you love. But I also understand my twentysomething self’s motives. I was a sophomore in high school when my father came out. Afterward, he often seemed like two people to me: the father I knew, and a new, independent—and suddenly sexualized—person who felt like a stranger. This stranger came with us everywhere: dinners, runs, museums, movies, chess. I found him unnerving. Who was this man? But I also sensed I needed to become comfortable with him, to reconcile him with the more familiar father. Writing provided the way. My novella, I suppose, was an attempt to chart out an atlas to the twin universes within him.

***

“I am part pre-Gutenberg, part Victorian, and part Martian,” Timothy Ely has said of himself. “I was a stoker on the Nautilus. I swept up after William Morris.”

Looking at his work from the past forty years, you might start to suspect this statement isn’t a self-description so much as a coded set of coordinates. Ely has made dozens of books in the course of his career, and each one of them is unique, a one-of-a-kind key to a one-of-a-kind place and time. They’re so meticulously constructed that it’s easy to believe he drew on firsthand experience of these spaces—even though they don’t exist. (Many of the books are kept in various terrestrial libraries, including the collections at Princeton, Yale, and the University of Texas, Austin.)

He’s traced the genesis of his career to a single day in graduate school, when he discovered the map collection in the basement of the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington. There he found maps that broadened his worldview—or, more accurately, his universeview. Maps of air currents, the ocean floor, the solar system, Mars. Maps of anywhere you couldn’t actually go. He returned again and again. Over time, two ideas became central to his work: maps can be a means of expression; and it’s okay not to understand what fascinates you, and live instead within the fascination.

“Discovering the Atlas was being touched by God or Rand McNally,” Ely has written. “It is about being awake and fully formed. The experience stands out for me as precisely how I see creativity working—connections are established, points connected and gelation occurs.”

Every October, he celebrates the day he first visited the map collection.

***

When my father became sick the distance between us collapsed. He lived with cancer for six years. I’d moved to the Bay Area by then—my girlfriend had taken a job in San Francisco—but I flew to Minneapolis frequently. I was with my father in the hospital for his first surgery and stayed with him as he convalesced, helping him around his house and picking up his prescriptions and groceries. I visited him through chemotherapy and radiation treatments, a sepsis scare, more surgeries, more treatments, the cessation of treatments. Meanwhile I was developing my own life. In these years I got engaged, then married, and became a parent myself. I was aware this all may have been catalyzed in some way by my father’s illness; I wanted him to see, before he died, that I’d established a life for myself.

I no longer wrote fiction; my time was taken up with parenthood and my career. I worked in tech marketing now, a job that paid well enough to support my life in the Bay Area. But by the end of most days I’d used up the energy that once went into more personal projects. I journaled and occasionally sketched out story arcs, but I never finished anything. Now and then I could see the shape of a narrative forming from my father’s ordeal—but whenever I began writing I felt guilty, and put what pages I’d drafted in the recycling bin by my desk.

He spent his last year in Palm Springs, to be near a cousin he’d grown up with. There was no winter there. I would visit every month or so—every two weeks, toward the end. He would ask me to bring him books: Dubliners, Billy Budd, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. He spent the year rereading great writers in the sun. On my last trip I took home all the books I’d loaned him. Penguin Classics editions, mostly. They’d been mine to begin with, but now they vibrate a little, too.

***

The next Tuesday morning my book dealer emailed to say that Borderline had sold. I wasn’t surprised to find I was regretful. Another piece of my father gone, on some anonymous buyer’s shelf.

I reminded myself I’d never connected with Borderline. But I had, at least, connected with my father. There were parts of him I’d never fully understand—but I would never be divested of my fascination with him. Not everything of his had to become mine.

As we’d agreed, my dealer would get a 20 percent commission. Likewise, the buyer got a 20 percent discount, because he was also a book dealer. (I didn’t quite understand this, but apparently it’s industry standard.) Half of what was left would go to my sister, whom I haven’t mentioned because I’m forbidden to write about her. A chunk would go to taxes. The rest would go to my mortgage. Another sort of magic: Watch as I turn this library into interest payments. Poof.

Max Ross is a writer and occasional bookseller.

On a low-pollution Sunday last December, the weekend before Christmas, I headed to People’s Park on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road to visit the city’s so-called marriage market: a cluster of footpaths and lawns in the park’s northwest corner, where hundreds of parents gather each weekend to matchmake their unmarried adult children. It was the winter solstice: a particularly auspicious occasion this year, as an aunt had written to our family’s thirty-one-person WeChat group—a day on which it was said that heaven and earth would reunite.

It had rained that morning, so the air was damp and cool. I’d come here before as a child, glimpsing the idling marriage brokers—the “aunties” and “uncles”—as my parents and I crossed the park to the city center. Though I was now of marriageable age, I doubted I’d find a husband here, a city from which I felt largely estranged. I’d grown up in Hong Kong and visited family in Shanghai every year until moving abroad over a decade ago. The cultural differences alone between any potential Shanghainese suitors and me foreclosed the possibility, I figured, of a real bond.

But perhaps there was something to learn from the stand-in courtship practiced here, so radically different from the flirting and swiping I was predisposed to. What were the right conditions under which to find a life partner? Long a romantic, I had lately come to learn that love might instead be something worked toward, an earned outcome rather than a projection sustained until its inevitable end. The idea of courting prospective in-laws before spouses therefore seemed reasonable. This market was pragmatic: it conceded that familial compatibility could only help a relationship. It was to the point, with no beating around the bush about your finances or genetic ailments.

I’d always enjoyed meeting the parents of friends and boyfriends—particularly the Chinese ones, who often seemed like strange permutations of my own: religiously preoccupied with their kids’ well-being and success, offbeat and quaintly crude, their politesse at odds with an inborn urge to voice their sometimes inflammatory convictions. Like the rule-abiding child I’d been, I was known to succumb to the flattery of my Chinese elders, who softened at my xiaoshun deference and fluent Mandarin—I’d spent months on the mainland as a child. I caved to cajoling missionaries at the supermarket in New York’s Chinatown, to the Mandarin-speaking Bank of America employee who convinced me to sign up for another credit card when all I’d wanted was to update my address.

I entered the park through a western gate, next to which a Starbucks played Mariah Carey and Willie Nelson. The market emerged suddenly: crops of middle-aged Chinese huddled around laminated advertisements that littered the ground or were clipped to trolley bags and music stands. The otherwise quiet grounds, within these few thousand square feet, were beginning to teem with brokers and visitors alike. Fleece-clad aunties lined the shrubbery; raincoated uncles smoked under the wutong trees. I slipped into the sparse flow of people that circled the gardens and moved through sheltered walkways.

***

The first uncle I saw stood on the outskirts of the market, a few yards before a long archway that drove deeper into its heart. Bald and stocky, he wore sweatpants and hiking boots. One hand was tucked into his pocket. He used the other to nurse a cigarette.

A dozen listings were spread at his feet. These were bare-text summations of vital information: gender; education level; age, via birth year; height, and sometimes weight; employment status and occupation; income; hukou status, which granted residence and access to health care, education, and housing within a given region; property holdings (owned or rented? number of bedrooms? car?); parent profiles (pensioned? healthy or ill?); debt, or lack thereof; vices (smoking, drinking), or lack thereof. A few listed hobbies or a Chinese zodiac sign.

The faceless prospects on offer were probably playing video games at home or hanging out with their friends. It was common knowledge that the matches themselves were generally uninvolved and uninterested in their parents’ schemes, that young people in Shanghai were dating on their own in all sorts of ways, both online and in person.

“You looking?” The uncle lifted his chin at me. “Birth year? Education level?”

“Ninety-nine,” I said. “I have a bachelor’s degree.”

“Plenty for a woman.”

This uncle charged a hundred yuan per month per listing and another fifty yuan for each date.

Women, he told me, ought to choose a husband with a higher education and income level than their own. He should also own an apartment. Most of the men advertised here at People’s Park had at least a master’s degree. “Bachelors with just a bachelor’s don’t bother coming here,” he said punlessly in Chinese.

There are thirty million more unmarried men than women in China, a result of the many girls aborted or discarded during the one-child policy. But the criteria for marriageable men have long been more stringent, so that there are many more women on the market than men. Many otherwise eligible young men—uneducated, rural, poor—simply don’t make the cut.

Matchmaking in China dates to imperial times, when marriage was a more explicit economic arrangement administered by and for the sake of one’s family. A bride-price or caili remains standard today, while able parents are expected to house their children until they are wed, to finance their nuptials, and then to purchase property for the newlyweds. The Shanghai Marriage Market has reportedly been around since 2004, when retirees congregating in the park found common cause in setting up their children, but this uncle said he’d known it to exist since the nineties. Though Shanghai’s is the largest, similar markets exist in major cities across the country.

These markets, the uncle told me, mostly serve older parents—those desperate for their children to settle down before it’s too late. Students in their twenties are largely dating online—which requires less up-front commitment—on apps like Tantan, China’s Tinder equivalent; Momo, a more socially oriented platform, featuring livestreams and local interest groups; and Jiayuan, which requires users to have a university degree. More popular than dating websites are multiplayer role-playing games such as Tencent’s Honor of Kings, which counts more than a hundred million players daily, and the more abstruse Dota 2, through which a cousin of mine met her husband. But there’d been a rise in fake online profiles (Zhenai, one of the older dating platforms, was fined 1.7 million yuan last year for displaying false listings), not to mention the perennial risk of what was called jianguangsi, or “dying in the light”: breaking up upon seeing a partner’s appearance for the first time in person.

“It’s easier to find the right person under these conditions,” the uncle said, pointing to the flyers in front of him. Still, the marriage market’s success rate was low. Everyone’s standards were too high.

Most of the singles, I noticed, were in their thirties or forties. There was a PE teacher, a military veteran, a civil servant, a technician at a foreign-owned company. Annual salaries ranged from fifty thousand to one million yuan. In place of names, epithets abounded: “pale complexion, cleanly”; “slim, graceful”; “polite, excellent physique.” Women sought men with a sense of responsibility; all sought a spouse with Shanghai hukou. One man desired a spouse with no dating history. In the event that she had been married previously, he would prefer that any child of hers be a girl.

When I asked the uncle if he had children, he flinched. His only son was thirty and single.

“I’m not worried,” he assured me, though I sensed he’d turned morose. “I won’t pester him. He’ll find his way. He’s already dated many girls. I always tell him to take a break . . . dating can cost you thousands of yuan!”

Our conversation was intercepted by a woman looking on her daughter’s behalf. They didn’t mind that I lingered like a buzzard to eavesdrop. When I waved goodbye minutes later, he was recounting: “I bought him a car. He drove for Didi [China’s Uber]. Then I told him, You’d better date, not drive. There’s no business there anyway!”

***

I’d rewatched Disney’s animated version of Mulan on the flight over. Pressing further into the market, a series of women who brought to mind the movie’s formidable matchmaker—with whom Mulan fumbles her first meeting, all but ruining her family’s honor—flanked the park lawns like infantry. These aunties bore a similarly fiendish Chinese aspect: powder-white complexions, sheepskin hats, leopard-print coats. Honeyed words dripped from their cherry-red lips. “Beauty, beauty!” they called out to me.

The first auntie wore plum lipstick and drank fruit tea from a ribbed glass jar. What was I looking for?

I told her I was visiting from America.

“America is fine,” she said, rummaging her files. “I have someone looking specifically for a foreign girl.” The local girls had done him over, strung him along for his money.

“Conditions are not good here.” She gestured at an invisible economy. “Foreign girls are more carefree.”

Why didn’t they include photos with the listings? Out of respect to the singles, she said. There were, of course, photos. Brokers offered them to me like presents once I’d shown sufficient interest. (A man in a suit, arms folded, under studio lighting. “Not to say he’s dashing, but he’s got a warm look about him,” the broker narrated. Another, pouting at the camera. “Is he handsome? What do you think?”)

The second auntie sat on a folding stool, behind which a clothesline hung résumés like blouses out to dry. She’d found her daughter a husband on this very corner—he had a Ph.D, she said, and was a professor. Both his and her families owned property. Would I like to see their wedding photos?

“We have too many girls,” the auntie grouched, crossing the arms of her long pink puffer. Of her listings, thirty were men and more than fifty women. “The men here are shy. They always stop through, but they’re absolutely meek . . .”

A third auntie had moved to Shanghai from Anhui Province when she was sixteen. At one point she’d worked at a factory in the city making plastic bags; now she’d been advertising at the market for a decade.

“Are you on TikTok? The young people here are all on TikTok. It’s skewing their perceptions of love.” A TikTok had gone viral, she explained, about a man who’d committed suicide before his arranged marriage. “What is wrong with these kids? How could a parent live after that?”

In lieu of individual résumés, she had printed spiral-bound booklets with abridged candidate profiles. I passed over WOMEN—NEWEST INFORMATION and flipped through NEW & UPDATED OUTSTANDING WHITE-COLLAR MALES ’87–’97, taking out my phone to capture one of the dozens of pages of information: name, age, occupation, and contact number, tabulated row after row after row.

“No photos!” she exclaimed, wresting the book from me.

***

Lone fathers napped upright on benches, hugging their daughters’ credentials to their chests. The more resolute lapped the grounds with résumés clipped to their lapels or hung from lanyards around their necks, like dogs seeking owners. At the most populous square, by the park’s northern gate, parents and brokers ogled me as I passed through their line of sight, trailing and then abandoning me upon overhearing my unsuitable credentials.

I approached a fiftysomething woman in a red vest who’d been noticeably staring at me.

“You’re a foreigner, aren’t you?”

What was the giveaway?

“You’ve got that glint in your eye,” she said, “Of independence, critical thinking.”

She and the man next to her were here to advertise their and their friends’ children. The group rotated shifts every weekend.

“We just want them to find someone they like,” she said. His son was twenty-seven, her daughter thirty-five.

“We persevere,” he said. They had been coming here for three years.

Did their kids have any prospects? I asked.

“If they did, we wouldn’t be here!”

“Xinku,” I said: “It’s not easy,” or more literally, “how bitter.”

“Mingku!” her friend corrected me: “Life is bitter!”

Indeed, China had just reached a record low of 5.6 annual births for every 1,000 members of its population, nearly on par with South Korea and Taiwan. Marriage had been on the decline for a decade now, and divorce on the rise, while recent state incentives (a handout of up to the equivalent of $1,500 per infant, a 13 percent sales tax on contraceptives, a ramp-up to a two-child and then a three-child limit) had hardly made a difference. The country’s one-child generation, born between 1980 and 2015, was coming of age, singularly burdened with the onus of continuing the family line.

But this man’s son had recently turned down a woman with a Ph.D, as he himself had only a master’s. This was too threatening, he explained. A mismatch.

***

The energy picked up at three. I passed parents on benches, legs crossed and leaning toward each other, speed dating as proxies for their unwilling or unaware children. “A 1.69-meter woman should look for a 1.79-meter man,” mused a mother to two fathers. “It’s the educated countrywomen you want,” said another. “Well-off in-laws can be their own problem.” “Inferior doctors have only master’s degrees.” “Eighty-five kilos? My daughter’s hardly seventy-five.” “Girlorboy?” they chirped. “Girlorboy?”

My elders laughed and spat. Two mothers discussed the odds of pregnancy at thirty-five. An uncle loudly recited his phone number to anyone who would listen. Another stood pontificating from his square foot of the park as though it were a podium.

When I approached, he leaned over and lowered his voice. “Any requirements, just let me know.”

I caveated that I lived abroad.

“America is the best country in the world. You shouldn’t be looking here—that would be beneath you.”

The woman next to him buckled in laughter.

“I would emigrate immediately if I could.” He was yelling now. “You ought to back Trump, get involved with the greatest people. Get out of here while you can.”

“Otherwise you weren’t raised right!” quipped the woman.

“America is the most civilized, democratic country there is. All the growth in China over the past few decades has been thanks to its example. Without the U.S., we wouldn’t have half this innovation. There’s no freedom of speech here. Ever since the Cultural Revolution . . .”

He seemed to remember why we were here. “Look,” he told me, “you can find someone here if you want, but best to bring them back to the States. If you stay here, you’ll regret it for a lifetime.”

The woman was cackling. “If we could leave, we would.”

I thanked the pair for their advice and was wandering toward the next column of brokers when a man caught up with me and tapped my shoulder: “You’re not from here?”

“No,” I turned around. “You?”

He paused, shuffling a black crossbody across his chest.

“Who are you looking for?” I asked. He was maybe forty.

“Guess,” he said, smiling.

“Oh,” I deflected. “Ha ha. Are you from Shanghai?”

“Jiangxi. Do you think we could, you know?”

I made a conciliatory face.

“I’m a generation above you . . .” he sighed.

***

Turning a corner, I came face-to-face with a man in a baseball cap, a surgical mask, and sunglasses. A morbid fear of darkening, even in the winter, meant that many at the market wore full sun coverage, lending them an ominous and all-knowing mystique.

“Oi,” he whispered. I caught the whites of his eyes above his frames. “I’ve got a ’95 man. Want to see? Most of my clients are at least 1.85 meters.”

He pulled up a sepia-toned photo of a guy smiling in what looked like a gift shop, a shelf full of stuffed capybaras behind him.

“Don’t trust them,” he said, pointing to a pair of brokers I’d spoken with down the path. “Don’t share your WeChat either. They’ll sell your information in bulk for six thousand or eight thousand yuan, then vanish once you pay them to set you up.”

“I’m a veteran here,” he said. He’d found a husband for his sister here in the aughts. “I can tell you’re a rookie. I won’t charge you for any information.”

I told him I lived in America. “We Shanghainese don’t revere Westerners. We don’t care for them. But foreigners from the outer provinces, they’d love nothing but to marry them!”

Had I been to North Korea before? He had visited a few years back and enjoyed it so much he didn’t want to return. “All the bad things they say about the DPRK are bullshit. Housing is free, health care is free, there’s job security. Whatever you want to eat, you can eat!”

A gaunt, wizened lady in aviators and a black mask nodded beside him.

“There’s no job security in Shanghai,” said the vet. “It’s hard to see a doctor.”

“North Koreans love Chinese people. They treat us with respect; they know that we fought for every inch of their land.” I was reminded that during the Korean War, the CCP had assumed a staunchly pronatalist stance: mothers of more than five children were feted by the state as “glorious,” and those with more than ten “heroic.”

“Shanghai’s elderly homes put you to death,” the vet continued. The caregivers they employed were individualists, capitalists. A new health aide might be okay the first month—then she took on additional clients to make more money, started asking for more and more red pockets.

The wizened woman added, her voice like sand: “Because you can’t walk, can’t move, and don’t have offspring to hold them accountable, they bully you. They eat your food.”

The vet shrugged. “This is just how an individualist society works.”

A woman with permed, maroon-dyed hair asked my age. I’d thought, nearing my late twenties, that here I’d be a borderline shengnü, a woman left over (a term popularized in 2007 by China’s Women’s Federation denigrating the country’s growing population of unmarried and highly educated women), but all she said was, “You’re a child!”

“Westerners, they’re not like us,” said the woman. “I ask what kind of person they want to date, a Beijinger or a Shanghainese, and they say they don’t care: I don’t need a house or a car—I want someone pretty!”

***

The market contained several submarkets. At the seniors’ corner, a woman my mother’s age was being set up with an older man. Adjacent to it was the divorced zone, where those who, according to listings, had secured a “clean break” from their marriage sought to remarry “as soon as possible.” Passing the Muslim corner and the old-Shanghai corner, for the children of families who went back generations in the city, I at last reached where I belonged: the foreigners’ corner, for those Chinese based outside Shanghai.

A posse of male exchange students from Oxford dictated their dating credentials to a pair of aunties who diligently transcribed them onto their phones. A herd of small Australian children walked past them, led by a chaperone. “You’re so pr-etty,” one uncle enounced cheerily in English at one of the girls.

Further off, a woman in a green raincoat stood browsing the flyers intently. Though she looked about my age, she was in fact in her late thirties, visiting from Chongqing. Her guimi (best friend) had brought her here. It was her first time at a market like this.

She had dated just once before, but it hadn’t worked out. It wasn’t easy to find someone these days, she said. What was she looking for? She wasn’t sure, exactly, but “someone taller than me.”

“I haven’t tried dating online,” she admitted. “I’m just not up to it.” She was pretty and seemed kind; I wanted to talk to her more, to encourage her, but our conversation was interrupted by Huawan, a mother who had been hanging around the foreigners’ corner waiting for the right woman to pass through—someone willing to move for her son, who ran a business in Tokyo. Anyone from Shanghai, or Zhejiang, where she was from, would do.

Huawan affixed herself to my side and led me forth along the path. “If you share your photo with others,” she primed me, “take it sideways so your face isn’t clear. Don’t tell anyone where you live.”

She roped in a roaming father to help me survey my prospects. “Check out this guy,” he said, showing me the résumé of a man from New York. He was born in ’87. Too big an age gap, Huawan and I agreed. The uncle argued it was doable, but offered other options: Melbourne? Auckland? Frankfurt? Tianjin? How about this one, in San Francisco? (“Is that far from New York?” the uncle asked.) He was a solutions engineer at Google, and his father was here today at the park—Huawan pointed out a man in a top hat seated under a distant gazebo.

Another option, in Connecticut, was within a decade of me, but only 1.70 meters tall.

“Shorter than you,” Huawan observed.

I was too tall, I conceded.

“Not in the north, not abroad, not in Dongbei!”

When it seemed unlikely I would find someone suitable even abroad (“If it’s not a fit, it’s not a fit,” mused Huawan), I exchanged WeChats with her (“Perhaps you and my son could have a call?”) and peeled off toward a small pond, next to which, beneath a lopping willow, a pair of French Canadians stood atop a rock advertising four of their male friends. They’d ChatGPTed their friends’ Hinge profiles into marriage-market-style résumés and printed them out that morning. Now their WeChats were blowing up, they told me. The blond one had recently gotten engaged, at twenty-two. The other was single.

I translated for the mob. Yes, those being advertised were medical students. No, they weren’t doctors yet. Yes, they were living in China for the next year. No, they weren’t the same guys standing here. Yes, they were looking for Chinese girls. No, they didn’t speak Chinese. Yes, this one was taken. No, I was not his fiancée.

The Canadians asked me to tell the crowd they were leaving soon. They were to go to Wuhan that night; their train was leaving in two hours. This didn’t stop a pair of local girls from clinging to their sleeves, asking if they were free that evening. “I’m from Wuhan!” one of them cried.

***

Around five, the brokers closed up shop, and a gray pallor blanketed the park, mirroring the skyscrapers that encircled it. On the southern fringe of the market, I locked eyes with my last parent. His son had a newly renovated apartment, he said, right in the city center. Would I like to see a video?

I asked how the search had gone for him today. “You have to make compromises if you yourself are not perfect,” he said. “We used to stumble blindly into relationships, and it worked fine!”

He continued: “Single kids, for now they’re all right. Once they’re old, they’ll be abused by everyone. Their neighbors will look down on them, hobbling around like this”—he mimicked walking with a cane.

I sympathized with these mothers and fathers, galvanized by a fear that their children would age without a companion nor children of their own to take care of them in their final days. The rural poverty that so many of them had grown up in had long been replaced by an unrecognizable urbanism that had yet to deliver the economic security promised alongside it. Now the city’s youth unemployment was soaring, peaking at 19 percent a few months prior, as costs of living continued to mount. Where social services fell short, filial piety, these elders hoped, would fill the gaps.

“No one could find a job this year. Without a paycheck, how can they afford to date? By the time the economy is better . . . maybe in five years . . . they’ll be in their forties.”

In a final bid he presented me with a selfie, taken in natural lighting, of a man with wire-rimmed glasses and a strong jaw, his hair swept loosely across his forehead. Not bad, I thought.

Becky Zhang is an associate editor at Harper’s Magazine.

Our bathtub was born in a sturdier, more brutal age. It’s a deep and oblong cauldron—perfect for cooking a human being—which stands in the center of our kitchen. Perched between the cheapo stove and the sink, the tub’s claw feet are plantar flexed, as if they’re wearing high heels or pointe shoes, topped with swollen ankles and muscled calves. Time and use have abraded the inner porcelain. Only Bar Keepers Friend, a powder from the nineteenth century packaged in a retro canister (the plastic squeeze bottle just won’t cut it), keeps grime at bay.

The rest of the apartment is hopelessly sullied: Dirt fills the gaps between the red-painted wood floors. The fire escape is covered in hundreds of cigarette butts flicked over by a neighbor who lost his mind during the pandemic. My spouse, the writer Jeff Weinstein, and I are not allowed to forget the past in this house. Sometimes you turn the faucet and the tub lets loose a frail, industrial moan, like a crust punk approximating a Gregorian chant. We put an enamel board over the tub when we cook and divert the water from our dish rack into its milky depths. This system, perfected by Jeff and his late husband, the artist and writer John Perreault, works quite well. The tub has held party drinks and drained acrylic paints; I have written a chapbook’s worth of verse in its suds. We split the monthly rent. I pay $339.26.

Bathtubs were once common in Lower East Side kitchens, relics of the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, which required landlords to provide, among other amenities, running water. Because the kitchen was usually the largest room in these shoebox dwellings for immigrant families, the tub was installed there. For Saul Bellow, who landed in New York in the forties, such an arrangement was a symbol of scrappy bohemia. He wrote of how the “tub became the kitchen table” when “covered with a heavy, smooth board,” in his short story “Zetland: By a Character Witness”—about a striving Chicagoan who heads east to attend Columbia, only to ditch his studies for downtown and its avant-garde. From my vantage in the twenty-first century, there is something so luxurious and, dare I say it, extremely gay about having a bath in the middle of your kitchen. Leisure and function are always butting up against each other. The cramped dimensions create their own kind of intimacy.

Read the full piece here.

Daniel Felsenthal is a writer and poet, with work in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and New York Magazine, among others. He teaches creative writing at Columbia and journalism at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

A gifted fiction writer who doesn’t publish must stand accused of genius or maladjustment (if we can distinguish those)—and Harriet Clark endured both during the twenty-plus years she spent refining her debut, The Hill. The work in progress, from which the Review eventually extracted a Plimpton Prize–winning short story in 2022, earned her several MacDowell residencies, fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program, and a rare pitch of whispered literary envy and suspicion—amply justified, in the end, by the novel itself, which came out earlier this month. Clark described its slow, uncertain gestation over tea one Friday afternoon in May, in the sun-soaked attic study of the Bed-Stuy house she shares with her wife and son. Its striking premise draws on her early experience. During her infancy, her mother, Judith, a member of the Weather Underground and other radical organizations, was arrested, and later sentenced to life in prison for driving the getaway vehicle for an armed robbery, intended to fund revolutionary struggle, that went disastrously awry. (She was released on parole after nearly forty years in 2019.) Like her protagonist, Suzanna, Clark (whose father also spent years incarcerated in connection with his involvement in militant groups) was raised by her maternal grandparents, once prominent Communists; they apparently fostered and protected Clark’s intimacy with her mother against the best efforts of the state. Yet rather than some thinly veiled autobiography, the book is an eerie, dreamlike, funny, psychologically acute fable crossed with a nineteenth-century novel (unexpressed ardor, letters burned unread, train rides, consequences), a portrait of childhood to rival What Maisie Knew.

INTERVIEWER

This book took you a very long time. What was going on there?

HARRIET CLARK

A big part of the problem was that, obviously, I had a situation, but I did not have a story. And I had a character whose perspective I often wrote through, but I didn’t think she was a protagonist. She didn’t really do anything. She was just inside that situation. So how could there be a novel about her?

INTERVIEWER

It was hard for you to imagine her driving the action, having any agency.

CLARK

Exactly. It used to sadden me that there were so few novels about growing up with a parent inside. When you don’t see your life represented, it contributes to the sense that you’re living a degraded life, not worthy of art. And when you’re in these unlucky situations, people do sometimes act like you’re living a lesser version of a life, like if your mother is in prison, you have less of a mother. So part of what became important to me, once I began imagining it as a book for readers and not just a private writing experience, was to show that life as something dignified. There’s a real American obsession with freedom that shapes classic storylines. For a while I believed the book had to end with the girl finally leaving her mother and riding off into her own life. But that doesn’t take into account how, if you’re deprived of a home, deprived of access to your family, you learn that, actually, being bound to others is the significant thing. Certain forms of freedom are also forms of being unheld. Even though there’s no way for Suzanna to have the standard sense of progress, of moving toward the future, and even though no one else thinks she is doing anything heroic, she needed to have, from the beginning, the revelation it took me so long to have—that, in trying to be with her family, she was doing something meaningful.

Also, and this is a sloppy analogy, but if you work on a book for twenty years—whatever we mean by work—people really act like you’re very neurotic. Like there’s something wrong with you, or you’re doing something wrong—and it’s easy to internalize that. Mary Ruefle says that she used to think she kept writing because she hadn’t yet said what she wanted to say, “but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.” For some of us, it takes so long to hear what you’ve been listening to—and it’s meaningful to give yourself all the time you need.

Read the full conversation here.

Lidija Haas, formerly the Review’s deputy editor, is a writer and candidate in psychoanalytic training in New York City.

Harriet Clark is the winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for her short story, “Descent,” and has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Wallace Stegner Program. The Hill is her debut novel.

Barthelme was a Houstonian. To me this is the single most salient fact about him, though the competitors for that distinction are many: that he was a contemporary-art-museum director; that his childhood was spent riding in an open-top car through the undeveloped Texas prairie; that his friend and neighbor in New York City was Grace Paley; that his students called him Don B. and associated with him the powers of a mystic or shaman, if one prone to sarcasm. Barthelme was a genre unto himself, the rare writer who never wrote toward or against any previously recognized form but simply, somehow, took his own form, which is always instantly recognizable as its inept imitations are also instantly recognizable. All these qualities attest to his home city, at least for me, who shared the city with him for a while in the mid-eighties. Houston is a city of unexpected adjacencies. Because it has no zoning regulations, it has no zones. Instead, things are put places—a church, an ice house, some houses for living in, a place for strippers, a place to buy your fishing boat, a place to eat chilaquiles—in whatever way they happen to go, as if the city has said, collectively, Let’s not get too hung up on formalities, we’ve got enough room not to worry about it. Even now, Houston is a city like a prairie, its urbanity thin as a threadbare quilt tossed onto the grass, a playful indication of the urban. And this is also very Barthelme, this playing with category rather than dutifully seeking to conform, this ignoring of the very many conventions—of living, thinking, and certainly of writing—with which the rest of the world seems to unquestioningly preoccupy itself.

Barthelme did not write numerous stories, and the occasional longer work, so much as he expressed his genius through the medium of language. A major aspect of his genius was concision. His exemplary works are all short and as sui generis as the fables of Aesop. Their publication, in his time, in such mainstream literary venues as The New Yorker attests to an age of American publishing that is long past. In contrast to Barthelme’s emblematic short form, Hiding Man, the biography of Barthelme by his former student and fellow writer Tracy Daugherty, is a Tolstoyesque tome at 592 pages, but this is exactly appropriate, because it is necessary to illustrate that Barthelme’s genius for concision or compression was also demonstrated by his life, into which he fit a wild variety of living while still managing to die far too young.

Donald Barthelme Jr. was born in 1931 into a family of exceptional brilliance and creativity. His father, Don Sr., was an architect of renown who concerned himself with what constituted the modern, building a house for his family of which Barthelme later said, “On Sundays people used to park their cars out on the street and stare.” Barthelme’s mother, Helen, was the sort of woman who could make a house full of Aalto and Saarinen furniture feel warm. She loved the theater, music, and literature, and her five children were such creative overachievers as to prompt comparisons to the James family, if the Jameses had lived in a stark modern box with a spiral staircase like half a DNA helix punching from one floor to the next. Barthelme enjoyed the sort of youth in which he and his friends—“poor little pale little white boys,” as he put it in his interview for The Paris Review—were tolerated by the regulars to bring their dorky enthusiasm to jazz clubs that were otherwise, audience and musicians, all Black. When Barthelme ran away from home to Mexico by hitchhiking with truckers and musicians, he was rescued by his father and grandfather, who seemed to enjoy the excursion. While still a teen, he wrote about jazz for the Houston Post. In college, he was the youngest-ever editor in chief of the college paper. A combat-free tour of duty in Korea delivered him back to Houston in time to find the August 1956 issue of Theatre Arts at Guy’s Newsstand, within which was the entire text of Waiting for Godot, as well as production photos. Standing at the newsstand, Barthelme read the whole play, then took it home to his then wife, Helen. “I found it exciting but did not foresee the implications for Don,” she recalls in her biography of Barthelme, published in 2001. “It seemed that from the day he discovered Godot, Don believed he could write the fiction he imagined.”

Sixty Stories was first published in 1981 and comprises selections from Barthelme’s first eight books, which cover his output from 1961 to 1979, plus another book’s worth of previously uncollected stories. Of the selections from the eight books, sometimes we get a third or so of the original contents, sometimes more than half; in the case of Guilty Pleasures (1974), there are only two out of twenty-four pieces, perhaps because Guilty Pleasures claims to be “Donald Barthelme’s first book of nonfiction” despite containing no recognizable nonfiction, a clip-art chronicle of a national uprising by vulcanized tires, and a parody of a Michelangelo Antonioni screenplay that gives stage directions like “(speaks in italics).” The Stories half of Sixty Stories’s title is also not quite right of a designation, but not because, like nonfiction, it’s such a misidentification that it might be a joke. Stories is too domesticated, too ordinary—and at the same time, it acknowledges the outsize impact Barthelme managed to make on the idea of the American short story after barely twenty years in the business. With its oversize-fancy-font, mostly-text cover design enlivened only by a red, heraldic-looking figure stuck to the center of the book like a medal, Sixty Stories evokes the Eminent Man on His Pedestal, not unlike the now-iconic cover design of The Stories of John Cheever, which precedes Sixty Stories by only three years. This is utterly the wrong vibe for the work within, and apart from Barthelme’s having chosen to curate such a collection, in my opinion the collection itself is not the ideal way to encounter the stories. For that, I prefer the original, slender collections, starting with 1964’s Come Back, Dr. Caligari, memorializing Barthelme’s very first, deathlessly funny and strange publications starting in 1961; moving on to 1968’s Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts in which, already, stories like “Game” and “The Indian Uprising” give the essence of Barthelme’s singular Barthelme-ness. Another six indispensable books follow in not even ten years: City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), the aforementioned Guilty Pleasures (1974), The Dead Father (1975), Amateurs (1976), and Great Days (1979). Child of the seventies that I am, when I first started reading Barthelme in my teens I felt the same way about his collections as I did about albums—that they were meant to be received and consumed as a unit, that the title and the cover art mattered, that they must be “played” over and over again. I accumulated them all, a few more than once to get variant cover designs. Like the stories themselves, the collections feel inseparable from their moment—from Nixon, from Vietnam, from Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, from nuclear proliferation and the rest of the roll call of modern absurdity—and for this reason of their intense timeliness they feel paradoxically timeless. Barthelme paid his bills as a newspaper reporter and a museum director before he was able to pay them by creating strange assemblages of words for weekly magazines. In his sensibilities no less than in his habits of work, he was a writer of ephemerality, zeitgeist, and subversion, not timeless tomes. His work is not just short but fleet, flights of broadside defacing a bank building, not old masters hung in the Louvre.

After reading Godot at the newsstand, after he started going to work in the mornings on his screened porch, where once, having eaten breakfast with Helen, he’d spend three or four hours banging away on his Remington, smoking, and filling the wastebasket with discards, perhaps it was inevitable that Barthelme would follow his literary star to New York City. There, he would be snubbed by Saul Bellow and befriended by Grace Paley; he would bother Roger Angell at The New Yorker about his layouts, having done plenty of magazine layouts himself; and he would become, in a remarkably compressed time period, an indelible voice of his time, his prolific work heaped with critical superlatives, all of them deserved and none of them quite capable of capturing the work, which continues to resist categorization and qualification. He would be compared to Kafka, Borges, Pynchon, a drug addict (“Donald Barthelme either takes pills, does dope, drinks an awful lot, or has one of the unique literary imaginations of the present age,” the Washington Post), a maker of presumably metaphorical “paintings,” “sculptures,” “cherry bombs,” and “funny language machines.” Somehow, even in its 592 outstandingly researched and beautifully written pages, Daugherty’s biography cannot quite account for the suddenness of Barthelme’s achievement, from the confidence and speed with which he goes from reading Godot at the newsstand to reinventing the contemporary short story. Nor can Daugherty’s, or anyone’s, biography of Barthelme accustom us to his untimely, sudden end. Just after the publication of Sixty Stories, after two decades of literary life in New York, Barthelme returned to Houston, to a teaching job at the University of Houston, his alma mater. He published Overnight to Many Distant Cities, his first new collection since 1979’s Great Days, in 1983, and received execrable, inexplicably hostile reviews. In the New York Times, Joel Conarroe wrote that while the emperor might not be naked, his suit seemed “threadbare.” I respectfully disagree. I love this collection as I love all of Barthelme’s work, though what I love most is the title. It moves me, as so many of his titles move me—written as they are by a genius of concision, his titles alone can be entire works of art. “Our Work and Why We Do It.” “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel.” “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning.” “Overnight to Many Distant Cities” stirred in me an intimation, both of loneliness and possibility. Barthelme was listed in the Houston white pages, and sometimes, in my unhappy teenage years, I looked at his number and dared myself to call him. I never got up the nerve. Barthelme died in 1989, at the age of fifty-eight. I was at college and heard the news from a friend who worked at a Kinko’s to which one of the Barthelme brothers had brought Don Jr.’s will. We lost a hometown hero, but literature lost an all-time great.

In one of my favorites of his clip-art stories, “The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace,” Barthelme writes,

It is difficult to keep the public interested.

The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders.

Often we don’t know where our next marvel is coming from.

The supply of strange ideas is not endless.

—and yet he let us feel as though it is.

An excerpt from Susan Choi’s introduction to Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme, to be published by Picador on May 26.

Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for Fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education.

Pine Island, despite its name, is not an island. It’s your average Midwestern farm town, population 3,800. Highway 52 cuts through it like a spine, with little to see on either side except corn and billboards—unless it’s winter, in which case it’s just billboards. Most advertise burgers or death: McDonald’s (seven miles north), Newt’s Burgers (thirteen miles south), judgment day (“After You Die, You Will Meet God”), plus two competing southeast Minnesota cremation services. Only one billboard, on the south end, is locally relevant. It’s newer, smaller, and appears to be homemade. It reads: “NO DATA CENTER.”

It takes two minutes to drive from one end of Pine Island to the other. I’ve counted. I pass through it on my ninety-mile commute from Rochester to the Twin Cities, so I learned about the data center as soon as the scrappy sign was erected. I was thrilled to see something new; my drive hasn’t changed much in three years. I was less thrilled for Pine Island, which has, like many rural Midwestern towns, become an unlikely microcosm of the AI debate, its residents thrust unwittingly onto the front lines of our digital and physical transformation at the hands of Big Tech.

The sign refers to “Project Skyway,” code name for a proposed 482-acre hyperscale data center and tech campus, whose developer remained anonymous for nearly a year and only was unmasked in February. (It’s Google). A dozen others have been proposed across Greater Minnesota, and likely hundreds more are in various phases of development across the country. The secretive nature of data center proposals often leave locals feeling vexed and blindsided—the Facebook group “Stop the Pine Island Data Center,” for example, organizes fireside vent sessions and promotes town council meetings where residents can voice their rage. They share alarming articles about similar towns whose fates may portend their own: giant black boxes looming on the horizon, humming incessantly, guzzling water, generating slop.

Nowadays, it’s unsurprising to learn that a tech company worth trillions is fighting, hard, to transform Pine Island, a town whose Wikipedia page claims just two notable people: Ralph Samuelson, the inventor of waterskiing (who was not technically born there, but did retire nearby to raise turkeys) and Lucas Helder, a.k.a. the Midwest Pipe Bomber (who was born there, but moved to Wisconsin before embracing astral projection and mailing strangers IEDs). A town whose greatest pride is the annual Pine Island Cheese Festival, a local treasure visited by thousands since 1936. A town whose claim to fame is, arguably, a poem by James Wright, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” which was first published in The Paris Review sixty-five years ago this summer. It’s a seemingly bucolic little poem known mostly for its last line, which has inspired decades of critical debate:

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind Duffy’s empty house,¹
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Every time I approach PI on my morning drive, I think of Wright’s volta, I have wasted my life. It’s a good mantra for a commute. On first read, it seems to undermine his idyllic imagery, perhaps gesturing toward the inherent meaninglessness of the natural world, or of man’s place in it. One step further: Is he exasperatedly renouncing his lifelong pursuit of poeticizing it? Or, because the speaker is lying in a hammock on someone else’s farm—William Duffy’s—is he lamenting a life spent anywhere but there?

I’m not exactly alien to Pine Island. When I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll sometimes bike through miles of farmland to the town’s Kwik Trip for a dunker and a Gatorade. The stillness out there is overwhelming. In the summer, the vast green hills and decrepit old barns are surprisingly beautiful, but the scale can only be felt from the ground—driving never does it justice. I often wondered if the poem loomed as large in the local consciousness as it did in mine; having seen little more than the gas station, I pictured life there as a perpetual late-summer afternoon where folks lazed around in existential silence. But I hadn’t wondered much else—at least until last year, when I found out about the data center and its apparent steamrolling of their quiet lives.

Read the full piece here.

Thomas John Weber is a writer and freelance reporter from Florida. He is currently living in Minnesota and working on a novel.

The literary agent is a mysterious and camera-shy creature, rustling busily in the literary undergrowth, her tracks visible only to those familiar with the species and its habits. If we were in the mood to further pursue this metaphor, we might compare her to one of those small but weirdly powerful wild cats one might glimpse in an episode of Planet Earth, only about knee-high but capable of causing great scurrying and alarm merely by swishing her tail. As Laura McGrath, a literary historian, argues in Middlemen, her history of the profession, “no figure has been more significant, and yet more invisible, in American literature than the literary agent.”

Take, for example, the agent Candida Donadio, a legendary figure with impeccable taste whose regular table at the Italian Pavilion restaurant in New York was “the undisputed central node in the network of the U.S. publishing industry” in the sixties. One of her clients was Thomas Pynchon, whose first novel, V, Donadio had helped to publish in 1963. A few years later, Pynchon’s trusted editor was moving to a new publishing house, and Donadio persuaded him to “throw something together” in order to fulfill his contract and follow his editor to Viking. The product of Donadio’s prompting was The Crying of Lot 49, today considered a masterpiece of postmodernism.

Agents, McGrath suggests, are the first and most consequential gatekeepers in contemporary publishing. Though the agent’s hand is rarely visible outside a book’s acknowledgments section, agents often play a decisive role in developing a manuscript long before an editor acquires the book. This can mean anything from editing “at the 30,000-foot level, thinking with their client about positioning their book in the market” to close line editing. “We all edit,” says one anonymous agent interviewed in Middlemen. “We think about the book not just as a piece of art … but also how it will be most appealing to the audience it’s intended for.” All of this will be obvious to anyone who works in the publishing industry, but one strength of McGrath’s book is that she comes to the subject as an unjaundiced outsider. A professor of English literature who has never worked in publishing, McGrath describes the mechanisms and eccentricities of the industry with a clarity and curiosity that insiders don’t necessarily have.

Over email, McGrath and I discussed the importance of the debut novel, the relationships between agents, editors, and clients, and the almost mystical significance of the publishing lunch.

INTERVIEWER

You call agents the unacknowledged legislators of the literary field—what do you mean by that, and how did you come to see them that way?

LAURA B. MCGRATH

Agents have so much influence over American literature, and yet they’re virtually invisible outside of a few square blocks of Manhattan or a few corners of the literary internet. Agents decide who gets access to the literary marketplace and who doesn’t, by virtue of their decisions about who to represent. They control the way books get published, by determining which editors to pitch and how to position a project and how best to advocate on their writer’s behalf. They educate writers about the ins-and-outs of the publishing industry and help writers decode, and sometimes appease, the market. Because agents serve as mediators between the author, on the one hand, and the publisher, on the other, they embody the contradictions of contemporary publishing. It’s not either art or commerce with agents—it’s always both.

INTERVIEWER

You say that before you started working on this book, you knew agents only by their stereotypes. What changed your view?

MCGRATH

I imagined literary agents were like Looney Tunes characters, walking around with dollar signs for eyes. I assumed that they were interested only in money. I’d been influenced by the Hollywood agents I’d met—charming but also sleazy, doing a lot of coke. But the days of making a fortune in publishing are past. I didn’t have a good sense of the financial realities of the industry. If they only cared about making money, they would’ve gone to work at Goldman Sachs.

My perspective on agents changed almost as soon as I began speaking to them. I found the agents I spoke with to be intelligent, compassionate, and reflective. Also charming! A professional requirement, I suppose. Aside from their general charisma, they were almost nothing like I expected. The biggest surprise to me was that they care about books! Many agents are extremely hands-on with manuscripts, at a much earlier stage than editors. Agents help writers to refine their manuscripts prior to submission, so they also do editorial work. Their eye for craft has been honed through years of work as voracious, highly analytical readers.

As advocates for authors, agents are making the case for the value and the future of books and reading, every single day. Every single pitch is an argument for why this particular book should exist in the world. Why this writer is worthy of readers’ attention. Why our mental and emotional lives, as readers, would be richer or fuller if we entered into conversation with this specific writer and this specific book and why publishers should make that happen.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think these stereotypes are so pervasive?

MCGRATH

For writers, the agent is a walking embodiment of the market—for better or worse. I think that’s why agents tend to be such loathsome characters in books about publishing. For instance, Percival Everett’s agent character in Erasure, Yul, is largely on the sidelines—the entire hoax is Monk’s creation, and his agent initially tries to talk him out of it. Monk has such distaste for Yul because he represents Monk’s past—the modest literary successes that Monk thinks of with shame, as having sold out. The agent isn’t treated with contempt by Ben Lerner in 10:04, but she is responsible for the quagmire that the narrator finds himself in. She sold a hypothetical novel based on a short story in The New Yorker for quite a lot of money, and now the narrator must write that novel, without any real idea or desire to do so. In Danzy Senna’s Colored Television, the writer-professor Jane begins her downward spiral when she is fired by her agent. The agent doesn’t understand Jane’s literary vision and fires her because her magnum opus isn’t commercially viable. Jane holds her former agent’s poor taste responsible for the many questionable choices that follow. And though he is initially hesitant about his white author posing as Asian American, the agent in R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface enables, then encourages, and finally goads on June from the sidelines, persuaded by the cash she’s raking in. In the spate of mystery-thrillers set in and around the publishing world—please, make it stop—the butler is no more. Invariably, the agent did it.

INTERVIEWER

How did you go about researching the book?

MCGRATH

I spent a lot of time in archives, like at the New York Public Library, at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and in Special Collections at Columbia and at NYU. Records of agents’ work are really only preserved through their clients’ archives. So finding historical material involved a great deal of speculation and intuition about archival absences, as many writers didn’t preserve much. I also analyzed a ridiculous amount of data, most of which is publicly available online and simply requires some elbow grease and a whole lot of patience to wrangle. This included industry-specific data compiled in publishers’ seasonal catalogues, the texts of deal announcements, member information from the Association of Authors’ Representatives (now called the Association of American Literary Agents), and salary data from Publishers Weekly, as well as national readership and population-level data made available by the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Census Bureau, among others. My goal was to get a full picture of the work of literary agents, the kind of bird’s-eye view unavailable to any individual working in the industry, but also a granular understanding of agents’ aesthetic judgment and market knowledge and business strategy that large-scale data couldn’t possibly provide.

The core of this book is based on interviews—I spoke with over seventy-five literary agents, anonymously, over the course of ten years. It was important to me that I document the profession as they see and experience it. I also did some fieldwork. I shadowed agents at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I sat in on meetings. I read pitch letters. I even tagged along on a so-called three-martini lunch with an agent and editor—alas, not a martini in sight. Agenting is so much about performance, and I felt it important to watch agents performing for different audiences, for one another, for editors, for authors, for foreign publishers.

INTERVIEWER

Lunch! Why does it matter so much?

MCGRATH

I call lunch a ritual and a metaphor. As a ritual, it’s how agents and editors get to know one another as professionals and as readers, in hopes that the agent will pitch the editor in the future with projects that might be a good fit. As a metaphor, it shows how publishing is built on relationships that are both professional and personal. The relationship between agent and editor—built on taste, on trust, on temperament—is particularly important. Many agents I spoke to described their job as matchmaking, knowing what kinds of books editors are looking for and knowing which clients might be a good match for them. That means knowing which editors to pitch, but it also means knowing how editors work, to determine if they will connect with a client and bring out their best. The agent’s job is about personality as much as it’s about taste.

INTERVIEWER

Most literary agents are women—why is that?

MCGRATH

Historically, publishing was long known as a boys’ club, handed down from fathers to sons, hiring fraternity brothers and lifelong chums. In publishing houses, women reached so-called ceiling occupations relatively quickly—if they weren’t working as secretaries, they’d work in children’s, or maybe they could work their way up to head of publicity. They could rarely break into editorial. Agenting, by contrast, is much more independent and entrepreneurial. Women turned to agenting because they found less institutional sexism, less hierarchical pushback, and more opportunity for personal advancement. Their success was dependent on their clients, not on their boss, who would probably hire another Harvard man before he promoted his secretary, anyway. Women were also well suited to the sort of work required of early agents. The world of agenting depends on gossip, on exercising soft power, on placating big personalities and even bigger egos. They’d spent a lifetime navigating patriarchy—why should navigating publishing be any different?

INTERVIEWER

In the book, Amanda “Binky” Urban, who represents authors like Kazuo Ishiguro and Cormac McCarthy, tells you that literary agents are like small children—“They should be seen and not heard.” Was that a sentiment you heard a lot?

MCGRATH

No one said it quite as succinctly as Binky! But I think all the agents I met felt the desire to remain in the background to some degree. Partly, this is because their job is to make the business of writing look easy, and to make their clients appear to be artistic geniuses, unconcerned with money. On the other hand, there’s a great deal of symbolic capital attached to the sort of gut instinct that enables agents to find great writers, predict what people will read or at least buy, and exercise good taste. That’s how the magic works. The more we hear from agents, the more we learn about the strategies that guide their decision-making, and they lose some of that mystery.

INTERVIEWER

Something that I’m sure readers are going to seize on is the fact that “twenty-five agents are responsible for representing half of the authors short-listed for major American literary prizes in the twenty-first century.” Were you surprised by that figure?

MCGRATH

I suspected that there would be only a few agents concentrated at the top, yes. Whether or not you are surprised by this figure has a lot to do with your opinion of literary prizes and the health of our literary and intellectual culture. Is there a significant amount of truly excellent literature being published? And do literary prizes actually find and reward that work—the most excellent? Prizes are one of culture’s great games. The rules can be learned, and the game can be won. To my mind, literary prizes surface a particular sort of literature, the intellectually and aesthetically interesting, and perhaps even challenging, works that have also benefited from significant publisher buy-in and have attained a high profile. Few books manage to succeed on both levels. Representing books that can do both requires a great deal of skill—to find the high-quality work and make it undeniably appealing to a mass of people. I suspected that only a few agents would be able to do that very well.

INTERVIEWER

In a chapter on the debut novel and what you describe as “the debut narrative,” in which the book and the author are simultaneously introduced to the public, you say that “the literary field of the twenty-first century is defined by its immaturity.” Could you talk a bit about that?

MCGRATH

It’s rare, in my opinion, that an author’s first novel is their best. But the obsession with an author’s so-called potential, quantified in their sales track, means that it’s much easier to generate enthusiasm for a first book than it is to generate enthusiasm around a second, third, or fourth book. A first book is pure potential. I fear that authors aren’t being given the opportunity to mature if debuts don’t meet expectations. A preponderance of debuts are coming-of-age narratives that close the distance between a young author and his young protagonists, books that focus on the experience of immaturity to maturity. I just hope that the novelists can get there with their own craft.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a great bit about the affair that Lynn Nesbit had with Donald Barthelme, which is an extreme example of the kind of sustained, intimate relationship that can develop between agents and their clients. Could you describe some of those relationships?

MCGRATH

The relationship between agent and author can be very close and personal. Ideally, agents stick with authors over the course of their entire career. They don’t just represent books—they represent people. That may also be true for editors, but it’s increasingly rare that an author and editor will get to develop the sort of relationship emblematized by, say, Max Perkins and Thomas Wolfe or Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver. Writers have to trust their agent with deeply personal things—their creative work and their money. I had just started working with my agent, and I was telling her about my salary as a professor. My sister doesn’t even know that! It’s not surprising that these relationships often bleed from professional into personal, sometimes quite personal.

INTERVIEWER

You say that “much of the literature we now associate with high postmodernism was published as a result of Donadio’s taste and tenacity,” referring to Candida Donadio, who represented writers like John Cheever, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth. How does something like that come to be?

MCGRATH

Like all of the agents I discuss at length in the book, Donadio reveals what’s possible for an agent. She had such distinct taste. She knew exactly what she liked, even if it was weird or misunderstood, and she was willing to fight for it. And her clients are proof that her taste was amazing—Joseph Heller, Pynchon, Roth, William Gaddis, Bernard Malamud. It’s Postmodernism 101. Donadio knew they were great when everyone else thought they were crazy. But good taste means nothing if you can’t sell a book, and selling a book is really about the strength of your relationships—do editors trust you? The editors she worked with were willing to take a risk on her oddball clients because she believed in them. We need only to look at her clients’ influence over American literature to understand the degree of her own legacy.

INTERVIEWER

You mention “a telegram from Philip Roth to Candida Donadio, thanking her for her work even as he fired her (‘unlike Portnoy I have no complaints’).” What happens when these relationships turn sour?

MCGRATH

Ideally, agent and writer stay with each other through thick and thin. In reality, these are relationships between humans, and humans are, by nature, fickle and temperamental and selfish. Sometimes, agent and author have different ideas about a book. Sometimes, creative interests and career aspirations shift. These relationships turn contentious for any number of reasons. It’s perfectly common for author and agent to go their separate ways.

INTERVIEWER

In 1963, Esquire published its literary-establishment centerfold, with Donadio and Robert Gottlieb right in the middle. It did the same thing in 1989. People who were left out “stayed pissed about it for years.” Do you think such an overview of what’s considered the literary establishment would still be possible in 2026, or has publishing changed too much?

MCGRATH

I definitely think it’s possible to map the field! The transformation from 1963—a two-page spread—to 1987—a four-page spread—was massive. It included so many more players—writers, publishers, magazines, agencies, media, the glitterati—all with a kitschy space theme. Today, we’d have to include conglomerated talent agencies, most of which are in LA. We’d also have a smaller network of literary journals and magazines that commit space to book coverage. And we’d have to think about entirely new innovations like Substack or other self-publishing platforms that are currently peripheral to the establishment but increasingly becoming central. Publishing has gotten a whole lot bigger, but I think that the number of truly consequential institutions or individuals has stayed about the same as 1963. People would certainly be pissed off, but they now have countless online outlets for their fury, so the effect of such an experiment would be cataclysmic.

INTERVIEWER

I wanted to ask you about the observation that literary agents are the first and most consequential gatekeepers. You have a very popular Substack. The claim is often made on that platform that traditional publishing is on its way out and that agents will soon be obsolete or possibly are obsolete already. What do you make of that claim?

MCGRATH

I don’t accept the premise. The idea that traditional publishing is on the decline is nothing but a Big Tech fever dream, an extension of the libertarian techno-utopianism that drives Silicon Valley. Self-publishing might not have literary agents, but it’s filled with gatekeepers—they’re just algorithms instead of humans. I don’t believe that agents will become obsolete any more than I believe that traditional publishing will become obsolete. Does publishing need reform? Yes. Should our literary life, our reading lives and our writing lives, our creativity and our attention, be given over to Big Tech? Absolutely not—god help us.

Rosa Lyster is a writer who lives in London.

I love a novel that tells you why it was written, a novel that has a bit of backstage to it. It’s like sitting at the edge of a row of theater seats, in a cheap seat that reveals an actor standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I hate that in the theater, but I love it in a book.

Gloria, written by the Colombian novelist and journalist Andrés Felipe Solano, and elegantly translated by Will Vanderhyden, is that kind of novel. It is the story of one long night in the seventies, during a brief spell when the author’s mother lived in New York. She was twenty. It was before her marriage to his father, and before Solano was born. But the story of a young woman (not yet a mother) becomes, through a series of very delicate, very sparingly placed interruptions in the telling, also the story of a son imagining the life of a mother he can never meet. He lingers in the shadows, brings her to life, withdraws, and then returns again in brief passages, or stray sentences, offering little hopes, a bit of wonder, tiny narrative gifts, as if from a god in the sky.

For instance, here, as Gloria stands in a sold-out Madison Square Garden, watching the famous Latin American singer Sandro, whom she adores:

His tousled head of hair, his long sideburns, his chest adorned with that heavy gold medallion. And his smile. And his eyes, with which he seems to look one by one, face by face, at the thousands who have come to worship him. From here, from my position in the shadows, I force the King to pause for a few extra seconds on Gloria, to make her feel his power in her knees, which shake uncontrollably.

The first part of the book tells the story of the long night of the concert: her waiting for her boyfriend, Tigre, who is late; the concert itself; snacks at a diner after; going to listen to records at an apartment later, and finally reaching her bed as the dawn breaks. Then we move forward into her future: a vacation with her two small boys (including the author); a motorcycle trip in early old age with a boyfriend; a last residency in New York as the son comes to help her, trying to persuade her to leave the States with him, thinking she must be lonely in New York. She is, but she likes it that way.

In every scene, one senses Solano trying to win happiness for his mother—and also freedom, and escape from something about her choices or fate that causes him pain. He doesn’t tell us what the pain is, or precisely what he’s trying to change with this tale. Perhaps sadly, as a novelist and journalist who is faithful to life, he cannot refigure her life sufficiently, cannot imagine into her past the kind of unencumbered lightness he most wishes her to feel. He can’t even avoid imagining the tiny oppressions of the boyfriend, the macho Tigre, who is, cuttingly, “good at detecting swings in her mood and tries to help when he thinks they’re justified or worth paying attention to.”

There is a particularly beautiful moment early on, in a book of beautiful moments, when Tigre and Gloria race from a diner before the concert, after he was late fetching her:

At last, they’re just steps away from the glowing entrance of the subway station. They go up the stairs and at the turnstiles insert one of those strange coins that I would find many years later in a drawer, rummaging around for hours to ward off the boredom of vacation afternoons, a coin that wasn’t big and was lighter than any I’d held before. It was stamped with NYC. The Y was actually a slot. One night, when she arrived home from the office enveloped in her typical blend of smog and Opium by Yves Saint Laurent, the perfume she wore for years, I showed her the coin and asked: What can you buy with this? She might have scolded me for having gone through her things. But no reprimand came. Seeing it, her eyes sparkled, she took the little piece of metal and held it in her open palm as if it were a baby bird. It’s a token. For the subway, I heard her say, and it might have been right then, in that moment, that I started writing all of this that I’m writing now.

His thought that this is the moment that he started writing the book comes again later, and again one more time. It’s true: with certain books, you feel like you started writing them when you were ten years old, and again at twenty-four when you had a certain dream, and again when you wrote the first sentence down. Such books feel like they were fated to be written, and also could have been written only at the time they were written, and not a moment before. It’s vanity to think you can start a book whenever you wish: the big orchestrator of art decides. Solano may have wanted to write this book five years before he started, but he needed to be with his mother in New York, in that laundromat, didn’t he? He couldn’t have known that, and might have become frustrated with himself. I’m so lazy. Why haven’t I started on the book about my mother working at the Agfa photo lab when she lived in Manhattan? But he hadn’t lived everything he had to live yet.

Solano is so close to his mother’s private struggles, so intimate with them. Gloria, having entered a friend’s boyfriend’s apartment for the first time, “bends down to pick up a button and sets it on the table, beside the Sandro albums. She can’t stand seeing things lying on the ground, she always has to pick them up and put them on top of something.” When you put something down—even on the floor—it’s always “on top of something.” So the phrase sounds a little like teasing. It’s sweetly funny: one imagines her looking for something she can put the button on top of. He continues, “Sometimes she struggles when she finds buckles, gloves, batteries in the street. Buttons.” This noticing—on the part of a son toward a mother he loves, which began with his birth and never ended—makes the book thick with a rare kind of feeling. It’s not nostalgic, or homesick, or romanticizing. It’s the feeling (how funny—this image just came to me) of putting on pants: that safe and enclosed feeling of being inside pants. Solano’s eye on Gloria is close, but not overly close, not constricting, not invasive, not a threat to her privacy, but rather a shield around it, somehow respecting it even as he imagines her innermost thoughts and feelings.

How does he manage to do this? I think it’s simple: love. Although love is not simple, in this book, it feels that way, as if the author’s love for his mother (or at least the character of the mother) is simple and straightforward. He wants what is good for her, which is the essence of any love: you want what is good for the other person, and you care about this deeply. So of course he hovers in the wings—he is reminding us that he is there. It’s a way of protecting her: You may think about my mother, but know that I am here watching. Because of this, his interjections don’t feel like a metafictional trick, but like more love. It’s quite a complicated thing he is doing, but he does it with such lightness and elegance.

Toward the end of the book, when he, now a grown man, suggests to his mother that she return to Colombia, fearing she is isolated, she communicates to him, wordlessly, something about her wish to stay in America; he reads in her eyes: “Where there’s freedom, there’s no abandonment, where there’s freedom, absolute loneliness doesn’t exist.” Perhaps what he always saw was a mother who carried some freedom within her—carried it as a corner of her being where even her own son couldn’t go. Maybe writing this book was his attempt to go near it, to stand in its wings. He steps onto the stage with her sometimes, just briefly. And then, like a funny little boy, he is off.

Sheila Heti’s next novel, The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April 2027. She is the author of eleven previous books, including Alphabetical Diaries, Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?

“Wanna see a dead body?” Milo asks from the back seat. The 5 is a white blade under the Valley sun, everything bleached flat, overexposed as we fly toward Fry’s Electronics. It’s 1999. The Acura’s sweating leather sticks to my thighs. My skin feels amphibian, a tween-age Geico gecko blinking too hard, raw in the new light of too much consciousness.

Even at eleven, Milo likes to pull out provocations sourced from some dark aquifer on the internet not yet known to me. Unlike Milo, I don’t have a PC in my bedroom. But we’re on our way to fix that.

Now Milo pivots, unzipping his backpack like a schoolyard dealer to flash two CD jewel cases. Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe (1998): an X carved into his gristly forehead flesh, chrome flames across the plastic. Busta Rhymes’s Extinction Level Event (1998): a world on fire, his mouth mid-detonation. “Which one?” he asks.

I don’t answer, reluctant to admit I know neither. Noah, my brother, at the wheel, picks Busta in the rearview.

“If you want it, let me hear you say it (gimme some more),” Busta belts.

I, too, am eleven. A child of a recent bicoastal divorce, spending the summer in the Pacific Palisades, being driven to Fry’s to assemble my first desktop PC—my twenty-three-year-old brother’s gift in the key of fraternal benevolence, pedagogical duty, and Californian techno-optimism. A deal struck with my dad: if we can build it, I can keep it in my room.

Milo—my surf-tanned, platinum-blond, Point Dume–living, feral best friend with an Insane Clown Posse fixation and a household parrot that mimics his mother’s laugh—is along for the ride. He’s beautiful and hectic. I want to live in his house. I want to live in his brain, his skin. I’m high on his confidence the way only a young girl without much of her own can be. So yes, sure: I want to see a dead body.

We pull into the parking lot. Fry’s is a postmodern cathedral dressed up as a computer store, its facade impaled by a crashed UFO, the aisles flanked by gargantuan fiberglass ants—making us feel like we are in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) but shot in Valley glare, catching the reflecting sun of an out-of-reach Hollywood. We move through motherboards, mice, and surge protectors, with Busta—“Gimme some more”—still looping in my head.

Back home, in my specifically Betsey Johnson pink-and-green-inspired bedroom, we drink sun tea, clear Beanie Babies from the desk. We slot in the motherboard, attach the fan. Noah, our IT magus, presides. We wait for the Windows start-up chime to ring out. The tower blinks alive. It’s wholesome enough, with something even like holiness in the air. The light shifts. The internet opens its putrid maw. We are off to see the bodies.

We riffle through the mail pail and find an AOL-installation CD. The dial-up crackles as sound ricochets off the gates of the internet underworld. A rush of cold air lifts the muslin drapes and raises the downy hair on our too-tanned summertime prepubescent flesh.

Milo two-finger types, one key at a time: w-w-w-.-r-o-t-t-e-n-.-c-o-m.

Like everyone else I knew who’d found their way onto the site, he’d first seen Rotten on a friend’s family’s desktop. The name was passed around in hushed tones, traded as contraband on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), slid across classroom desks in folded notes.

It felt like discovering an older sibling’s porn stash, except more raw, more despicable, less human. It felt illegal. Like the childhood certainty, fed by the inevitability of horror lurking at the edge of fairy-tale pages, that you’d be struck by lightning or get bitten by a shark or end up in jail. Who knew? Maybe in life I could end up killing a man or stealing a car. Rotten was a key you turned that locked a door behind you.

The home page was plainer than it should have been: white background, blue underlined hyperlinks laid out with the punishing utility of a DMV intranet. The soft white underbelly of the Net, eviscerated for all to see. Underneath, a subtitle that had the ring of a warning read aloud by a neck-bearded Charon, oar in hand, ready to ferry us across the Styx: “Rotten dot com collects images and information from many sources to present the viewer with a truly unpleasant experience.” Then, below, an inventory of links with one-line captions. “Maggoted: Why does a living man have this condition?” “Meat Grinder II: Very unfortunate kitchen mishap.” The T-shirts, one of which a kid would eventually show up to school in, said it more plainly: “PURE EVIL SINCE 1996. Flush please.” The whole effect added up to a GeoCities-era HTML ledger cataloguing unspeakable horrors in the register of a blasé librarian. Served directly to our oatmeal-mush prefrontal cortexes were botched suicides, severed limbs, an unrecognizably swollen corpse rumored to be that of Chris Farley. Another obese dead body on a sidewalk, captioned “splat.” Patently offensive material, engineered to scandalize adults yet magnetically consumed by minors. This wasn’t meant for us. We weren’t supposed to be there, which is why we weren’t going anywhere.

***

Rotten.com had been launched three years prior, in 1996, by a former Apple and Netscape engineer who went by Soylent; his real name, aptly, was Thomas E. Dell. The website operated under the umbrella of Soylent Communications, under which orbited a portfolio of the obscene: the Daily Rotten, the Rotten Library, Bonsai Kitten—early traffic farms of abjection, some with political underpinnings. Rotten itself was a free-speech dare, a provocation in the shadow of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), which attempted to criminalize “indecent” or “patently offensive” online material that was accessible to minors.

In the American tradition of “protecting minors” as a cover for culturally right-leaning restrictions, the CDA smuggled in a broad censorship regime. Civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the act would criminalize vast expanses of the internet. It sought to sweep up everything from university servers to sex-ed resources and online sex work in an ongoing effort that resurfaced twenty years later, in 2018, with FOSTA-SESTA (the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, respectively), two pieces of legislation that collapsed entire swaths of the Web. Craigslist personals went dark overnight, and sex workers were forced off the relative safety of platforms like Backpage or Rentboy and into more precarious spaces both across dark webs and on the street. Even sites like OnlyFans reshaped themselves in FOSTA-SESTA’s shadow, and were forced, by payment processors newly skittish in its wake, into briefly announcing a 2021 ban on sexually explicit content—before reversing course after a creator outcry.

Rotten’s founders explicitly framed the site as a challenge to this moral order. In a manifesto, titled “Words,” that he posted to the site, Soylent argued that “censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical, and wrong,” and that to censor Rotten was to censor “medical texts, history texts, evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries.” CDA was state-backed censorship cloaked in the language of protecting children, and the wager was to redraw the boundaries of the internet so that “indecent” and “illegal” became indistinguishable. Rotten’s strategy was to test that line by posting only what was technically permissible: public-domain, medical, or news-sourced material that was nonetheless grotesque or taboo. It focused on the distasteful but not the prosecutable. Only one year later, the Supreme Court struck the CDA’s core down in Reno v. ACLU (1997).

And yet the golem persisted. Rotten.com carried on as a grotesque monument to the profane. It was a haunted arcade, dispensing trauma in gumball-machine doses straight to kids with dial-up, who chewed on images never meant for their half-formed stomachs.

***

At summer’s end I powered down my beige beauty of a desktop, kissed the California glow goodbye, and headed back to my mom’s house in Macon, Georgia. After school I parked myself in the home office, dialed into the AOL mainframe, and pinged “squealinglilpiggy,” Milo, on AIM. Let the Rottening begin.

Squealinglilpiggy and I had a routine. AIM chat rooms were organized by category in public directories—”Romance,” “Politics,” “Religion & Beliefs”—and you could drop into any of them. Young Christians was a regular of ours. A Jew ejected from California and deposited among corn-fed Friday Night Lights–style Christians following my parents’ divorce, I found the room was one of the few places I could work out my alienation and theological rage with an audience.

We had recently stumbled across a particularly rotten image: a middle-aged man in soiled underwear and a leather collar fastened to his neck in a dank basement. We set the scene in our AIM chat first. I would be the gimp, he the captor. We started small. I entered the room in a normal register—a lonely kid who was curious about God—and let the regulars welcome me. I asked questions about prayer. I said I was scared. I said I wanted to be saved. Only slowly, across forty minutes or an hour, did the story darken: I was sitting in my own filth. I had been down here for a long time. I was trying to find God. I needed to be saved, from my cage and from my damned mortal coil. I typed with bloody fingers from the dog crate I’d gnawed my way out of, begging for redemption. We were not fooling anyone. But the chat room kept responding, kept offering to pray for me. Squealinglilpiggy timed his entrance for maximum devastation: he’d log on as we reached the moment of salvation, reveal my deceit, and rain down threats. “I’ll stuff you like a Christmas ham,” he told them, “blind you with a crucifix, baptize you in shit.” The room combusted in something like righteous outrage. We logged off and printed the transcript.

Our gimp-captor scripts felt like private inventions, but of course they weren’t. We had absorbed a whole grammar of trolling by osmosis. By the early aughts, people were passing around LemonParty.org as a bait-and-switch prank link: it was a web page consisting of a video of three normal-looking, horny elderly men engaged in oral sex. There was also Tubgirl, shorthand for the absolute worst thing you could be tricked into clicking on, and it spread like a dare: a jpeg of a naked woman in a bathtub shitting a fountain of orange-brown diarrhea over her own face. Groups like the Hick Crew had already made a practice of spamming Christian chat rooms with goatse.cx—a legendary image of Kirk Johnson “spreading hole.” They, and we, performed antagonism, jeering at the gullible.

I kept our AIM printouts in a plastic sleeve slipped under my mattress, shamefully, gleefully. The pages are gone now—likely shredded in a panic the day I imagined my psychoanalyst mother reading them—but the memories remain. And it wasn’t just us: plenty of millennials I know once owned similar receipts of deviance. We spent hours toggling between Rotten.com’s static carnage and live AIM rooms. Rotten’s images bled straight into our scripts. Corpses were reanimated as characters, the gore became a prop in our rehearsal of humiliation, mercy, and desire. The internet was a space of total freedom and zero accountability.

For a tween in Macon, where nonconforming sexuality or gender presentation was shunted to the shadows, the Rotten-to-AIM pipeline was an education and a theater-scape that the town could not provide. Or rather, the town did provide it—in the style of the Southern Gothic trauma of closeted sexuality and worse—but the internet made it feel safe. One day I would be the gimp; another day, I would type “A/S/L” and send a photo of Adriana Lima in exchange for a stranger’s dick pic, only to be called out—“That’s not you, that’s a Guess model!”—at which point I’d confess to being a mouth-breathing Kinko’s employee who needed punishment, then hard shut-down the tower and pour myself a glass of ice-cold orange juice.

In clinical language, children and adolescents use play to model risky acts from a distance—to rehearse transgression in environments without bodily consequences. As D. W. Winnicott puts it in Playing and Reality (1971), “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality.” Even domination and submission—gimp and captor—are, as the analyst Jessica Benjamin has argued, a process that ensnares both parties in bonds of complicity, structured by the failed work of mutual recognition.

The CDA imagined children as innocents to be shielded; in practice, children were inventing indecency themselves and broadcasting it into online rooms filled with strangers. Probably many eleven-year-olds pretending to be twenty-year-olds had a suspicion that the person they were chatting with was actually a forty-year-old in a basement somewhere. AIM chat rooms were not a threat to childhood but rather its crucible: places where one could sit with the abject until it lost its sting, where horror became malleable, and where nascent queerness and kink first found public expression under the protective guise of trolling.

When Milo and I reunited back in Southern California and took the scenes offline, the results rerouted back into the realm of an oddly tender childplay. We staged tableaux with Beanie Babies and filmed them on a Hi8: Rainbow Caterpillar chose public seppuku at her high school pep rally rather than face single motherhood. Princess Diana Bear, the mean girl, spent weeks tormenting her shut-in target, American Bear. American Bear eventually came back as a Columbine-style trench-coat shooter.

***

The pipeline from Rotten to AIM ran alongside other channels and bled into them. eBaum’s World, for example: the proto-meme aggregator that metastasized into the feed logics of FAIL Blog and 9GAG. Pirated-file-sharing services like LimeWire, Napster, and Gnutella opened direct lines to every imaginable form of flesh, whether you sought it or not: the first time I encountered scatological porn was while trying to download Liz Phair’s Whitechocolatespaceegg (1998). And there was the recursive way that new media scavenged the old. Early Rotten seed images were ripped from TV broadcast and print—Tupac’s autopsy, Columbine’s cafeteria stills—proving the maxim that the first wave of content for a new technological medium comes from the one immediately preceding it.

Meanwhile, the offline world was performing its own grotesqueries. If Rotten was the public archive and AIM the rehearsal room, then the national stage was set to feel real, real bad. The year of my Fry’s desktop, 1999, gave us Columbine and Woodstock ’99. Columbine: the massacre that blurred instantly into imagery that was shot through CCTV and looped endlessly, then was archived and resurfaced online. Woodstock ’99 was its inverted image: full-grown white-male grievances amplified, monetized, and platformed on a corporate-sponsored stage, self-immolating in real time and broadcast live on MTV, the echoes of a proverbial wakakaka echoing through the bucolic Hudson Valley. Here was the same alchemical rot of rage and grievance playing out at once as private theater, Clearnet archive, and mainstream spectacle. It was also one of the last moments of true monoculture—a moment when everyone could still watch the same flames together, on the same screen, at the same time. Survivor and American Idol were pulling in the same direction: appointment television as a collective ritual, the country gathered around the same broadcast. Today that ritual is gone. A public spectacle of grievance—a war, a riot, a killing—no longer happens to a national audience. It happens across feeds, in fragments, already metabolized by the algorithm before anyone sees it whole.

***

By that crepuscular dawn of the turning century, a younger generation’s pumps were primed to dissociate from these horrors. Rotten famously reposted the images of human beings hurling themselves from the Twin Towers in a file called “swandive.jpg.” Two years later, the images leaked from Abu Ghraib made the circuit explicit with photographs of hooded Iraqi prisoners wired to electrodes, stacked in pyramids, and of soldiers posing with grins and thumbs-ups. It was Rotten courtesy of the American military.

In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag states the obvious: that digesting atrocious images repeatedly numbs us to them. By 2004, when photographs of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison first surfaced, my group of online youths had been rehearsing atrocity as play for years. We had not only seen such images; we had simulated them by inhabiting the roles of both tormentor and tormented in AIM chat rooms. The desensitization was not only visual but embodied, a muscle memory knotted together with the libidinal impulse of early sexuality—shame, arousal, cruelty, recognition. What mattered wasn’t so much the image itself but how it moved. Its value lay in its circulation: whom you could shock, how fast the chat room would combust, how far something would travel before it came back to you like a bad penny. Like any horror gag, the corpse is just a prop until it reanimates. Only then do you run. We spread each image like a virus, multiplying it through inboxes and buddy lists, a chain letter from hell that we kept passing along.

Images stopped being evidence of anything. They became raw material to restage as printouts, as forwarded emails, as props for whatever script we were running. Their origin didn’t matter as much as the charge they carried. Not “What does this image mean?” but “What does this do to me?” The images moved through our bodies as sensations—horror and arousal, laughter and shame blurring together—one minute in private in my pink-and-green room, the next performed in front of strangers (from the safety of said room). Passing them around bound us into a group of very online kids who learned early that atrocity could be terrifying, hilarious, disgusting, a smidge horny, and, above all, something you could play with.

In early 2001, Rotten was investigated by Scotland Yard and the FBI over an image of alleged human cannibalism, and was threatened simultaneously by Germany’s family ministry and a rolling list of corporate cease-and-desists, including from Coca-Cola, Pillsbury, and Burlington Coat Factory. Soylent’s defense, as invoked in Miller v. California (1973), the Supreme Court’s obscenity test, was that Rotten’s images carried “literary, artistic, political, and historical merit” and so could not be prosecuted as obscenity. None of the threats produced a criminal charge or a forced takedown. Which is to say: a generation of tweens was handed a catalogue of autopsy photos and suicide stills that had been, by the state’s tacit non-prosecution, admitted as art. The evidentiary weight of the images had already been severed from the bodies they depicted before we ever got to them. The site would go on operating for another eleven years, with updates slowing in 2009 and stopping for good in February 2012. What shuttered Rotten wasn’t a court order but its obsolescence: by the early 2010s, shock had migrated from curated URLs to ambient feeds on social media, and you no longer had to search “rotten.com” to stumble upon a corpse.

***

I don’t think I’m particularly twisted. Even though my budding sexuality bloomed in the dark corners of the internet, I don’t flatter myself by thinking that anything Milo and I were doing was unique. I already knew then that plenty of other children were right there alongside us. Some of my terminally online peers of the late nineties—like, oh, I don’t know, Stephen Miller—are now running America. So when I asked people my age what they remembered about Rotten, they crawled out of the spongy, maggot-infested woodwork.

One friend described the time he saw a Russian teenager slowly pushing a screwdriver into a homeless man’s eyeball, recorded for clout with Nokia-era blur and all. A stranger on Instagram spoke of the mental residue the site left, telling me that “it permanently damaged my brother’s psyche. He says the part of him that could ‘handle’ Rotten is evil. That looking at all was a kind of moral litmus test.”

Banal, the way evil tends to be. Boys in public libraries huddled around the one computer tucked between the stacks, daring one another to click. At someone named Jimbo Ballmer’s house, late-night Rotten sessions were followed by Family Guy DVDs or Airsoft pellet-gun fights. One friend remembered the film Faces of Death (1978), which peddled fake snuff fifty years before AI or deepfakes: “My friend Jack and I loved a video of a guy getting hit by a car, only years later realizing it was the accident scene from Meet Joe Black (1998).” Another friend remembered hearing a mention of Rotten on The Howard Stern Show in ’98, then immediately checking it out. “No other website made me feel so dirty,” one friend wrote.

***

In my freshman year of college, I took the train from New York to visit Milo in Montreal. We took 2C-B he’d bought from a dealer who had it shipped in from China, apparently. After a session watching Microcosmos (1996), we ended up at the Biosphère, staring at the sky through its aged geodesic lattice, then looking down to see a dead fish floating to the aquarium’s surface. On the train there, he’d mentioned offhand that in Maori culture, to smile with one’s teeth is a sign of aggression. We sat across from each other, grinning manically, baring our teeth, watching the trip dilate in each other’s eyes.

Dena Yago is an artist, a writer, and a founding member of the trend forecasting group K-HOLE (2010–2016). Her writing has appeared in e-flux journal, Flash Art, and frieze magazine. That Figures, a book of her selected writings, will be published by After 8 Books this June.

Wolfgang Koeppen, the maestro dirigent of the post-Nazi German-language novel, was born in the cold old Prussian port of Greifswald in 1906, a bastard, as they used to be called, the out-of-wedlock son of a seamstress who moonlit as a theater prompter and an ophthalmologist father, who dabbled in winter sports and competitive ballooning and refused most contact. Mother and son moved around a lot, from Koeppen’s grandmother’s house to the house of his mother’s stepsister. In 1912, the year Death in Venice (not Death in Rome) was published, the pair settled in Ortelsburg, Masuria, which is now the Polish city of Szczytno, where Koeppen attended Realschule. Mother and son fled west with World War I, heading along the Baltic coast until returning to Greifswald, where Koeppen made efforts to resume his schooling before dropping out totally and working as a deliverer for a bookstore, a cook, a ship’s cook, an assembler in factories, a theater usher, a movie theater usher, a projectionist, an ice maker and deliverer, and a tester of light bulbs. Each of these occupations, it might be argued, is a metaphor for “novelist”: delivering the books, preparing nourishment, et cetera. They certainly provided what in German industrial circles is called “material.”

In 1931, Koeppen washed up, or down, in Berlin, and began contributing articles to the liberal-left Berliner Börsen-Courier, which eventually put him on staff, a precarious position that ended when the paper was shuttered by the Nazis on the final day of 1933—not an auspicious time to be launching a German-language literary career.

The man was an anachronism: born too early or too late. He’d come into his thirties during the Third Reich, and with a sensibility already matured through interwar Modernism, the homegrown Döblin and Becher, the Austrians Broch and Musil, and the experience of having been among the very first readers of Proust, Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce in German. To be sure, when his journalism stint came to a close and he turned his calloused hand to fiction, he seems to have realized how desynchronized he was and set himself to writing two novels with then-approachable touches of socialist realism (not national socialist realism), akin to the working-class work of that fellow son of Greifswald, Hans Fallada: the love-lost account A Sad Affair (1934) and the bleak pastoral Die Mauer schwankt (The tottering wall, 1935).

At the same time as he started publishing, however, Koeppen tried to make a break with Germany and followed his Jewish publishers and many of his Jewish and left-liberal friends to Holland, which served as a temporary refuge for some who wound up leaving the continent altogether and for others who wound up being dragged off to Poland. Koeppen did, or suffered, neither. Instead, he—who reviled the Nazis—decided to leave the Hague and go back to the Reich, repatriating in 1938. It might be hard to understand this choice in retrospect, but I imagine in the moment it felt inevitable. Koeppen was no cosmopolitan. He was a monoglot, an obscure fatherless Eastern boy, holes in his pockets, holes in his shoes. He was never going to live in sunny California exile and be Thomas Mann or even Heinrich Mann.

Taken as a whole, Koeppen’s activities during World War II seem a canny exercise in self-sabotage that was also self-defense. The scripts he wrote and helped to write for UFA and Bavaria Filmkunst were almost never produced, but his employment got him cover. The propagandistic (or so it was described) novel he signed on to write never got finished, but the contract earned him a deferral from military service. An Allied bombing run in Berlin gave him the opportunity to essentially fake his own death, and he spent the last years of the war underground, or at least hiding out in a ramshackle hotel near Munich, where he married the proprietor’s sister, Marion. Following the war, the couple eked out a living selling antiques (looted, stolen, abandoned), while Koeppen also drudged freelance as a ghostwriter, most notably on the memoirs of a German Jewish postage stamp dealer named Jakob Littner who’d been through the ghetto liquidations. Koeppen edited, revised, and some would say completely rewrote Littner’s manuscript in exchange for bimonthly care packages the man sent from his new life in New York. Hoarding tinned fish and canned ham, Koeppen also hoarded experience: there is the sense that his entire life up until the fall of the Reich was all a vast batteric accumulation of power, a rag-and-bone collecting of resources, from his jobbing and hustles, from theater and film, from the Nazis and Jew who employed him.

The great discharge of these energies came only in the fifties, the decade of total division and partial denazification when Koeppen began writing fiction again—writing quickly to be read quickly, books that made speed their governing principle. It’s unclear to me—and it was probably unclear to Koeppen himself—what caused this abrupt fecundity: possibly a desire to novelize the novelties of a Germany that was suddenly West Germany, possibly the more quotidian fact that he met a publisher, Henry Goverts, who upon returning from exile was interested in Koeppen’s work. Whatever the reason—I’m not sure it’s useful to insist on a reason—the man was writing like his typewriter was on fire and in flaming succession produced three books that have been called a trilogy through proximity alone. With no incidents or characters connecting them, with no single style even linking them, they are a trilogy simply because they were written one after another—written as though enjambed—and represent the only fiction that Koeppen would publish postwar, though he continued to live for long, silent nonfiction decades and died in the nineties, just after the fall of communism.

Pigeons in the Grass, with a title from Gertrude Stein, was published in summer 1951 and, Ulysses-like, follows dozens of characters but especially a Black American serviceman named Odysseus through a single day in spring 1948 in Munich. The Hothouse, published in fall 1953, follows a suicidal West German politician over the course of two days and two nights in spring 1953 in Bonn. And Death in Rome, published in fall 1954, takes the reader to a Nazi family reunion-cum-Roman holiday lasting three days in spring 1954.

It’s this family element that most clearly sets Death in Rome apart from the Mann classic referenced by the title and often lampooned within the text. Both books traffic in the German cathexis with Italy, the Teutonic concept of the Mediterranean cradle of the Imperium as the primal site of warm abandon, where pale and dutiful burghers can go to tan amid the ruins, spice up their bready palates, and fall in love or just lust as a supposedly acculturating stop on the Grand Tour. But that is where the similarities between these thanatoid fictions end, because while Mann focuses on a solitary genius reckoning with his decadence, Koeppen homes in on a busy klatch of already decayed relations, a dark-comically caricatured cohort of Nazi normies who’ve come to the balmy capital of post-Mussolini Italy to cut loose from throat-cutting (and to say a little prayer and make a little night music).

Gottlieb Judejahn is the patriarch: note the Jew in his name and wonder (as translator Michael Hofmann has pointed out) whether the jahn references Wahn, madness, or jäten, to weed out or extirpate. He’s an unrepentant former SS man whose résumé takes in pretty much every major German twentieth-century travesty: the Freikorps, the Black Reichswehr, and so on. Sentenced to death in absentia at Nuremberg, he has somehow escaped to an Arab country—either Egypt or Jordan, it was never clear to me—where he works as a military consultant helping to plan the destruction of the State of Israel. His presence in Rome is both business and pleasure: between Baedeker tourism and catching up with family, he has a sit-down with some arms dealers to make a purchase. Judejahn and his wife Eva have a son, Adolf, who wears another uniform: he’s a trainee priest affiliated with the Vatican, seeking salvation from his father’s crimes in religion, but troubled by the Church’s relationship with the Reich. Judejahn’s brother-in-law is Friedrich Wilhelm Pfaffrath, a former front man for Nazi manufacturing, since reformed into a Burgomaster and Bundesrepublik caudillo convinced he has enough clout to get Judejahn pardoned and readmitted into the country. Pfaffrath is married to Eva’s sister, Anna, and they have two sons: Dietrich, a careerist law student destined to become a version—and given that he should know better, an even more malicious version—of his father, and Siegfried, a serialist composer who gradually becomes what has to be considered the novel’s hero. He, like Mann’s von Aschenbach, is a homosexual and a pederast, a writer not of prose but of the so-called dodecaphonic music espoused by the Viennese school of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. His music, an ostensibly logical rational transposition of the world’s dissonance, provides the most superficial occasion for the reunion: a performance of his new symphony, which has won a prize. Though Siegfried professes to hate the piece, it is being performed at a concert under the baton of the conductor Kürenberg, whose Jewish wife Ilse becomes a target of Judejahn, Siegfried’s uncle …

Such is the cast that meets and parts, meets and parts, as the characters insinuate themselves like musical leitmotifs in and out of the Roman vias, confronting German-Roman history ancient (Alaric the Goth) and modern (fascism), in a mad allusive style that takes its cues from music: patternization, systemization, theme, and variation.

Musicality is a neglected attribute of prose, and when it’s evoked as a description, usually by the deafer critics, it’s used as a hazy-daze-y indicator of sentences that sound good: alliteration, assonance, some poetry-like balancing of the sonic surface. But Koeppen’s musicality goes deeper than that: it’s structural. The clause is the unit, which Koeppen deploys in canon and manipulates by the principles of fugue, creating sentences that sing in a complex orchestration of what’s essentially contrapuntal voices. That makes this book a masterpiece in German, but fiendishly difficult to translate, though I hope you’ll agree that Michael Hofmann has performed a near miracle, reinventing the colorations for English while preserving the formal architecture in all its modulations, as in the following passage:

and the two of them, two firm silhouettes, had stepped up to the window, the tall French window, and they looked down into the illuminated pit of the street below, and they looked across at other hotels like their own in many-storied stone buildings by the station, full of travelers, electrical signs flashed their temptations, and Rome was ready as ever to be conquered, and Kürenberg was thinking about Siegfried’s music, the flow of feeling he wanted to tighten and compress and cool for this city tomorrow, and Ilse stood beside him and looked at the roofs of automobiles creeping along the bottom of the street like an armored column of cockroaches, she saw the brief, harmless flash of lightning in the wires over the electric trolleybuses, she saw through the convention of pretending death didn’t exist, the unanimous agreement to deny terror, the ownership of the buildings she saw was set out in the land register, and even the Romans, well acquainted with ruin and the devastation of former splendor, believed in the everlastingness of this particular arrangement of stones on the old earth, she saw the mystery plays of trade, these also based on the delusions of eternity, inheritance and certainty, she saw the blooming and withering miracles of advertisements, whose colors had played on her own childhood too, quicksilver lights or dragon candles, and how simpleminded of her father it had been to put up a wall of books, music and art between her girlish life and the store, a false bastion, mild lamplight extinguished forever.

Here in this stretch that I’ve picked almost, but just almost, at random is Koeppen/Hofmann at their best. Putting aside a comparison with the original, let’s stay in this English transcription where the two of them, the bassoons might say, two firm silhouettes, the flutes might add, step up to the window, the cellos declare, the tall French window, the violins correct, and they look down into the illuminated pit of the street below, like an orchestra’s pit, but here the orchestra is lit and center stage. The theme, or countertheme, of Roman history is introduced before the conductor himself enters to think about Siegfried’s music, rather to think about how he wants Siegfried’s music to sound, though just as his thoughts coalesce and focus, Ilse brassily steps out from the wings to pick up the Roman motif and run with it, straight into the wall of her bourgeois childhood. The virtuosity on display here is emblematic of Koeppen, whose technique bears beauty as an entr’acte between the world’s recurrent slaughters.

An excerpt from Joshua Cohen’s introduction to Wolfgang Koeppen’s Death in Rome, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, which will be published by New Directions in May.

Joshua Cohen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.

This is not a traditional review but a look at the set of myths and the sublimated pursuit of dominance that have made it necessary to mount an exhibition featuring decommissioned Confederate monuments disrupted or forced into deeper layers of disgrace by remix and recontextualization. The result is a humiliation ritual that both targets and empowers white nationalism in the American South, instigating its reactionary temperament just enough to arouse productive tension but not enough to alleviate it or rehabilitate the temperament itself. Since its opening this past October, which came in the wake of the brutal, live-streamed assassination of Charlie Kirk and public fallout that ranged from glee to real mourning to opportunistic purposing of the optics of both grief and outrage, MONUMENTS, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA and the Brick in Los Angeles, has been an institutional zone wherein real and symbolic clashes between far-right extremism and bourgeois liberal dismay are played out in pantomime. We are all of us characters in this impromptu theater of convoluted archetypes.

Paradoxically, in the museum or gallery, ornate propaganda for the Confederacy gains some of the dignity of archaeology. Its monuments become pendulums swinging backward, gathering the momentum that comes from being the subject of protest and outrage, kept at bay and in check by that attention, but not for long. They haunt better there, stalking the mind like hunters in an offseason. Think of Billie Holiday’s tawny tone belting “This year’s crop of kisses are not for me, for I’m still wearin’ last year’s love” or the deceptively whimsical opening line to “Strange Fruit”: “Pastoral scene of the gallant South.”

***

The stable of statues and monuments that once adorned U.S. cities, tasked with subtly flaunting white nationalism’s triumphant past, have become petrified entities we can reanimate and make dance at will. This is their logical karmic destiny if we remember the way the hired hands manning slave ships made their newly initiated labor force dance on the decks so their muscles wouldn’t atrophy in the holds. Our grand assets become our marionettes. Those dances were the first phase of what is called the entertainment industry in the West—men and women in shackles, practicing for forced labor, improvising horrified waltzes into prayers to ward off death and shipwreck. Perhaps, besieged and desperate for touch and fresh air, some grew attached to these brutal aerobics, experienced them as a reprieve from more severe humiliations, and invented new styles of movement and music to accommodate forced performance. The captives staged rituals of possession and exorcism, as if rehearsing the spirit’s escape while captors cheered and celebrated what was, to their smug gaze, an exquisite spectacle of allegiance to their system. The dances were simultaneously promises of surrender and premonitions of rebellion.

When that system was overthrown, statues that heralded the Confederacy’s glory arrived in its place to haunt the idealism of freedom. These statues were enshrined in parks or town squares as silent, eternally resonant, speech. What did the Confederacy’s monuments want? What were they confessing through their passive-aggressive poses when commissioned by Southern and Northern states alike? Were they not merely biding their time before openly reverting to the plantation logic by which they could make you dance while bidding on or beating you into sublime resignation?

***

And we retaliated, remixed Confederate grievances with our good graces. We made new gospels, new genres of music and thought that they would of course borrow from or mimic but never master. We made our monuments transient, tricksters that seem one way while being another. We changed as soon as we were decoded, jazz into hip-hop into mumbling and back. New dance forms would accompany each, new uses of the body in space and time. We were ruthless and unsentimental about reinvention. Think of Miles Davis’s range, the permutations of his sound both becoming and toppling sonic monuments. Today, we’ve sampled and broken open stray archival video and audio that populates the internet’s many ghettos and gated communities, until even the literary canon’s assets and archetypes are up for grabs. (See Percival Everett’s retelling of Huck Finn, or Henry Dumas’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” insinuated in Sinners; see samples of Baldwin’s and Morrison’s speeches deployed in every direction—sometimes meaningfully, sometimes because they are needed as mascots to signal virtue.) This is the cultural landscape the Confederate monuments were confronted with as they became increasingly conspicuous during the BLM years. Reckoning was inevitable, the culture would want to do with them what it had done with sound and language.

Beginning in 2017 with the removal of statues of Robert E. Lee in New Orleans, that reckoning or wrecking ball came. Monuments that heralded the culture of chattel slavery and segregation thereafter were vandalized with abandon, forcibly removed by protesters, or decommissioned by municipal governments in half-hearted gestures of reconciliation that ultimately felt like the gloved hand of an official person waving from a parade float—it sees you but it will not reach out to you. It seizes you without touching you. The trouble is, these statues and plaques are alive, and even or especially in uprooting and wounding them, we aroused them, daring them to reassemble as the walking dead. The territory they once occupied is now doubly haunted by exile and the ever-present threat of return. The nation is splattered with these zombie structures, or sutures, with nowhere to be and no path to total erasure. This is when Hollywood, our great cemetery of living-dead fantasies, came calling.

***

Curated by Hamza Walker and Bennett Simpson for the Brick and the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Monuments is the ghost of Gordon Parks’s American Gothic reappearing to clean up the past decade of distinctly post-9/11 Obama-meets-MAGA era demolition. The physical act of transporting vestiges of the Confederacy and the protest songs they inspire to 2025 Los Angeles to become one ensemble merges with the ritualized everyday in a city whose economy was built on fantasy, shadow and act. With the feigned blasé of someone entering a nightclub with armed guards for bouncers, you pass security to enter the exhibition and gawk at the big band of bandits, survivors, and assassins. The most sinister of the objects, with a will of their own that bends toward opportunism, are there to be rehabilitated and made progressive by association. The museum, sterile and accommodating by nature, is a minimum-security prison, and the objects seem to relish an extended conjugal visit while we watch. I walked through this scene feeling a déjà vu of the shameful erotics of the Walk of Fame, and tried not be starstruck, both over- and underwhelmed, convinced and unconvinced, by this spectacle of propaganda and trauma. The villains have star quality, the heroes sing pretty; the tension between them, their endless rivalry, is as good for empire as it is for movies and other cultural capital. With the whole cast in one place, you can feel the artifice that binds Confederate ethics with neoliberalism’s policing of temperament in the hope of establishing a gentle, unproblematic affect of decency in the collective. It’s sad, like the liberals and the fascists need one another to sustain the discreteness of their personalities. They subsist on one another, are dependent on an opposition that can only be mediated by Black people. Black people, their forever minstrels and muses, go limp in the cross fire yet still put on a great show.

The archaic and the brand-new are in a familiar museum dialogue, whispering opinions to each other back and forth. There’s an upside-down lowrider not far from where a Julie Dash film loops, featuring the singer Davóne Tines, a tribute to the nine congregants killed during a prayer meeting at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015. One headline reads that the exhibition “topples white supremacy.” I’ll be honest and say that it helps us remember and reenact its hold. As I watched the Dash film at the opening, surrounded by mostly white people, I was hypervigilant of the spectacle of reaction. Though almost moved to tears, I refused them because it felt a bit like being danced, brought out to demonstrate an imposed sorrow in the semi-public of the museum. The exhibit topples the myth that the myth of white supremacy can be toppled.

The endeavor of this exhibition is so absurd and so ambitious that it courts the very convergences of disaster it laments, which is to say that it is fully realized. Kara Walker sacrifices a decommissioned Stonewall Jackson monument from Charlottesville, Virginia, to be its crowning, crow-cawing catastrophe. She forces the takedown that became a meme for radical triumph into the body, where it accrues momentum and substance like a drum machine, the mangled heartbeat of the matter quickening through her. Walker constructs her own monster, turning Jackson and his horse into a hideous centaur that stands solitary in the belly of the Brick’s gallery. Like a grotesque heap of stuntman costuming trapped in a film-studio back lot, the grammar of MONUMENTS collapsed into one hysterical high note. She calls the work Unmanned Drone, at once dehumanizing the dismembered Jackson and his stallion and rendering them into a freak of such character that the statue almost becomes amiable, one of those cinematic ghouls you come to love and want to confide in. And suddenly the men who martyred themselves to terrible ideas become fairy-tale creatures, an army of Tin Men born without hearts. These figures came into the world incapacitated. They’ve borrowed, then hijacked our emotional intelligence in order to survive. The U.S. will never outrun nostalgia for its own evil, its own proud freaks, and nor will the trickster spirit driving that nostalgia-sickness (always part envy-sickness) ever fail to convince us that it’s been humbled by having been remixed by an honest artist, while everybody else, the spectator, the dancer, the overseer, the danced, looks equally ridiculous. A masterpiece here, and mastery itself in the American context, is always part tragedy, part farce, part runner looking over her shoulder hoping to be captured and made famous for a lifetime of reiterations of her failed resistance. Jackson rides his broken horse onto Sunset Boulevard while the sunset itself backs away—at least on camera.

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker, and the author of five collections of poetry. She is currently at work on a biography of Abbey Lincoln, a book of memoir and music criticism, and her next collection of poems, among other writing, film, and curatorial projects. Her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles is now up at REDCAT through July 2026.

My dad used to take me to work with him. He worked at a group home for juvenile delinquents. I remember playing on the floor of a windowless office one afternoon—zooming some toy cars around—when the door kicked open and a teenager flew in. The kid smacked hard against the polished tile floor with the weight of two grown men on top of him. They were trying to calm him down, and his face was pink and wet with tears. He was screaming.

I was five years old. I scooted my cars back into a corner and went on playing.

Such scenes were part of my childhood. These were pretty desperate boys, twelve to eighteen years old, ten of them living together on the grounds of an old tuberculosis hospital. I remember a redbrick home with many rooms—what used to be apartments for nurses—way up on a hill, the path to it winding through the trees. Sometimes the new boys—orientation phases—would tear off down the hill on foot and try to make it into town. This was eastern Kentucky in the eighties. Near the home was a highway, a gas station, and a rundown motel where a man had murdered his wife. That was about it.

Dad was pretty good at finding the boys who wanted to be found, but if you stole a car or broke into somebody’s house, he couldn’t take you back. It was a community-relations issue. Two boys stole my mom’s car once and drove it into a ditch, totaling it. Another boy ran off and no one ever heard from him again. He was fourteen years old, but it said in his file he was a prostitute, and everyone was pretty sure that was the life he’d gone back to—that he’d made it down to the highway and caught a ride.

There were worse places to be than a group home—you could be locked up in a camp, a hundred serious delinquents out in the middle of nowhere, staff not at all hesitant to put their hands on you—but some of the boys didn’t know this yet. My dad was the youngest treatment director in the state. He took his boys everywhere—to movies, baseball games, five hundred miles away to the beach. Some of them had never been out of the projects except to be sent to a home. They thought Louisville was the world. Dad would load them into an old Ford Econoline van and the boys would tell their stories, what they called their “past histories,” and I would wedge in beside them and listen.

At a very young age, I learned a lot about how life can go wrong. It put things into perspective, even if that perspective was a little warped. I remember a friend of mine—I’m guessing we were eight or nine years old—came to school upset because his mom and dad were separating. I looked right at him and said, “Jeremiah Witt’s mom set herself on fire.”

“What?” replied my friend. “Why?”

Of course, in the back of the van, I learned other things, too, like who the Geto Boys were, what a 187 was, and that you could make a lot more money selling crack than working at McDonald’s. I also learned about my dad, seeing him run group counseling and coach basketball and tell stories. Back then he drove a little blue Chevette hatchback, wore jeans and white Reeboks. He was smart and charismatic, short, freckled, and quick, unafraid to jump up in somebody’s face.

It didn’t occur to me, when I was a child, that he was one of them—one of the boys, just a few years older. His mother had abandoned him, though only after filling the formative years of his childhood with drunken stepfathers and boyfriends who broke her nose and threw her out of cars and assaulted her on the kitchen floor. Once, while being beaten up, she screamed for my dad to go get the shotgun. In a rushed panic, he got the gun, but he couldn’t find the shells.

Both his brothers ended up in prison. The man said to have been his father was barely literate. He wore a flannel shirt to a factory job up in Mansfield, Ohio, got his sleeve caught in a belt of some kind, and was yanked into the machinery. The accident damaged his brain in a way that rendered him quiet and ashamed of himself. Having played essentially no role in his son’s upbringing, he resurfaced years later at my dad’s wedding but wouldn’t get out of his truck.

So that was how Dad came up, his basic training in the childhood traumas of abuse and neglect. I suppose his work with troubled teenagers had something to do with wanting to be the father he had never had, but also I think he liked the challenge. His favorite boys were the most delinquent—street-smart sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, drug dealers, usually, who had adapted to the world around them but were kids still, and in group would ask the sort of questions no one had any answers to. Questions like “If my mom doesn’t want me selling drugs, how come she takes the money I give her?”

These were boys from just outside Cincinnati, from housing projects in Lexington and Louisville. Dad’s roots were hillbilly, but in a group home none of that mattered much.

Some of the boys had major mental health issues. Some were capable of cruelty, but others—despite whatever else they’d done—had held on to their humanity in remarkable ways. When my sister was seven years old, she was hit by a truck. We were about to cross the road after the boys’ softball practice. She got excited and took off on her own. She made it across a lane or two, and then we heard brakes and a thump and she was skidding and scraping along the asphalt, knocked out of her shoes.

Dad ran to her, which left me alone with the boys. I was five years old, my sister in the street. A kid named Chris grabbed me. There wasn’t anyone watching him—he could have gone AWOL, or he could have gone on observing a spectacle, what everyone thought was the death of a child. Instead, he picked me up in his arms. He ran me back into the park to get me away from it all.

My sister survived, but Dad blamed himself for her injuries. He’d poured so much time and attention into his boys, it had nearly cost him his daughter. But nothing changed. He went on working, and it nearly cost him his marriage too.

When he was thirty-one years old, he left the group home for someone else to run. He wanted to do something bigger. He took over another redbrick house on another hill, this one with even more rooms. He started out with two poor country boys, Jackie and Odell. I remember a plaque, their names etched into it after they got their GEDs. Jackie had run off from another placement once and stolen a four-wheeler. He was picked up with three hundred dollars’ cash in one pocket and three hundred dollars’ worth of weed in the other. He hadn’t been gone but a few hours. He was a great kid, though—they both were. Years later Jackie called from prison and said to tell everyone hi.

Two boys became about fifty boys or so, and the home became a business. Some of the people over my dad—his board—gave themselves contracts to feed the boys and clothe them and whatnot. They had a financial interest in the home’s success and believed that, as the director, Dad lacked polish. They flew him to business seminars and told him he needed a better car. He sold his little four-speed Chevette and was leased through the home a Pontiac Bonneville that had leather seats with nine unnecessary adjustment buttons. He occasionally wore a suit, shaved off his mustache, and for the first time in his life began to blow-dry his hair.

They asked him to take over another home at the same time, a place no one else could run. Of course he said yes, and the boys kept coming, seventy, eighty, a hundred of them. I remember a boy who’d been shot in his feet. He had ripped somebody off on a drug deal. When his feet got better, he ran away. Another kid went AWOL in the middle of a basketball game. He jumped up off the bench in his uniform and took off into the night.

The game stopped and everyone went quiet.

A boy named Richie, pudgy and solemn, skilled at stating the obvious, spoke up and said, “Sir, George is goan.”

With this fact acknowledged, the game resumed. Basketball was a way of bringing the boys together. I remember them winning a tournament, beating all the other homes, and a kid we’ll call Andre lifted me up onto his shoulders. He was six foot five and had recently eaten a light bulb. Dad had checked him out of the psych ward to play. From up there on Andre’s great big acned shoulders, as he raced me around the court, I remember glancing down at my mom and seeing a look of frozen terror on her face.

When I was eleven, I joined the team. We had some terrific athletes. One of our boys went to college on a scholarship. He played for Billy Donovan, who coached the Chicago Bulls. We’d take our ten best players and go play the big camp teams, who’d bring out a couple hundred teenage delinquents to stomp the metal bleachers and heckle us. Being the youngest, I got it pretty good. The other players would come after me to steal the ball. I remember making a few plays and everybody shutting up, except for a kid behind our bench who remarked, “I’m telling y’all, that little white boy is good.”

Dad heard about a team at a youth prison in West Virginia that was supposed to be better than us. He loaded us into the van one morning and we drove two hundred miles to play them. This was a maximum-security facility for juveniles, up in Salem. We had to be buzzed in through a thick steel door and then through another one and another, but they wouldn’t let us into the gym. We could hear someone in there screaming.

Then it was silent, and the door opened. On one end of the court, the other team was about to warm up, and on our end—where we were supposed to warm up—a kid was mopping a puddle of blood.

“Let’s get loose,” Dad told us, but we couldn’t take our eyes off that kid pushing the blood around the court.

Kentucky had a youth prison like that too. A lot of the camps are still there. Most of them have pretty dark histories of abuse. We used to go down to Rice Audubon in Louisville for a holiday tournament every Christmas. They had their own gym. We’d sleep on the floor and they’d turn off the heat and try to freeze us.

For my dad those tournaments were like state championships. When I was older, helping coach, it was my job to keep him from getting thrown out. He had a deep sense of injustice and always believed that his boys were being cheated. When we won a championship, he’d take us out for a steak dinner, and the boys, daunted by menus and cloth napkins, would attempt to order hamburgers.

One year, after a softball tournament, Dad drove his travel team nine hours to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. My mom, my sister, and I went, too—Dad’s idea of a family vacation, us and the boys. My grandmother had a single-wide trailer she’d parked within sight of the ocean after Hurricane Hugo wiped everything out. I remember sleeping on the porch, about twelve boys and the whispers of waves crashing, Dad stretched out next to the screen door with me beside him, so that anyone hoping to leave would have to wake us.

There were times I wanted a break. Our family life was inextricable from the home and everything happening there. Someone was always calling in the middle of the night, and Dad was always going in to work. I think early in his career he really believed he could save his boys. I think he thought they could save each other, but no matter what changes they made, almost always they went right back home to the very situations that had failed them in the first place.

I remember an old car pulling up to our house one afternoon. It was our basketball star, who was still in high school at the time, and another boy named Antonio Sanders. Dad had helped Tony get into high school too. He’d played baseball and was sharp, the sort of kid who could run the group himself.

Both boys had gone home but were back in trouble. The basketball star was going to be sent off to the camps. He came in and talked to Dad awhile, and Dad agreed to take him back as an orientation phase. Tony wouldn’t come in. He didn’t want to start over.

A year later we read about Tony in the newspaper. He’d been shot in his belly. He’d bled out and died in the back seat of somebody’s car, this kid we all loved.

Losing Tony took something out of us, but that happened sometimes—kids went home and got killed. You couldn’t keep them forever. At some point, you had to let them go. Some made it and some never really had a chance.

In all, my dad worked with kids for about forty-five years. He lost more than a few. He lost entire homes. One place burned down when I was twelve. No one was hurt—the boys were off campus—but in the fire they lost their clothes, their food, their beds, everything. Where were they going to go? Dad called everyone together—boys and staff, more than a hundred people total—and promised them he would figure it out. Then he went and sat in his car and cried.

He ended up in a nasty dispute with the county judge-executive over whether the home should be rebuilt. It got rebuilt, but Dad was run out of town. In our local paper he was made to look like a crook. They brought up the Bonneville, how he’d gotten himself a car.

It devastated him. I remember him being unemployed, trying to wash clothes and help out around our house. Once, he washed my wallet, and it embarrasses me to this day, the things I said—that I’d made him feel worse when he was having such a tough time.

He ditched his suit and the blow-dried hair, grew a beard, found an old elementary school three hours away, and made another home of it. When he was starting a place, he’d sleep on a cot in his office, awake every minute the boys were awake. He thought everybody should work like that. One consequence was that I saw him a lot less—he’d watch me play baseball, say hello after the game, then drive straight back to the home—but I didn’t mind. He was always happy when he was building something, and anyway, I knew where to find him.

No matter where the homes were, there were always problems with the community. Our boys went to an alternative school, but if a kid was smart or good enough to play ball at a public school, Dad would give him a chance. It was controversial, sending boys with criminal backgrounds off campus. Things happened. Some of the girls in the community got pregnant, for instance. These were rural school systems in the nineties—the girls were white and a lot of our boys were not.

When I was a freshman in high school, one of our kids—a football player—punched his girlfriend in the mouth and knocked out some of her teeth. She’d called him a name you can’t call people. Physically, this particular boy was a man. He had grown up in Little Rock, Arkansas, back when the city was having such a brutal gang war that HBO filmed a documentary about it. I came out of the lunchroom and just about our whole high school was waiting for him outside the principal’s office, but he was already gone. His counselor had snuck him out a back door, and Dad gave him as harsh a punishment as he could give a kid like that: he sent him home.

Tension with the community only grew worse. The basketball star got in a fight he didn’t start, and everything blew up. All of our public school boys were jumped and pummeled. I was shocked at how the people around me—some of them my friends, my teachers—turned against the boys. Even the girls were in on it, girls I’d grown up with, beating on our boys with their zipped-up purses as they tried to escape down a hall. Dad met with the high school principal, who, refusing to punish anyone, told him point-blank that sometimes you just gotta take your beating.

I was a quiet kid and I got quieter after that, which wasn’t brave but nonetheless served me well. I was thought of as a good student. It was expected that one day I would take over for my dad and run a home, but I wanted to be a ballplayer. In the seventh grade I wrote an essay about it. My English teacher pulled me aside and said, “I want you to read this to the class.”

“I don’t think so,” I told her.

She said, “Okay, I’ll read it.”

I agreed, as long as she didn’t mention my name. My desire to be an athlete was nothing unique, but what I had really put down over the course of a few pages was the sheer, genuine determination to do something with myself. I denied to my classmates that I was the one who had written it. I didn’t want anyone to know I had my own aspirations.

The next year, I wrote my first boys’-home story. It was about a kid named Chance that I’d imagined. This time I was braver: I read it to the entire eighth grade. I remember looking out at everyone and feeling like a magician, that I had cast a spell over them. I didn’t want to be a ballplayer anymore.

No one thought to encourage my writing much beyond that. I was a kid in eastern Kentucky, surrounded by the sons and daughters of men who worked hard, long shifts at the blast furnace, the coke plant. Not a lot was expected of us academically. By my sophomore year of high school, I was taking basic English because the advanced and honors classes conflicted with a conditioning course I needed to play baseball. I was still of the mind that being good at baseball was how I would get to go to college, whether I wanted to play or not. Sports had worked for one of my dad’s boys.

I had a good family and a good childhood, but it was tough on us when things collapsed. Another home closed and Dad lost everything he’d built—lost it all over again—and had to sell his house and even his car. I remember him trying to sell off the vans the boys rode around in, trying to scrounge up enough money to keep from going bankrupt. When I was in college he rented a little apartment with my mom a half hour away from me. I’d go see him, but it was hard getting him out even for an afternoon. I’d call him and tell him I was coming over. I’d beat on the door.

I worried about him, but he was like a phoenix rising from his own ashes about once every eight years. For a while he was down in Florida working with delinquent girls. He moved up to Ohio and sold insurance, a job he hated. On his lunch break he’d email me pictures of abandoned elementary schools. He could walk through a school or an old church and see it all in his mind—where the boys would sleep, where they’d have counseling. Over and over I did those walks with my dad, and more than once a home he envisioned did, in fact, come to be.

In time, his beard turned silver, his back was shot, and he had started over so often that the only boys anyone would send him were the ones no one else would take. These kids were different—they beat the crap out of him. My mom would call me, upset, or send me a picture of him with his glasses broken and his eyes black from getting headbutted, too old to be looking like that.

“Oh, I’m all right,” he’d reassure me.

He needed help, but I couldn’t help him. I begged him to close the home himself, but he kept on. Finally someone sent him a kid he could work with. He built a group, and within a couple of years he had another home running like he wanted it to, the last one.

He’s an old man now, retired against his will. I wish he were at peace, but if you’ve fought all your life, peace is a hard thing to come by. My dad, like all fathers, had his flaws. He was old-school when you couldn’t be anymore. He made too many enemies, took too many risks, and broke rules he shouldn’t have broken. He took in more kids than he was licensed for—quite a few more—and was not honest about it. I believe he did this not simply out of the kindness of his heart but to see what he could build. The bigger the home, the more kids he could have, but also the more workers he needed. Working with aggressive, screwed-up teenage boys is hard, and he hired people who weren’t as skilled as he was—who didn’t care as much as he did—and this was a problem. He fired them, and that was a problem too.

Running a small group home, helping the kids he could directly help, and accepting that he had helped them weren’t enough. He was a dreamer, and had a habit of overlaying the dreams of others with his own.

“This could all be yours,” he used to tell me, meaning the lives in his hands, the boys, the staff, the home.

I didn’t want it. My dad was driven to help kids in a way I was not. He had a wound I didn’t have—he’d never had a father, and yet he had taught himself how to be a very good one.

Watching him with his boys and being around them, sitting in on group counseling, the countless trips in the van, the endless stories—to him, that was my training. To me, it was something else. It was a chance to be with my dad, to come to know his heart.

Eventually, he had to let me go too. But I did work for him for a while. My senior year of high school, when I was still too young to be alone with a group, I worked the night shift. I remember my first Friday, going to school all day and then making the long drive into the mountains, already worn out. Dad would fire you if you fell asleep. I’m not sure he would have fired his son, but I didn’t want to embarrass him either. I sat out in the hall with another guy, drinking coffee. The guy was a big talker, but I didn’t want to talk. I combed through files and read about the boys’ lives, the things they’d been through. Around 3:00 A.M., when the night grew long and my eyes heavy, my coworker still yammering on, I got down on the floor.

“What are you doing?” the guy asked me.

I broke into a set of push-ups—an old trick my dad had suggested to stay awake. I did sit-ups, too, and jumping jacks, and every twenty minutes or so I stepped into the bedrooms to check on the boys, their heads shaved down to their scalps, their eyes closed, their teenage faces dreaming.

Soon I would play my last baseball game. I would graduate from high school and slip out into the world.

Late that night, the guy I was working with finally quit talking and began to snore, his cheek laid across the logbook. There I was in an old grade school turned into a home, a place my dad had dreamed into reality, seated in the quiet carpeted hall with all these scattered lives gathered into the rooms around me. The only soul awake, I realized, was me.

I closed my eyes and listened to the silence.

Joe Bond’s debut novel, Hope House, told from inside a group home for boys, will be released in the U.S. on May 26 and in the UK this fall.

Last week, at The Paris Review’s 2026 Revel, the writer Edward P. Jones accepted the Hadada Award, a prize presented each year to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” Jones, whose 2004 novel The Known World won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has been a beloved contributor to the Review since 1992, when his short story “Marie” appeared in the Spring issue. Among the editors’ initial reactions to that story, we found a handwritten note (whose chicken scratch strongly resembles that of George Plimpton) which reads: “a formidable character … well-plotted … very well controlled … Hooray!” The note accompanies a letter from Jones, dated October 1991, in which he told the former editor James Linville that “it seems that I have been creating the people in the stories all my adult life.” This speech, however, takes us back to before that adult life, to when Jones was first falling in love with, as he puts it, “this fiction stuff.” We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

Doing nonfiction stuff is not something I like very much, so I will not be standing here for very long, sparing you and sparing me. For some months—since I was told about this award—I have been trying to find the point in my life when this fiction stuff and I became friends. I cannot find it. It perhaps has something to do with a poor boy with a mother who could not read or write, who cleaned restaurant floors and made hotel beds to feed her babies—maybe it has to do with a boy who had no desire to write but who looked up one day from enjoying some book and began to understand that words matter, that words have magic and power and that with each word, each paragraph, each book, he was—without even knowing it—becoming a piece of that word-world. Admittance was possible because his mother could afford for him the price of Signet paperbacks. And because libraries were free.

My friend Steve Mears and his family managed a few years ago to find the first book I ever read as a boy, a book that had no pictures. I was thirteen years old and I, with my sister, was visiting family in South Boston, Virginia. I was used to reading funny books. The rest of the world calls them “comics’’ but in Washington, D.C., they were “funny books.” From Marvel superheroes to Archie and the gang to Little Lulu and Hot Stuff and Casper the Friendly Ghost, I had known only funny books, with all their colorful pictures. And books of folktales and fairy tales—all of them giving me picture after picture so that my brain did not have to do much work.

There were no funny books in 1964 in South Boston, Virginia, but my oldest cousin was married to a man who made part of his living by selling salvageable stuff he would find in a junkyard. One day he found in the junkyard a box of books, and one of those books was Who Killed Stella Pomeroy? It was a British mystery published decades before 1964. From my Superman funny books, I knew words like invulnerable, but I did not know bungalow, which occurred a lot in that book. I thought it some kind of special house and I just kept reading, because it was all about the people and the good and bad things they did to each other, not about the house where they did it.

Read the rest here.

Entering Albany by highway from the south, as a fleet of buses did in late February, requires weaving through a nest of interchanges between the city and its waterfront, then shuttling west along a series of dingy arteries, before emerging onto a plaza the New York Times once said looked more like “the planet Krypton than the capital of the state of New York.” The Empire State Plaza, as it’s called, does indeed seem like something from another world, or perhaps from several others. The Capitol building, a hulking castle of rough, dark stone capped with ruddy terra-cotta, sits at the north end of the square; the other three sides are lined with eleven anonymous, modern structures, a mix of squat blocks and slim vertical slabs, all sheathed in shining white marble, over forty thousand tons in total. This odd assemblage of vaguely sinister buildings looks down on three reflecting pools and one enormous oblong entity—a bizarre, six-story Brutalist construction known simply as the Egg, which officially serves as a performing arts center but resembles nothing so much as a newly landed UFO.

This Brasília on the Hudson, first opened to regular use fifty years ago this summer, was commissioned in the early sixties by the then governor Nelson Rockefeller, the philandering scion of the robber baron family, who funneled some two billion tax dollars into what he hoped would “symbolize the vitality of the state and its government.” In a way, it does—though primarily as a monument to Albany’s imperial power and baffling, byzantine inner workings. I’d arrived by bus that February morning for what was dubbed the Albany Takeover, the kickoff public event in a prolonged battle between New York’s various stakeholders over government revenue and where it would come from. New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, had just cruised into office on a bold platform to expand public services, which he planned to fund primarily by raising taxes on large corporations and the ultra-rich. But the new mayor’s inauguration also marked the start of the state budget season—an arcane, monthslong process involving countless preliminary proposals, innumerable delays, and an annual begging ritual, evocatively known as Tin Cup Day, on which mayors from across the state schlep to Empire State Plaza to ask for funds.

Though New Yorkers ostensibly elect hundreds of legislators to make these sorts of decisions, the negotiations themselves are notoriously secretive—New York ranked dead last among all states for accountability and transparency in its budget process, according to a 2015 analysis by the Center for Public Integrity. Ultimately, all major decisions are made by a group known as the Three Men in a Room: the governor, Senate majority leader and Assembly speaker, the former two of whom are now, for the first time, women. One of those women, Governor Kathy Hochul, has been stalwart in her opposition to raising taxes—despite the hole that the Trump administration’s cuts has blown in the state’s finances—not least because she faces reelection this fall. The event that morning, a march and rally at Empire State Plaza, was the first in a series of efforts aimed at reminding the governor that polling consistently shows a majority of her constituents disagree. Much of the media seemed to take Hochul’s refusal as a foregone conclusion. But if nothing else, the site was a well-chosen locale for registering dissent. The Plaza—which has been called the most expensive government complex in American history—is a case study in the lengths to which New York’s leaders have gone to find gargantuan sums of money to enact wild new visions for the state.

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