Our New T-Shirts & Totes

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Celebrate ZYZZYVA while looking stylish, too! The cream T-shirt comes in all sizes, features a ribbed neck, and is made from 100 percent USA cotton. Manufactured by Los Angeles Apparel, with the design printed by San Francisco’s Babylon Burning, this T-shirt is about as California as it gets. Order here. People have loved our red-and-blue totes, but now you have your choice of two color schemes to choose from. Our new offering is a black canvas tote with cream lettering—at once bold and elegant. Order here. And if you’d like to get either of these items along with a subscription, […]

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The Mystery of the Caves: ‘Our Beautiful Boys’ by Sameer Pandya

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What happened on Friday night? There was a high-school football game, of course; it is America, and our beautiful boys played like young gods! Then they gathered themselves, the quarterback and two running backs, and they went for Indian food, and then to a party with about a hundred other kids, a party within the ruins of a house set off the road and near three caves.  Another story is in the making, an older story, an older question: What happened in the cave?  How did Stanley Kincaid, a troublemaker par excellence, get beat to a pulp and skewered hundreds […]

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Optimizing Doesn’t Equal Thriving: Q&A with Alex Higley

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It can be disorienting to read a novel as good as True Failure (Coffee House Press; 280 pages) is when its bold title archly gestures toward the opposite possibility. Readers of Alex Higley’s third book will instead encounter the work of a writer coming into his full powers as a skilled ironist and cultural critic. True Failure is a moving, fresh, and very funny story about a cast of characters whose quotidian lives and aspirations will seem at once familiar and strange in highly inventive and memorable ways. (Think John Gardner and his dictum that all good fiction has an […]

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Yearning at Its Highest Levels: Q&A with Iheoma Nwachukwu

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The first time I read Iheoma Nwachukwu’s story collection Japa & Other Stories (168 pages; University of Georgia Press), I was staying in a small Airbnb near the Mexico border while my wife volunteered as an interpreter for human rights lawyers interviewing detainees at two nearby detention centers. Each night when she returned, she talked for hours about the people they had interviewed and how odd it was to see these centers filled with people from around the world, who had all somehow made their way through Mexico. So, of course, it seemed like a strange serendipity that of the […]

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Living to Just Work: ‘Make Your Own Job’ by Erik Baker

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You’re tired. Perhaps you’re on your feet all day, or sit in a car for most of the night. Maybe you wake up to unread emails. You polish that resume, prep that interview, hold out hope. You clock in, you invoice, you bill the hour. You cannot shake that sinking feeling that you are not quite where you need to be. That your time, already limited, is misspent. That you could be, should be, doing more. You are not alone. Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (337 pages; Harvard University Press) arrives amid […]

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Dreaming Metapluralism: Jonathon Keats’s “The Future Democracies Laboratory”

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As soon as it seemed on the night and early morning of November 5th and 6th that Donald J. Trump was on track to win the presidency, postmortems of the Democrats’ failure began to pop up like so many fungi. (Some were even written in advance of the election.) Varieties of optimism, from the cautious to the overconfident, disintegrated into hypotheticals and cases. Once the outcome was known—the recent past fixed—it became fair game for meddling. The dice had rolled to a stop; the gears of retroactive prophecy began to turn. The Future Democracies Laboratory, a project by artist and […]

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The Multitudes of the Family Restaurant: Q&A with Curtis Chin

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Curtis Chin is the author of the memoir Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant (Little Brown). A co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, Chin served as the nonprofit’s first executive director. He has received awards from ABC/Disney Television, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he has made two documentaries, Tested and Dear Corky, the latter of which premiered on “American Masters” on PBS. Chin and I zoomed about his memoir and about his formative years spent in Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, his family’s restaurant […]

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The Era of Prohibition as Feminist History: Q&A with Gioia Diliberto

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Gioia Diliberto’s new work of nonfiction, Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition (336 pages; University of Chicago Press), is an immersive and meticulously researched examination of the forces behind the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which went into effect in 1920, and the contentious, years-long struggle that led to its repeal in 1933. The four women mentioned in Firebrands’ subtitle were key figures in Prohibition’s passage and its eventual repeal: Ella Boole, who led the Women’s Christian Temperance Union for many years; Mabel Walker Willebrandt, assistant U.S. Attorney General, who was responsible for […]

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The Boy Is a Time Bomb: ‘Saint the Terrifying’ by Joshua Mohr

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I live a quiet life. Wife, family, gym membership—the whole catastrophe. But Joshua Mohr’s latest, Saint the Terrifying (290 pages; The Unnamed Press) offers me—and you, Dear Reader—a day-pass to a world of pain, glory, lust, and limitlessness. It’s a picaresque account of a West Oakland punk rocker on a mission from God (make that Scandinavian deities) to find out who’s been stealing the gear from his starving musician buddies and make them pay for their sins, bigly. At story’s outset, the one-eyed title character is recovering from the death of his alcoholic mother, who had a habit of dancing […]

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‘Bad’ Women: ‘Shame on You’ by Melissa Petro

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“Brown,” as in Brené Brown, is mentioned forty-two times in Melissa Petro’s investigative memoir, Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification (288 pages; Putnam). It’s not surprising. Few people are as connected with studying shame as Brown, whose 2011 TED talk “The power of vulnerability” and subsequent books catalyzed an anti-shame movement. Yet shame, as Petro states, “remains no less pervasive today than it was ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago.”  Seven out of ten teenage girls are ashamed of their bodies; seventy-five percent of executive women feel imposter syndrome; three out of […]

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In the Time of COVID: ‘A Journal of the Plague Years: Words and Music from the Lost Days’

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Capturing the “decisive moment,’’ in Cartier-Bresson’s phrase, has always been a perilous project, made more so in these dizzying times of social media, constant disinformation, and attention spans as fleeting as the latest app or iPhone upgrade. All the more impressive then, when writers, and editors, take the time for a more considered look at once-shattering events that have been too quickly forgotten. Such is the case with A Journal of the Plague Years: Words & Music from the Lost Days (289 pages; Blue Books). A spinoff from an online website offering takes on the immediate and long-term impact of […]

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Beauty

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None of us knew her real name. We heard her mother call her Beauty and she became Beauty for all of us. The day she arrived we were in the yard of Jana’s house, waiting desperately for the rain. Sameer had been hitting the ball all over the large yard, and nothing we did, chucking, distracting, changing the ball, nothing could get him out that afternoon. Our hopes clung to the gray clouds taking over the sky, threatening to wash away everything. And when we saw from a distance a thin-mustached man open the tin gate and a long, beaten-up […]

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