Hello Readers,

I need to write this out somewhere so I can look at it, think about it, appreciate it.

In 2026 we have new books from Cristina Rivera-Garza, Jordy Rosenberg, Karen Tei Yamashita, Valeria Luiselli, Renee Gladman, Cesar Aira, Hernan Diaz, and Kate Zambreno. Eimear McBride and a sequel to Blackass called Whyteface! Grace Krilanovich! Monica Ojeda! Jake Skeets! Throw in some chunks of 2025 and in the surrounding 20 months or so we’ve also had new Caren Beilin, Helen DeWitt, Ariana Harwitz, and Ron Currie! Mario Bellatin! It’s like a huge chunk of my bookselling career is folding in on itself.

I don’t think I have anything clever to say about or conclusions to draw from that fact. As I said, I wanted to put this in text so I can appreciate it and if you can appreciate it too, great! Every year is a great year for books for someone.

I’ve also just self-published an essay/zine that I’m selling through Porter Square Books. It’s called For White Dudes (Like Me) Who Have Not Considered Reading Trans Books and it’s about, well, you probably guessed, but it’s about how cis het masc dudes like me benefit from reading trans books like Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through and Worthy of the Event. I wrote it because the trans community is under attack and hyping books by trans authors is a thing I can do. I zined it because…honestly that felt easier than the whole submission racket, I also didn’t want to feed it to the AI moloch, and I just kinda wanted to give self-pubbing a zine a try. We do need to make our own media after all. Hope you dig it.

On to the four books!

Josh

P.S. If you like what I’m doing here the best way to support it is to help grow the list of subscribers, so share the sign up link around. Thank you!

YESTERDAY

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

There’s a moment in Confessions of the Fox where you might lose heart, where you might think you are reading the same old story with the same old outcome. Having written about Confessions of the Fox a few times (I’m pretty sure even in this newsletter) I’ve grown to appreciate the narrative slight of hand Rosenberg pulls off to create this moment. In some ways, everything about the book (honestly, even it’s core conceit, even its title!) should have tipped us off, but at the same time, Rosenberg manipulates those old stories and the moment to shake us from whatever comfort we might have been feeling in the storyline, before delivering us to something different. It’s an incredible narrative moment, (now making me think a little of the ending of Everything Matters!) and one that I’ve been thinking about in the years since I read it. (Some day, I’ll have the time to reread it and think more intentionally about the build up to this moment.)

I’m writing about Confessions here (maybe again) in part because it’s such an incredible book but in larger part because Rosenberg has a new novel out. Night Night Fawn seems to have had a quietish release but is now seems to building some momentum. I hope I’m contributing to that below!

Buy Confessions of the Fox from Porter Square Books

Buy Confessions of the Fox from Bookshop.org

TODAY

Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg

Listen, I’m not about to tell you that you’re going to like the narrator of Jordy Rosenberg’s incandescent new novel (I’d frankly be shocked if you did!), but I’m guessing the readers of this newsletter are generally comfortable spending literary time with characters and narrators they would not be friends with in real life. Like Stephen Florida, Barbara Rosenberg is a difficult voice to be around. She’s aggressively transphobic, classist, and obsessed with looks, making the case for being one of the shallowest protagonists I’ve ever read. But where Stephen Florida keeps us in his brain through a weird relentlessness that, I feel at least, ends up being kinda endearing, Barbara keeps around her bigotry and shallowness by being really fucking funny and occasionally cuttingly insightful.

In some ways, Barbara’s voice, both how funny she is and how insightful she can be, could feel unrealistic. Someone this small-minded shouldn’t be this eloquent, right? But in other ways, Rage Against the Machine has conservative fans, Ivy League educations produce fascists all the time, and plenty of horrible misogynists are great writers, so maybe the issue is less about Barbara as a realistic character and more about one of the stories I tell myself to explain this state of the world in a way that is emotionally satisfying (or at least stabilizing) for me.

Rosenberg maybe doing something really interesting with the idea of “the villain” here, maybe kind of a long triangulation of agency that preserves personal responsibility while rejecting any kind of objective evil. For example, Rosenberg does an incredible job showing the throughline between experiencing misogyny and expressing transphobia, while also making it clear that if Barbara just chilled the fuck out about a few things, she probably, (like many if not most people who have experienced misogyny) wouldn’t have reflected that hatred onto her own daughter. Complicating things further, Barbara is a trained actress with a very sophisticated understanding of how language can be deployed, which is a long way of saying she is likely a master manipulator. So what is that sort of balance Rosenberg created? Is it the simple fact that no one, not even a transphobe and zionist, is ever a monolith and that a true humanist perspective recognizes the humanity of villains? Is it simply that Rosenberg knows readers will drop off if they get nothing positive from Barbara? Or does Barbara “own” this “balance” and the moments that bring us back to her are calculated manipulations? She is certainly aware that people could disagree with her, even hate her, and it’s clear Barbara and Jordana have had conversations about Barbara’s bigotry and she seems like a person who would make her case for posterity.

However you understand Barbara, she is force to be reckoned with and absolutely belongs in the canon of great American characters.

Buy Night Night Fawn from Porter Square Books

Buy Night Night Fawn from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

Questions 27 & 28 by Karen Tei Yamashita

I’ve argued elsewhere that Karen Tei Yamashita writes against the idea of America as a “melting pot,” instead, through her style, the diversity of her works, their subject matter, she argues that, at its best, America should be understood as a mosaic, a society in which many different and distinct cultures and identities can share space in such a way that they create something unified that is greater than the sum of its parts. Out of many, one and all that. That we can all be different together, rather than melting into an assimilated mass, and the exchanges that happen from all that juxtaposed difference, is the primary source of American greatness. That’s where we get jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, all of our best food ways, Hollywood, Toni Morrison, the opening of Underworld, David Lynch, Patti Smith etc, etc, etc. The “melting pot” was always a bad idea put forth (innocently or not) by people who had a very narrow definition of what an American should look like.

But you cannot celebrate the beauty that is the American mosaic without grappling with the forces in our country and society that fought against it. White supremacy interacts with every single American in both dramatic and subtle ways. For Karen Tei Yamashita, the dramatic way was the Japanese-American internment during WWII that she and her family experienced directly. (A contemporary potentially more subtle interaction would be the exploitation of some Asian-Americans by white supremacists to undercut Affirmative Action.) So in Questions 27 & 28, we get Yamashita’s mosaic of Japanese Internment, a mix of fictional and historic characters, source material, and imagination, unsettling juxtapositions, and stark presentations. And all with that core humanism that makes Yamashita’s work ultimately hopeful, no matter who bleak the world she depicts is.

Stylistically, this is the closest to I Hotel of any of her other works that I’ve read (I think I’ve missed…two, maybe.) and I haven’t decided/figured out yet what the relationship is between the two. Questions could be read as a prequel, or perhaps a Vol I of a longer cycle, or even as a sequel, or with no relation at all to I Hotel. However you read it, it’s Karen Tei Yamashita, so you’ve got to read it.

Preorder Questions 27 & 28 from Porter Square Books

Preorder Questions 27 & 28 from Bookshop.org

FOREVER

Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

I was a Vonnegut/Asimov teenager. Like so many people who go on to be big readers, my first loves as an adolescent were sci fi and fantasy. (Just to make one quick thing clear, I am still a Vonnegut adult because I can let go of opinions when I learn new information, even opinions that were really important to me at one time. No props for sex pests.) I went through a pretty snobby period after that and so was away from the genre for years, maybe a decade. I still don’t read all that much sci fi, but I’ve returned to respecting it. I also feel like I’ve matured into “Not for me, but I’m glad it’s here for you,” for everything I don’t connect with. Imagine if everyone, yada yada yada.

The Windup Girl was one of the books that woke me back up to the artistry and literary potential of sci fi. The sophisticated world, the complicated morals, the interesting characters, the sentence by sentence quality of the prose. I liked The Water Knife as well, although not being a huge fan of crime thrillers, even when they’re well done and even when they meaningfully connect with a coming crisis, it didn’t connect with me the way Windup did.

I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before that I’ve been reading more entertainment lately, my brain often too tired for art when I finally get the chance to read for a little bit. So when I saw Navola, Bacigalupi’s take on medieval fantasy, I figured I’d give it a try. And if I were looking for a richly rendered political coming of age saga set in a slightly fictionalized medieval Italy, with deep explorations of power, adolescence, heritage, and probably a dozen other things, I’m sure I would have blasted through it. But my brain needed something different. I put it out on our front step and someone walking by picked it up. I hope their brain needs what it provides.

Buy Navola from Porter Square Books.

Buy Navola from Bookshop.org

P.S. A QUESTION FOR YOU!

I’m guessing it’s only my ride or dies reading at this point so…Beehiive has been really excited about all the AI “resources” they’re able to offer us creators. Though all that seems pretty avoidable at the moment, it sure doesn’t inspire confidence in terms of a long term relationship with this platform. On top of that, we’re going to start paying for pre-school in the fall and though it’s not that much more than what we’ve been paying our babysitters, it’s definitely more!

Which is a long way of saying, I might be looking for a new platform but I think for this newsletter to make sense in the long run it needs to net me, I don’t know, $20-40 per month. You know, just cover a few iced teas. So here’s a little Google survey to help me know if that’s even a possibility. Thank you!