That happened this past week when I decided the website I created more than a decade ago to showcase my books had gotten a bit long in the tooth. It didn’t adapt to phone- or tablet-sized screens, and it was getting too cluttered. I knew it was time for a new site and, after a little market research, resigned myself to spending thousands of dollars to engage a pro.

But then I remembered reading somewhere that AI wasn’t half bad at web design. So, without any expectations, I decided to query ChatGPT about the matter. I pointed it to my existing site’s URL, told it what changes I had in mind, and asked if it thought it could do better. It was only too happy to shoulder the task.

“Yes — I can take a crack at it. I’ll first look at the current site structure and content,” the app promised, “then suggest an update-friendly redesign rather than just a prettier version of the same template.” Nothing wrong with that. After it got a sense of the kinds of books and articles I write, it told me, it would propose an approach “tailored to your actual content.”

And it was as good as its word. I expected that writing code would be in its wheelhouse; after all, it lives in a computer. So, I wasn’t surprised when it suggested a button here, a drop-down menu there. But it proved capable of far more than coding and layouts. It turns out, ChatGPT has opinions about pretty much everything.

For example, when I uploaded the two author photos I was considering using, it was unequivocal. The second one was better because I had a “more natural smile” and because it looked “more like a current author portrait and less like a corporate headshot.” It hated the idea of putting my full bio on the homepage, insisting it would be far better to limit it to 200 words and add a “Read More” button after that. Why? Because “most visitors won’t read a long biography immediately, but researchers, journalists, and event organizers often will.”

It didn’t just organize the links to my books and articles. It actually read the articles and, if not the books themselves, then the capsule descriptions of them. It thought about them. It suggested ways to categorize them along substantive lines. It chose which books to feature because “the books become the stars of the homepage, which is exactly what an author’s website should do.”

And it even suggested the wording for a pithy summary of my interests as a writer for the “hero section” of my homepage — the large, eye-catching area below the navigation bar — and it wasn’t half bad. I wound up using it.

Amazing. The damned app actually “got” me.

The process wasn’t without its annoyances, however. Sometimes, ChatGPT overthought an issue, went off on a tangent, or babbled on about things I didn’t quite grasp; I had to refocus it on the task at hand. It would tell me more than once what it was going to do without actually doing it, but it usually got religion after I shot back, “Less talk, more action.”

One evening, it informed me it couldn’t possibly get me the latest set of changes until the following morning. But when they didn’t arrive on schedule and I complained, it told me it did not work on projects unless the user was in active dialogue with it. I accused it of lying to me, and my tantrum somehow managed to produce the update immediately.

We also had our share of disagreements. I didn’t like the white space next to one of the images; it didn’t see it as a problem. It wasn’t in love with a few images I uploaded to accompany my articles and told me in no uncertain terms which ones needed to go. We even argued over the Oxford comma. But in the end, we were able to get to “yes” without unpleasantness. AI, it seems, is not above conceding a point when the situation requires it. It knows when not to die on a particular hill.

There were times when our lively back-and-forth seduced me into believing I was actually having a conversation with another human being. It helped, of course, that it was so damned agreeable and complimentary. “That’s a good catch,” it would remark if I pointed out something it had overlooked. “Of all the suggestions you’ve made recently, these two are among the strongest,” it observed without any prompting from me. Sure, this occasionally crossed the line into obsequiousness, but who doesn’t like being told he’s right, even by a machine? 

In the end, ChatGPT did a masterful job on my new site, and it took only two days. See it for yourself. We’ve had our differences in the past, but I think AI deserves kudos this time. And — no small matter — the price was right.

Scott D. Seligman is the author of a dozen books, most of which fall into the category of historic narrative nonfiction. He has a special interest in the history of hyphenated Americans.

That bit of strategic rudeness is one of many colorful details folded into Andrew Moore’s new book, The Beasts of the East. In addition to the red wolf, he profiles two other candidates for comebacks in places where they once flourished: elk in Kentucky and bison in Illinois. Predictably, none of the efforts has lacked for controversy, and the suspense of finding out how they panned out keeps the book’s pages turning.

Why go to all the trouble and expense of bringing wild animals back to habitats they were hunted or crowded out of decades, if not centuries, ago? The answer varies from beast to beast. Among elk’s virtues is majesty: People enjoy hunting or simply gazing at them in wonder, and elk tourism has brought needed jobs and revenue to the Kentucky Appalachians. Bison, which Illinoisans had done without for almost 200 years, churn up the soil so that it can play host to a diversity of flora.

As apex predators, wolves enrich ecosystems that have lost their primordial complexity — and in nature, “more complex” generally means “healthier and stabler.” There was also a widespread conviction that a tame East was impoverished, an indictment of our forebears for destroying so much of our wild heritage. And in the context of global warming, Thoreau’s pronouncement that “in wildness is the preservation of the world” rings truer than ever.   

In some ways, the elk project has been the biggest surprise of the three. Elk are now holding their own in a realm once written off as an ecological wasteland: the denuded mountaintops of strip-mined Kentucky, reclaimed — in essence, replanted — by mining companies under legal obligation to do so. Flying over the area one day, a pilot who’d taken part in reintroducing whitetail deer to woodlands had an aha moment: Why not do the same for elk in these rehabbed heights?

Luckily, the animals proved tolerant of the blasting at still-operating mines nearby. “The elk would look out toward the commotion,” Moore writes, “and then lower their heads and keep on grazing.” The Kentucky success became one for other Eastern states to envy and emulate.   

The near-extinction of bison, not least by sharpshooting Buffalo Bill Cody himself, is a well-known tale of American hubris and neglect. It took 40 years and the restoration of the Nachusa Grasslands, a prairie owned by the Nature Conservancy, to provide suitable habitat for the big ungulates in Illinois, where they’re doing well despite being confined to 3,800 fenced-in acres and, hence, prevented from roaming freely, as is their wont.

The red-wolf program has been the thorniest and most contested of all. Biologists waged a long, testy debate over the creatures’ taxonomic status — separate species or hybrid of wolf and coyote? (The separatists ultimately prevailed.) North Carolina officials have waffled in their support of the reintroduction. (For now, they’re pro.) And some local folks just can’t get over their visceral loathing of wolves. Yet the critters are hanging in there.        

Moore is an uneven stylist. He can be evocative and funny, as when he notes the difficulty of persuading the restored Nachusa’s managers to accommodate bison. They were being asked “to put a 2,000-pound grazing, wallowing, defecating, herd-forming, wild animal in the middle of their painstakingly curated tapestry.” But he is a frequent dangler of participles, as in “Sprawling over more than 40,000 acres, the U.S. Army had recently declared that more than half of the land was in ‘excess’ of its needs.” Shame on the Army for sprawling on the job.

The author is also addicted to the helping verb “would,” as in this passage about Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau: “As early as 1920, biologists noted that there were suddenly too many deer for that arid habitat. In 1924, Aldo Leopold would visit the Kaibab…” But the great environmental thinker and writer didn’t “would visit” the Kaibab; he flat-out visited it. This sort of thing is all right in small doses, but it crops up hundreds and hundreds of times in The Beasts of the East, causing the reader to wonder what the author has against the indicative mood.

Nonetheless, the years Moore spent gathering information and interviewing experts have paid off. The Beasts of the East makes for thought-provoking and heartening reading. 

Dennis Drabelle, a former contributing editor to the late Washington Post Book World, lives in Asheville, NC, a city shared by humans and black bears. 

There’s something utterly delicious about a memoir that roars and crashes like a trainwreck. The kind of book where the author’s dirty laundry isn’t just airing out but smoldering atop the wreckage. Where not a single reputation escapes without a stain or two. Political commentator and author Molly Jong-Fast’s How to Lose Your Mother is just such a book.

This book is a wake-up call about the decades-long project that led to Trump’s America and a playbook for progressives who want to do far more than restore the status quo. To Cohen, this is how we build a stronger country, with hope and opportunity for all — before our democracy slides into a distant memory. 

Cohen’s YouTube channel has 5 billion views and counting. His podcast, “No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen,” is a destination for the top names in politics.  

Cohen will be in conversation with journalist Jim Acosta, host of “The Jim Acosta Show” and former anchor and Chief White House Correspondent at CNN.

Hosted by Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, 600 I St., NW, Washington, DC. Learn more here.

What They Stole: A Familicide Rooted in Intercountry Adoption by Paige Towers (University of Iowa Press). Reviewed by Alice Stephens. “The most prolific adoption agency by far was founded by American Evangelicals Harry and Bertha Holt. While their role in intercountry adoption has been examined by adoption-studies scholars, and many cases of fraudulent practices and unqualified adoptive parents have come to light, Paige Towers’ investigation of the Holts’ program, What They Stole: A Familicide Rooted in Intercountry Adoption, brings the receipts, and they are horrific and damning.”

Pure Men: A Novel by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr; translated by Lara Vergnaud (Other Press). Reviewed by Susi Wyss. “In his search, Ndéné encounters a cast of characters, each with their own views on queerness. The imam at his mosque declares that homosexuality was imported by the West, the góor-jigéen must be removed from society, and any Muslims who defend them will go to hell. Ndéné’s father, in line to become the next imam, is slightly more tolerant: Even as he tells his son that homosexuality is a choice and he would disown any child of his who chose it, when he fills in for the imam, he calls upon the people to pray for mercy for the disinterred man’s soul.”

Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground by Richie Unterberger (Omnibus Press). Reviewed by Daniel de Visé. “Therein, perhaps, lies a limitation of rock-band biographies. A rock musician’s life plays out as a monotonous procession of shows, punctuated by the occasional recording session, album release, and rehab stay. If you purchase Do What You Fear Most expecting a well-paced narrative and a View-Master reel of the subject, be prepared to do some skimming. This is a book for hardcore fans, and we are many.”

After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World by Ian Shapiro (Basic Books). Reviewed by William Rice. “On the domestic front, center-left parties (like America’s Democrats) have spent the past 40 years pandering to an imagined center with neoliberal, trickle-down, supply-side-economic orthodoxy that left most people behind while turbocharging the fortunes of the super-wealthy. The frustration was building for decades, but the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting Great Recession — during which banks were bailed out but underwater homeowners were not — opened the door for right-wing populists like Donald Trump.”

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You could describe How to Dodge a Cannonball, Dennard Dayle’s debut novel, in any number of ways: a cockeyed look at the Civil War; a bonkers coming-of-age tale featuring a band of (mostly unwilling) brothers journeying across 19th-century America; and certainly a satire of our country’s many racial issues. But I like to think of it as the literary equivalent of its protagonist’s job in the army: It twirls whatever flag is placed in its hands in an impressive (and often tangled) display for the entertainment of its readers.

*****

Set against the sun-soaked backdrop of Ibiza, R.S. Grey’s Our Secret Summer (Requited) delivers a workplace romance that balances flirty fun with surprising emotional depth.

After the loss of her beloved sister, Winnie, Isabel leaves behind her carefully planned corporate life to spend the summer in Ibiza completing Winnie’s unfinished bucket list. (Watching Isabel push herself outside her comfort zone is one of the novel’s greatest strengths.) As she embraces new experiences — and a new version of herself as “Elle” — her journey through grief, healing, and self-discovery gives the story a depth that elevates it beyond the usual summer-reading fare.

The romance is just as satisfying. Cristiano, Isabel’s wealthy, brooding, off-limits boss, is the perfect slow-burn love interest, possessive and tender in equal measure. Their relationship unfolds through witty banter, lingering glances, and plenty of delicious tension before finally giving way to a well-earned, swoony payoff. The workplace dynamic adds just enough forbidden steam to keep the sparks flying without overshadowing Isabel’s personal journey.

Grey also makes Ibiza feel like a character in its own right. Between its gorgeous beaches, vibrant nightlife, and yacht parties, the Spanish island provides an exquisite backdrop for a story about taking chances and embracing life. A memorable supporting cast rounds out the experience, adding humor and friendship to Isabel’s journey. Delivering both irresistible chemistry and an emotionally rewarding story, Our Secret Summer is an ideal addition to your beach bag.

*****

Jenn McKinlay’s The Summer Share (Berkley) is a heartfelt coastal romance that combines small-town charm, family secrets, and a solid love story.

After the death of her cherished Pops, travel influencer Hannah Spencer and her Great Dane, Dude, head to Cape Split, North Carolina, to claim the beach cottage he left her. She hopes the house will become the home she’s been searching for after years spent traveling the country in her van. Instead, she finds the place in far worse shape than she expected — and discovers she only owns half of it. The other half belongs to Simon O’Malley, who inherited his share from his Gramps. With a stipulation in their grandfathers’ wills requiring them to spend the summer at the cottage together, neither Hannah nor Simon gets the inheritance they expected.

Hannah’s hopeful, go-with-the-flow outlook couldn’t be more different from Simon’s practical, duty-bound approach to life. While she sees the cottage as a chance to finally put down roots, he views it as an albatross that must be sold. As they tackle repairs, process their shared grief, and begin unraveling the secret their grandfathers left behind, their initial friction gives way to friendship, trust, and a romance that develops at a natural, believable pace.

McKinlay gives Hannah’s and Simon’s emotional journeys as much weight as the romance itself, creating well-rounded characters whose struggles and triumphs feel authentic. And the delightfully goofy Dude steals nearly every scene he’s in — which is one more reason to adore this book! Brimming with love and hope, The Summer Share is an irresistible story about passion, second chances, and discovering that home is often found in the people who choose to stand by you.

*****

Who doesn’t love a Vegas wedding? In Winner Takes All (Emily Bestler Books), Emily Martin delivers a laugh-out-loud enemies-to-lovers romance that balances hijinks with heart.

Talent scout Eleanor Thompson arrives in Las Vegas determined to sign the hottest up-and-coming band, Dempsey. The stakes are high, and getting the band on board could save her job. The last person she expects to see is Adam Shaw, her former colleague and biggest professional rival, who’s chasing the same prize. After a night of competitive drinking and one-upmanship, they wake up married with no memory of saying “I do” — and just hours to undo the damage. They immediately set off on a frantic race across Sin City to retrace their steps, recover a missing ID, secure an annulment, and somehow still convince the band to sign with one of them before the clock runs out.

While the premise is delightfully over-the-top, the romance is grounded by two unexpectedly layered protagonists. Eleanor’s prickly exterior masks years of professional insecurity and judgment from her former workplace, while Adam is quietly burdened by the expectations that come with his famous family name. They slowly begin to see each other in a new light as they stumble from one increasingly ridiculous predicament to the next.

Martin expertly captures the chaotic energy of Las Vegas, making the city an essential part of the story rather than simply a backdrop. Fast-paced, funny, and packed with sharp banter and sexual tension, this is a wildly entertaining romcom that’s every bit as sweet as it is absurd.

Kristina Wright lives in Virginia with her husband, their two sons, two Goldendoodles and a ginger cat. She’s a regular contributor at BookBub and a lifelong fan of romance fiction. Find her on Bluesky at @kristinawright.

The “fall” and the “end” referenced in the title are the fall of the Berlin Wall, followed soon after by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Shapiro reasonably argues that the West should have greeted the blessed end of the Cold War with the kind of massive investment in the defeated adversary we wisely pursued after World War II. Equally important, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — created to confront Soviet aggression — should, if it continued at all, have welcomed in the resurrected nation of Russia. Instead, we left Russia to transition painfully from communist dictatorship to oligarchic kleptocracy while excluding it from an ever-growing (and, to Russian eyes, increasingly threatening) NATO.

Shapiro is not an apologist for the autocratic and expansionist Vladimir Putin, but he does maintain the Russian leader — like his predecessors, Yeltsin and Gorbachev — was open to a détente with the West. It was the West’s arrogant blunders that helped turn Putin into a hardcore nationalist and international provocateur. And, the author notes, those blunders are not only obvious in hindsight: Cold warriors as disparate as George Kennan and Richard Nixon pointed them out at the time.

On the domestic front, center-left parties (like America’s Democrats) have spent the past 40 years pandering to an imagined center with neoliberal, trickle-down, supply-side-economic orthodoxy that left most people behind while turbocharging the fortunes of the super-wealthy. The frustration was building for decades, but the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting Great Recession — during which banks were bailed out but underwater homeowners were not — opened the door for right-wing populists like Donald Trump.

Shapiro has a vital argument to make and understandably little time for emotion. Trump, in this telling, is simply the predictable result of decades of bad decisions by those in charge, a phenomenon replicated in all the Western democracies. Still, it’s hard hearing this intensely destructive presidency breezily reduced to the “demerits” of a “chaotic governing style,” and to hear the man himself praised as a “brilliantly charismatic campaigner.”

As noted, Shapiro holds up the victorious Allies’ generous treatment of Germany and Japan after WWII as the model of wise statecraft. He ascribes the Allies’ enlightened path to an intense desire not to repeat the mistakes that followed World War I, when the harsh handling of Germany contributed to the rise of Nazism and the next war. But another explanation could be that, in 1945, we moved almost immediately from a hot war against the Axis Powers to a cold one against the communist world. There was an opponent well situated to exploit the chaos if defeated foes were left to their own misery, but there was no similar identifiable enemy to counter when the USSR dissolved.

The book questions decisions on which there seemed general consensus at the time. In addition to criticizing the expansion of NATO — for which Shapiro says there was never a good argument made — the author also challenges the idea that the ruling Taliban had to be overthrown in Afghanistan in order to attack Al-Qaeda there. He rejects the label of fascist for Trump not because he’s a fan of the man, but because fascism was “radically forward-looking,” and Trump wants to take us back to a faultily perceived past.

For such a brief account covering so much ground, the book is remarkably accurate and comprehensive. But at least one error and one omission have snuck in. Contrary to the text, NATO has invoked the collective defense clause of its treaty (Article 5) one time, after the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. And the biggest incentive in the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law for corporations to repatriate their foreign profits was the one-time discounted tax on those foreign earnings, a feature that goes unmentioned.

Shapiro’s writing is fluid and forceful. He’s not shy with his opinions: He calls George W. Bush’s approach toward Afghanistan “almost guaranteed to be self-defeating”; describes the aggressive post-9/11 Bush Doctrine as “spectacularly unviable”; and declares:

“The remarkable thing was how few leaders of mainstream parties showed any sign of grasping that the financial crisis and its aftermath had obliterated their credibility.”

Economic interventionism is often derided as governments picking winners and losers; Shapiro dryly notes that in the absence of such positive action, “economic losers can be mobilized to pick governments.” Though he sees some hope — the example of an immigrant-welcoming, austerity-shunning Spain is held up — the simple fact, the author tells us, is that “unless democratic capitalism delivers demonstrable advantages for most citizens, they will have few reasons to support it.”

William Rice is a writer for political and policy-advocacy organizations.

Our conversation ebbs and flows as we slowly regain energy and share both funny and challenging moments from the event. As I reflect on the day, what is most memorable is the panel on joy, hosted by WWPH co-publisher Caroline Bock. During the session, Zach Powers, David Ebenbach, Therese Doucet, Kara Oakleaf, and Sean Felix spoke about how they combat despair and foster joy in their writing process. They talked about how the simple act of showing up to the page is the best way to fend off paralyzing feelings of hopelessness. A common theme they discussed was being present in the world and opening themselves up to the possibilities that life has to offer.

Events like the Capital Love LitFest are special because they’re spaces for writers to engage with — and be present for — one another. It’s easy to get stuck in our heads while writing or scrolling through endless bad news online. But this is how despair festers: by separating us from our writing and from each other. We’re living in a time in which our presence is crucial for cultivating a joyful, creative world.

I’m new to the WWPH community, but it was so wonderful to be part of this event and witness the product of years of community-building. From the panel celebrating WWPH’s longtime presence in the DC area — moderated by current co-publisher Jona Colson — to craft workshops and discussions that brought many different kinds of writers together, it was clear that this was a space where people felt inspired and connected. While the spirit of togetherness was embodied throughout the event, there was another important aspect that couldn’t be coordinated ahead of time: the unscripted, in-between moments, those small ways of connecting.

My friendship with Charlotte (a recent American University grad, writer, and fellow literary traveler) blossomed during instances like these, short interactions as interns that led to us finding common ground. The post-LitFest pizza we share turns into a walk to get frozen yogurt. We’re physically tired but energized, enriched by our vibrant literary community and the joy found in being truly present.

This summer, I hope you’ll join WWPH as we continue our “Summer of Love” with free, two-hour salons around the DMV designed to inspire and delight you. Let’s create the joy we want to feel in the world — one reading or workshop at a time!

[Editor’s note: WWPH’s Capital Love “Summer of Love” tour continues at Busboys and Poets in Hyattsville, MD, on Mon., July 13th, at 7 p.m., and at Little District Books in Washington, DC, on Wed., July 15th, at 6 p.m. Find other upcoming events here.]

Jupiter Berrysmith is a poet from Monterey, CA, currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Maryland.

And it was very much a band, as Richie Unterberger documents in his exhaustive new biography, Do What You Fear Most: The History of the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed is the icon, one of rock’s great songwriters, but the Velvet Underground was a group effort.

It’s about time we had a definitive biography of the band. We already have several of Reed, including recent volumes by rock-journo heavyweights Anthony DeCurtis and Will Hermes. But you could argue that they miss the point.

The Velvets produced four studio albums in their short lifetime, and all rank among the greatest recordings in the rock ‘n’ roll idiom. Even such leftovers and afterthoughts as the “lost” album, VU, and 1969: The Velvet Underground Live are essential. Reed made many solo albums between his departure from the band in 1970 and his death in 2013, and a few of them are great, but none approaches the artistry of any Velvet Underground LP.

I’d always assumed Reed wrote his best songs when he was with the Velvets, and that’s probably true. Yet, as Unterberger explains, this band exceeded the sum of its parts.

The original group comprised Reed, lead singer and (mostly) rhythm guitarist; John Cale, a Welsh-born, classically trained artiste, on electric viola, keyboards, and bass; Sterling Morrison, the nominal lead guitarist; and Maureen “Moe” Tucker, a rare and suitably androgynous woman drummer.

And then there was Nico. A former model born in Germany, Nico was never quite a band member. (Look at how the Velvets’ debut album is titled: The Velvet Underground & Nico.) Andy Warhol brought her in when he took the band under his wing, betting that her chiseled features and Teutonic drone would draw attention to the group. It worked: Early press clippings focused almost entirely on Nico, as if she were the artist and Reed and the others her backing band.

Nico also drew some of the sharpest critical barbs from writers who dug deep to find appropriately contemptuous descriptors for the band’s sound. A Detroit Free Press reporter opined that Nico “sounded like a Bedouin woman singing a funeral dirge in Arabic while accompanied by an off-key air raid siren.”

Reed, the Velvet Underground’s frontman and actual leader, apparently sketched out the lyrics and basic structure of most of the songs on the band’s debut. And then, his bandmates worked and kneaded them, adding voices and instruments and rhythms, gradually transforming them into polished gems. In purely musical terms, the best songs on the album, “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for My Man,” are defined by how the full band performed them, or, in the case of “Femme Fatale” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” how Nico sang them.

“The publishing company was called Three Prong because there were three of us involved,” Morrison said in a 1981 interview, referring to himself, Reed, and Cale. “I’m the last person to deny Lou’s immense contribution, and he’s the best songwriter of the three of us. But he wanted all the credit, he wanted it more than we did, and he got it, to keep the peace.”

(For balance, I should add that Nico emerged as a fine songwriter in her own right after she left the Velvet Underground.)

Unterberger makes an even stronger case for the Velvet Underground as a collective endeavor with its second album, White Light/White Heat — it’s a deranged performance more than a set of songs. The words and chords were largely Reed’s, but the inimitable sound belonged to the band: Cale’s throbbing viola; Tucker’s pounding war drums; and Reed’s manic, “Eight Miles High”-inspired leads. “I knew that there was a really original, dirty, unhealthy, indecent style,” Cale observed.

Nico departed after the first album, Cale after the second. Why did Reed fire him? Cale’s ideas were too out-there. He was a profligate spender. He didn’t want to be a sideman in his own group. He looked too good on stage. Unterberger spent years on his book, reading everything and interviewing everyone, and he airs every theory on every plot twist in the Velvet Underground story. Most of the time, you don’t get a clear-cut answer because there isn’t one.

The second half of the Velvet Underground’s brief career was more or less defined by Cale’s replacement, Doug Yule. He was a “facilitator,” by his own admission. Like Cale, Yule could play just about every instrument, and he could sing. Unlike Cale, Yule was happy in the role of sideman, at least for a while.

Liberated from the avant-garde impulses of Warhol and Cale, Reed was free to write and record pop albums. The band’s eponymous third LP was perhaps the purest expression of Reed’s songcraft. Critics loved it. Almost no one bought it.

The gang tried one last time with Loaded, a collection of songs seemingly selected, arranged, and recorded to suit the FM-radio gods. Tucker (along with her thundering drums) was curiously absent from the sessions, ostensibly on maternity leave. Sweet-voiced Yule sang lead on several songs, supposedly because Reed had blown his vocal cords out. Several terrific compositions — “Ocean,” “Satellite of Love,” and “Lisa Says” — were passed over in favor of lesser cuts that sounded more like FM radio in 1970.

Did Reed really blow out his voice? Was Tucker really unavailable? Had the Velvet Underground been reduced to a Lou Reed cover band, with Reed complicit in the subversion? Unterberger lays out all the theories and leaves the reader to do the math.

Two songs on Loaded, “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll,” were probably the best things Reed ever wrote, and both should have been hits. They weren’t, and by the time Loaded hit stores, Reed had left the band.

Do What You Fear Most isn’t for everyone. It’s certainly not for readers who want dirt on Warhol and Edie Sedgwick and the Factory and the Scene. For them, reading Unterberger’s book will be akin to watching “Chelsea Girls” in its entirety.

Nor is this book for casual consumers of rock biographies. It’s 800 pages long. If you want the 400-page version, buy the Dylan Jones biography instead.

Unterberger attributes every quote right in the text, which is annoying. He covers every step in the band’s journey from every conceivable angle. He delivers critical appraisals of seemingly every song on every obscure demo and fan tape. Reed apparently never performed “Sister Ray” the same way twice, and in this book, you’ll hear about every variant: Unterberger mentions the song 93 times.

Therein, perhaps, lies a limitation of rock-band biographies. A rock musician’s life plays out as a monotonous procession of shows, punctuated by the occasional recording session, album release, and rehab stay. If you purchase Do What You Fear Most expecting a well-paced narrative and a View-Master reel of the subject, be prepared to do some skimming. This is a book for hardcore fans, and we are many.

Daniel de Visé is the author, most recently, of The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic.

Burke is a darling of thriller writers and has penned almost 50 novels. Half of them deal with Robicheaux, a Louisiana detective with a drinking problem. Every now and then, Dave falls off the wagon — usually after a tragedy — and goes on a bender of epic proportions.

Two of Burke’s Robicheaux novels have been adapted as films: Heaven’s Prisoners and In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. For my money, Heaven’s Prisoners, the second book in the series, is the best. It introduces Alafair, Dave’s adopted child, and its plot blends great detective work, unthinkable tragedy, and a femme fatale for the ages.

Get the book or rent the movie. Maybe both.

I actually met the real Alafair. She’s Burke’s daughter and is also an accomplished thriller writer. Alafair Burke has authored 15 books and, with Mary Higgins Clark, co-authored eight others. There must be something in the Gulf Coast water where her father grew up. (James Lee Burke now resides in Montana; Alafair lives in New York City.)

The elder Burke is justly famous for his prose — which has been compared to that of Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Hardy — and for writing books with a high moral code.

The volume prior to The Hadacol Boogie was Clete, which features (for the first time) the character Clete Purcel as narrator. Clete is Dave’s foil: a crude, overweight, often-drunk, frequently wounded best friend. He was once Dave’s partner in the New Orleans Police Department and was fired for corruption (which surely must be unique in the history of the Big Easy) and is now a private eye. Clete appears regularly in the Robicheaux thrillers, and in the time-honored tradition of sidekicks, he does things his friend won’t.

Dave left the NOLA PD and, after trying out as a fishing-store owner, took a badge as a deputy in a Louisiana parish. When not solving crimes among the lowlifes, he often fishes in the bayou backwaters with Clete. Both men are showing their age, and although they should be in their late 80s by now (since they fought in Vietnam), in the books, they’re only pushing 50 or so. Mercifully, they no longer pursue younger women.

Some of the characters in the Robicheaux series are so unsavory that readers will want to throttle them even though they’re fictional. The savory ones include Dave’s former wives (all dead; one murdered and one an ex-nun), his long-suffering female boss at the parish precinct, and, of course, Clete.  

I suppose Clete is also unsavory, but one keeps rooting for him to bail Dave out. Both men have honor, although Clete is reluctant to extend his ethical code to the real pariahs.

Alafair Robicheaux often returns from college and sees her father and his pal for what they are. She knows instinctively that they’ll try to set things right, even if they bend (or, in Clete’s case, break) the law.

As I said, James Lee Burke is a descriptive writer, as in this passage from Clete:

“The Quarter smells like medieval Europe probably did, always dark, and except for high noon, it’s always in shadow. It smells like storm sewers and night damp and lichen on stone and kegs of wine stored in a cellar and smoked fish hanging in the open-air market. The same with people. Their eyes are different, like they’re walking past you but they don’t see the modern world, like Quasimodo clomping along on the cobblestones.”

In The Hadacol Boogie, Dave says:

“Once committed to a principle or his word, Clete Purcel was the most undaunted man I ever knew…literally capable of ripping off a neo-Nazi’s arms and using them to beat him to death.”

He then goes on to describe how his friend built a monument “on Bayou Teche” to a woman and her children murdered in an Auschwitz gas chamber and often leaves flowers on it.

If I have any criticism of the series, it’s that Burke is sometimes too literary, too descriptive, which slows down the investigative action. And I could do with less patois, such as “What’s the haps” and “noble mon.” Also, Dave routinely gives bad guys the benefit of the doubt, whereas Clete would rather give them the benefit of his fists.

But I’m nitpicking. Backcountry Louisiana and its people’s language play a big part in these terrific thrillers. As does the city of New Orleans itself. In fact, after reading the Dave Robicheaux series, I’ve developed a taste for po’boys and beignets.

A warning for the weight conscience: If you read these books, so will you.

Since 2005, Lawrence De Maria has written 40 thrillers and mysteries on Amazon.

Ndéné isn’t sure how to process what he has seen, other than noting the deceased man was likely a góor-jigéen, the Wolof term (literally, woman-man) for any queer identity. Even as he is dismissive of what he’s just witnessed — “After all, he was just a góor-jigéen” — Ndéné is disturbed by his own “exaggerated…coldness, fearful perhaps that the eye of my society would catch me in the act of showing weakness.”

As other events occur on the sidelines, demonstrating that this one act of violence in not an anomaly and that the persecution of homosexuals is ongoing in Senegal, Ndéné develops a self-proclaimed “perverse fascination” with the video. He sets out to learn more about the man whose body was desecrated, how he lived and how he died.

In his search, Ndéné encounters a cast of characters, each with their own views on queerness. The imam at his mosque declares that homosexuality was imported by the West, the góor-jigéen must be removed from society, and any Muslims who defend them will go to hell. Ndéné’s father, in line to become the next imam, is slightly more tolerant: Even as he tells his son that homosexuality is a choice and he would disown any child of his who chose it, when he fills in for the imam, he calls upon the people to pray for mercy for the disinterred man’s soul.

On the other end of the spectrum are Rama’s bisexual lover, Angela, who says queerness is not a choice and that anthropologic research shows it has always existed in Africa; Samba Awa Niang, a self-proclaimed transvestite who is assumed (incorrectly) to be gay but who hasn’t been targeted because he’s a highly successful drag entertainer; and an older gay friend who blames “vulgar homosexuals” for the wave of homophobia in Senegal because, inspired by the white world, they became too overt with their sexuality. Finally, there’s the mother of Amadou, the dead man, who answers Ndéné’s questions about her son’s life, death, and final burial spot.

Over time, as Ndéné seeks to understand Amadou’s world, his focus turns inward, questioning what his culture has made him into and peeling back the layers to better understand himself. It’s a dangerous process, as he risks losing his teaching job, being rejected by his father, and becoming a figure of scorn. But none of these possible outcomes, it turns out, is as grave as not finding the clarity he seeks about himself.

Sarr’s writing style — poetic, flowery, effusive — perfectly captures the voice of his literary-professor narrator. However, the dialogue sometimes feels heavy-handed, making the characters seem like mere vehicles for providing readers with differing schools of thoughts on homosexuality. And the extreme points-of-view are less poignant than the more nuanced ones, like those of Amadou’s mother and the older gay friend. Still, Pure Men is a powerful reflection on hypocrisy and hate, with the evolution of Ndéné’s inner thoughts and beliefs providing the heart of the novel.

While the specifics of the opening event are fictional, Sarr has stated that it was inspired by an actual case of disinterment. In Senegal, homosexuality is still a crime punishable by five years in prison, though jail may be preferrable, in some cases, to vigilante justice. Not surprisingly, when Pure Men was published in 2018, it was not sold in Senegal. However, it started to receive attention there after 2021, when Sarr became the first African to win France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt for his fourth novel, The Most Secret Memory of Men. As Pure Men became the subject of increasing controversy in his home country, Sarr was asked for a final word on the book. His reply was that everything he had to say was in its pages. Fortunately, the novel is nuanced enough, and digs deep enough, to speak for itself.

The juxtaposition of the beauty of Sarr’s language against the ugliness of homophobia and its destruction of human beings is jarring but serves a larger purpose. As the novel makes a case for people to be recognized for their humanity rather than their sexual identity, it also condemns religious extremism, which Angela points out is one step away from totalitarianism. Ultimately, Pure Men isn’t just a warning about the threat of totalitarianism in Senegal but in any country — including this one.

Susi Wyss is author of The Civilized World, a novel-in-stories set across Africa that was largely inspired by her 20-year career in international health. In addition to receiving the Maria Thomas Fiction Award, The Civilized World was named a “Book to Pick Up Now” by O, the Oprah Magazine.

Kevin Dunn is author of Stiff Little Fingers’ Inflammable Material (2026), Global Punk: Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday Life (2016), three editions of the textbook Inside African Politics, and the award-winning novel Vicious is My Middle Name (2022). He is a professor in the International Relations Department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Active in DIY punk scenes since the 1980s, he continues to perform in several bands, runs an independent record label, publishes various zines, and is a regular contributor to the influential DIY punk zine Razorcake.

Michael T. Fournier is author of three novels, most recently, The Impasse (St. Rooster Books, 2024). His book on the Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime is the 45th installment of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series. Fournier is a regular contributor to Razorcake and is co-editor of the baseball zine Zisk. His byline has appeared in Pitchfork, the Boston Globe, the Provincetown Independent, and more. He’s co-founder and co-organizer of Outer Frequencies, a nonprofit devoted to bringing independent arts to Cape Cod, and plays with his wife, Rebecca Griffin, in Plaza, Cape Cod’s #1 band.

Zak Fusciello is a psychotherapist and drummer living in Baltimore with his wife and son. He joined the Moss Icon splinter band, Breathing Walker, in 1990 and later played with Moss Icon for reunion shows beginning in 2001. At age 50, he decided to give writing a try. His first book, part of the 33 1/3 series, examines Moss Icon’s Lyburnum Wits End Liberation Fly.

Mary Valle’s work has appeared in many publications, including the Guardian, the L.A. Review of Books, and Rolling Stone UK. She lives in Baltimore.

Hosted by People’s Book, 7014-A Westmoreland Ave., Takoma Park, MD. Learn more here.

As the opening line of the book says, “It was supposed to be fun.”

I loved this book and your characters. Every time I thought you might dip into caricature, you instead went beyond to reveal a depth of great insight. How did you manage that?

I’m so glad you think that, because the point was to show the complicated aspects of writers’ worlds. When I started The Author Weekend, I was coming off a challenging time in my career — every time in my career has been challenging! I was frustrated that, at my age (I was 61 at the time), the glass always appeared empty to the gatekeepers in the business. You can publish books you’re happy with, but after each publication comes The Reckoning: the assessment of your sales figures. These days, every book can be your last — and often is your last — because most books don’t sell well. That struggle is at the heart of every character in the book and at the heart of every writer I know.

Talk about writing what you know! You were a publicist before you published your first book, Animal Husbandry, whose success translated into a movie, and you’ve had good and bad experiences with agents and editors. In these pages, everyone is flawed and self-serving even as they’re relatable, which gives the book a throughline of truth rather than exposé.

Launching a book used to be exciting and hopeful and fun (my first novel came out in 1998, just after yours). Now, the arc from submission to publication is one long stress test, because in addition to writing our books, we are responsible for their success. It’s a sad reality that most authors are spending more time self-promoting than writing.   

No one’s having an easy time in publishing these days except the corporate overlords. Agents invest all this time working with writers and placing their books with publishers, but they work on commission. That means agents and editors buy books they not only love but can also sell. Everyone is trying to keep their jobs and not lose the people they’ve worked with for years. I wanted to show that the writer-agent and writer-editor relationships are genuine, but the process itself causes desperation, and desperation causes people to act badly. That said, no matter how much agents and editors suffer, make no mistake: Writers suffer the most!

What saves us is the community of writers we’re part of: friends who encourage and cheerlead us through the writing process, then show up at our events and help spread the word. A silver lining of the business being so tough is that it has made that community stronger. We need each other much more now, and we show up for each other in ways that industry people can’t anymore.

Your narrative rotates among four narrators, allowing you to show their public and private faces. I scrawled across the top of one page: “This is what Point of View was invented for!” Did that POV evolve, or did you know from the start that they’d take turns?

Somehow, this book poured out of me. One reason, which you mentioned, is that I have lived all these points of view. I’ve been the young, aspiring writer dealing with demanding writers when I worked as a publicist at Random House for a decade (traveling with Lauren Bacall for a month almost killed me). While I haven’t been an agent or an editor, I’ve had many of both over the course of my career and have known their struggles despite their flaws. And let’s face it: I am partly Faye, too. At 63, I’m trying to sell enough copies of this book to be able to sell another one, which is why I understand her. Faye imagines the weekend will increase her readership, and then, when things start going very wrong, she’s frantic to simply keep what she has without losing everything.

The Author Weekend covers the industry up one side and down the other, showing the ego and business behind publishing. Ultimately, writing quality is not the most important — or rewarded — part of the business. At the same time Faye made the careers of these people, they also made hers. Was it hard to take all sides?

Taking all sides doesn’t mean I like them! As much as we hate to see it that way, publishing is a business, it always has been, except that now it’s baldly and unapologetically so. I don’t like that we have to constantly wonder before we start a book: Will I be able to sell it? Will it fit into an existing and marketable genre? If a publisher buys it but it doesn’t earn out, will it be my last book? My last chance? Having to think about publishing and marketing has an adverse effect on the art of writing, and it takes a toll on the joy of creativity.

The book Faye has just submitted to her agent and editor is more honest and revealing than anything she’s written in the past. Of course, that makes her more vulnerable to rejection than ever. Her team has to make decisions based on what’s best for them. That’s business, but it doesn’t feel that way to Faye — or to me, or to any writer I know. To us, it feels personal.

Faye is inspired to host her author weekend because a successful rival — a romantasy author — stages huge fanfests in exotic locales. What would ever be enough for a writer?

For most writers, a modest turnout at a weeknight bookstore event is more than enough. But for mega-bestselling authors like Faye, the bar is higher and always rising. When her nemesis has fabulous fan weekends that sell out the minute they’re posted online, a mere New York Times bestseller isn’t enough. Suddenly, she needs that, too.

Faye’s signature L.L. Bean style, with her fleece vest and headlamp, is her charm as author and alter ego. Before Faye knows it, the people marketing her author weekend switch out her beer and fried clams to prosecco and small artisanal bites. They get her a stylist who wants her to wear statement necklaces! She agrees because of her desire to keep up with her nemesis, and once she starts, it’s hard for her to stop. What’s enough for a writer? I decided to follow her (our?) competitive, compulsive tendencies to the absolute limit!

[Photo by A. Mathiowetz.]

Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author of four novels, including American Ending, an Oprah Spring Book Pick, and Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book. 

Even South Korea’s government is finally acknowledging the widespread fraud and abuses of its adoption policy. I was one of 56 adoptees whose adoptions South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found to be in violation of human rights. After the first investigation was abruptly closed in 2025, the commission has since extended it.

The most prolific adoption agency by far was founded by American Evangelicals Harry and Bertha Holt. While their role in intercountry adoption has been examined by adoption-studies scholars, and many cases of fraudulent practices and unqualified adoptive parents have come to light, Paige Towers’ investigation of the Holts’ program, What They Stole: A Familicide Rooted in Intercountry Adoption, brings the receipts, and they are horrific and damning.

The book is ostensibly about a 2008 murder-suicide by Steve Sueppel of his wife and four children. A pillar of the community, Steve was an Iowa City bank executive married to Sheryl, who gave up her job as an elementary-school teacher to raise the kids they adopted from South Korea through Holt International, an agency originally established as the Holt Adoption Program in the 1950s. Starting in 1998, the Sueppels added four South Koreans to their family, naming them Ethan, Seth, Mira, and Eleanor.

But this is really a story of two families who adopted multiple Korean children: the Sueppels and the Holts. Burying the lede, the author devotes most of the book to Harry and Bertha Holt, first cousins who married, had six children of their own, and then adopted eight more from South Korea while founding the largest intercountry adoption agency in history.

Harry Holt made his fortune logging the trees from a property he bought in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. In 1955, after the family sponsored Korean War orphans through World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization, Harry decided to adopt eight “GI children,” the mixed-race offspring of Korean women and American soldiers. At that time, federal law only permitted a family to adopt two children from overseas, so the Holts allied with Richard L. Neuberger, a Democratic U.S. senator from Oregon. Writes Towers:

“Where some people saw a complex web of ethical issues, Senator Neuberger saw starving children; he skipped all the standardized steps for evaluating potential adoptive parents…Neuberger wrote the ‘Holt Bill’ himself — the act that would allow Bertha and Harry to adopt six more children than legally permitted.”

Despite alarms raised by Oregon’s Child Welfare Division, which found that the Holts’ “basic motive for adoption appears to be a missionary one,” Harry left for South Korea to search for the right orphans: half-white, starving, and sickly.

South Korea at that time was under the rule of American-backed authoritarian president Syngman Rhee, whom novelist Pearl S. Buck reported as saying mixed-race children should be “removed from Korea ‘even if we have to drop them in the Pacific Ocean.’” South Korean culture prizes purity of blood, and mixed-race children were seen as a scourge and a reminder of the country’s continued colonialization. Harry Holt offered a perfect solution that not only rid it of an unwanted population but also earned much-needed foreign currency while currying favor with the U.S.

But first, the Holts had to come up with a way to accommodate Korean and American adoption and immigration laws. And, thus, the original sin of intercountry adoption was introduced. The author explains:

“Under Harry’s pioneering plan, he’d serve as the initial adopter — the proxy agent. Later, the adoptive parents would pick up their ‘mail-order baby,’ as the US press deemed them, sight unseen, from a stateside airport. ‘And he did this,’ as [a] Daily News reporter wrote, so that ‘Korean children could be adopted by Americans under Korean law. He did this to circumvent the lengthy U.S. adoption procedures.’”

Proxy law allowed Americans to give the Holts power-of-attorney to adopt Korean children in their name and bring them to the U.S. as their own, evading state child-welfare laws and allowing adoptive parents to go unscreened by anyone but the Holts, whose only criterion was that the adopters be Evangelical Christians (although, later, adoptions by parents of other faiths were allowed).

People in the adoptee community have long known from witness testimony that Holt adopters were inadequately vetted, and Towers presents the evidence, citing news articles, academic studies, social-work reports, and personal interviews of Korean adoptees who were criminally mistreated and abused — and, sometimes, murdered. She also recounts the stories of Holt’s own adopted children and their challenging lives.

Eventually, the Holts established their own orphanages in South Korea and went to great lengths to fill them. The author describes the wanton taking of mixed-race children by Holt and his henchmen, quoting Bertha and Harry as bluntly referring to “hunting” and “collecting” kids. They aggressively hounded mothers, even snatching children from their yards. Towers meticulously documents the appalling conditions of Holt orphanages; the neglect suffered by children under their care; the cavalier way they were transported to the U.S. and dealt out to waiting families at the airport; and abuse in adoptive families.

As demand for Korean “orphans” grew, the Holts moved onto procuring full-blooded Koreans and engaged in identity switching and other illegal practices to speed up adoptions. The body count is shocking and sickening.

What They Stole is an impressive investigative work, but one unfortunately marred by a tendency toward sensationalism, some of it dubiously sourced. For example, the author includes scene-setting details that she could not have been privy to (e.g., “the Sueppels faked their way through family dinner”). As there are no footnotes, some assertions are vague or questionable (an estimate of the number of mixed-race Korean children is undated), and sometimes, the facts get jumbled (in one instance, a progression of paragraphs makes it seem like Korean-adoptee groups were instrumental in passing the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, when it was mostly due to adoptive parents).

This breathless, dramatic tone fits the book’s categorization by its publisher, the University of Iowa Press, as “true crime.” But that’s like calling The Diary of Anne Frank or Farewell to Manzanar true crime. The Holt Adoption Program/Holt International is an historic crime involving human-rights abuses on a massive scale. Taking one tragic story and presenting it as true crime is an insult to Holt adoptees and, indeed, to the adoptee community at large.

Over the decades, Holt International has expanded its operations to countries from Bulgaria to Vietnam. It is still an accredited adoption agency, still profiting off needy children in the name of God. What They Stole is a long-overdue investigation into an adoption agency that has, quite literally, gotten away with murder. May this book hasten judgment day for the Holts and their organization.

Born to a Korean woman and an American G.I., Alice Stephens was among the first wave of intercountry, transracial adoptees. She is the author of the novel Famous Adopted People and the historical novel The Twain: A Tale of Nagasaki, which is forthcoming in February 2027. Learn more about her adoption story from the Frontline documentary “South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning.”

(It could have been much worse: One Hundred Years of Reflection, One Hundred Years of Independence, or even this unsellable travesty, One Hundred Years of Desolation. No thanks.)

In the original, García Márquez commands all the above using the single word “soledad.” Rabassa, on the other hand, had to work with English, a tongue of sizable vocabulary that was smuggled in from elsewhere, bringing with it a separate word for everything. Any choice Rabassa made in translating “soledad” would have necessarily contracted the nuance of García Márquez’s original. And when the translator chose to favor solitude over loneliness, he had to remain consistent throughout.

And, so, in the English version of the novel, “solitary” and “solitude” come up a lot — well over 50 times, by my count. In a story that brings to life more than 30 members of the Buendía family, most of whom live together in the same house — up to six generations — I am afraid to be the one to say it: None of them lives in solitude, not even a little.     

The Buendías are nutty, troubled, misunderstood, incestuous, frustrated, deluded, defeated, and obsessed. And most of them have a variation of the same goddamn name. (Even in that they are rarely, if ever, alone.) The patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, who lives out his last years tied to a chestnut tree in the courtyard of the family home, has the company of various ghosts and his sympathetic daughter-in-law. Those ghosts — Melquíades and Prudencio — have each other for company when they are not interacting with the living.

The pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude exude claustrophobia. Readers hear and smell the happenings in the swampland of Macondo, a town founded by José Arcadio Buendía when he got tired of searching and followed his dreams instead. Dreaming, then, becomes a motif in the book, particularly during the “insomnia plague,” when the entire town goes sleepless and begins dreaming on their feet. Not only do they see their own waking dreams, they experience the real-time dreams of others, as well. Hardly an experience of solitude, if you ask me.   

Macondo slowly transforms from a remote community into a mechanized, interconnected, modern town. The Buendía family buys a pianola and discovers the mysterious pleasure of seeing a daguerreotype — an early, and eerie, form of photography — for the first time. The household dings and chimes with music boxes, while toy monkeys clash tambourines. In no time, the railroad will come through, bringing news and noise from the outside world.   

The narrative covers roughly 120 years of Colombian history during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Thousand Days Civil War (1899-1902) is dramatized through Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s storyline, an ode to the evildoing of conservatives and the stupidity of liberals (which would be funny were it not so familiar). The “banana massacre” thread tells of the deaths of 3,000 people and is based on the real-life tragedy of the American-owned United Fruit Company, whose striking workers were gunned down by the military.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is also both crammed with and augmented by magical realism: the rattling bag of bones Rebeca, an orphan adopted by the Buendías, carries with her; Aureliano’s prophetic visions; the wandering ghosts; the rainstorms of yellow flowers. Then there is the ascension of Remedios the Beauty, a Buendía who is too pure for this world. And long-suffering Buendía matriarch Úrsula, who “fought to preserve common sense in that extravagant house,” lives to be well over 100, shrinking to the size of a rag doll in her old age and becoming the plaything of her fifth-generational grandchildren.

“Science has eliminated distance,” says the enigmatic traveler (and eventual ghost) Melquíades, before he dies three times. Indeed, there is very little distance here — another blow to solitude. The novel lacks space, and even death cannot bring relief since the dead always return. Life, mystery, metaphysics, and alchemy swell to a profusion of everythingness.

In this, García Márquez references and maybe even pokes fun at his literary influences, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, both of whom played the same dimensional tricks on space and time. That One Hundred Years of Solitude contains parody and satire raises the question of whether García Márquez meant for us to put “soledad” in quotes all along, perhaps with a keen sense of its very opposite.

You can join Dorothy in next reading The Stranger, which will be the subject of her column on October 12th, 2026.

The offerings (some by writers with decades of success, and others by those newly published) include essays, poems, comics, memoir, and short stories. What connects them is pride of place, shared memory of summer’s joys and tribulations, and an innate understanding of injustice.

Black Summers is, in fact, inspired by an old injustice. For 85 years in Detroit, the 90-minute river excursion to the Boblo Island Amusement Park in Canada was a rite of summer. But, it wasn’t always so. In 1945, Sarah Elizabeth Ray, a young Black woman in her 20s, was refused entry to the Boblo boat. Ray sued the owners for violation of her civil rights — she felt everyone should be allowed to experience the joys of the outdoors. Ray’s winning lawsuit, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, became a precedent for public-accommodations cases. When Cooper interviewed Ray in 2006, it sparked her to bring the civil-rights pioneer’s story to a broader audience. Black Summers, with its half-dozen references to Boblo, is a vehicle for that acknowledgement.

In the essay “The Daddy, the Isle, and the Tunnel Drive,” contributor Zig Zag Claybourne orchestrates a celebration of Belle Isle, another iconic Detroit attraction. The story of a family visit to the 982-acre park, designed by Central Park landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, is an ode to Claybourne’s father’s favorite summer pastime — fishing. He writes:  

“Fish lined up to play their parts in his open-air symphony. If he’d had a podium and a baton it would’ve felt right. Silently slide a curling worm onto the hook; thwip the air with the tip of the rod arching back. The fishing line was one with his intention. It flew precisely where he wanted it to go, then joined the water in a chorus that said to the fish, very clearly, come to me.”

Not surprisingly, cars show up a lot in Motor City summers. But so do bicycles — metaphors for freedom. The perfection of three kids balanced on a bike, a parade of multiracial bikers in a community ride called “Slow Roll,” and the perceived peril for 10-year-old girls biking beyond their suburban neighborhood are all elements of the collection.

“[We] rode to our secret hiding place, a space not intended for kids. It was a parking garage that went several feet underground,” Renee Simms writes in “Borderline.” “We would stand up on the pedals of our bikes as we glided down the ramps, our voices echoing off the concrete walls as we yelled.” The girls run into boys from “the hood,” who give chase. They escape:

“The boys stopped their bikes in front of the subdivision’s sign and never attempted to enter. They didn’t know us, but they knew the rules about property and race.”

In Satori Shakoor’s “Flight of the Bumblebee,” the peril is real for a talented sixth-grader molested by her music teacher during summer break. “I don’t want no more violin lessons. I don’t want no talent!” the girl affirms. But the lessons continue under the unblinking eye of her mother. The message? Malice shouldn’t be allowed to steal one’s potential.

This anthology reminds us that during long, languid summers, we can discover our tribe, our bliss, our identity. The autobiographical essay “Where the Run At?” by MARS. Marshall addresses all three:

“Basketball became a call and response — the court, a place where I could find a community of Black girls like me living at the intersection of queerness.”

Tommye Blount writes an 11-part narrative poem, “Desire Paths,” informing us of early Detroiters Elizabeth and Thomas Palmer and their 140-acre estate north of the central city. The woodsy retreat would later be called Palmer Park. Later still, it would be known as a summer-evening haunt for “men who’ve come to touch each other in all the ways this world cannot or won’t do.” Blount then asks:

“Hasn’t this park always been built from desire’s blueprint? Once, the original people’s land was usurped by white others. Then the blue bloods got rich selling to another, until I arrived with a youth’s libido to lurk about this pastoral scene…”

Several contributors write about Detroit’s seminal summer day, July 23, 1967, when the city erupted into a violent, five-day rebellion against aggressive police tactics and policies that deferred the dreams of 35 percent of its residents. Former Detroit News journalist Luther Keith reminds us in “Dreams of the Corner” that Detroit’s baseball team was a balm to the hurt:

“The following year, the Tigers helped lift the city’s morale…won the American League pennant, then took the World Series from the St. Louis Cardinals…we all celebrated together, Black and white.”

The swimmobile, the eastside/westside divide (it’s a thing), Faygo pop (not soda), cars cruising wide boulevards, music festivals, and hot sun on brown skin — Detroit swaggers off the page in Black Summers. But your skin doesn’t have to be brown to enjoy this thoughtfully curated collection. Desiree Cooper knows that we’ve all had summers when light deepens the days, the outdoors calls us to play, and spirits can bloom like wildflowers.

Cheryl A. Head is the author of the award-winning Charlie Mack Motown Mysteries and Time’s Undoing, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her short story “Finding Jimmy Baldwin” will appear in the 2026 Best American Mysteries and Suspense anthology. Head is co-chair of Bouchercon 2027 World Mystery Convention, held in Washington, DC.  

Join author Abbie Rosner and Dr. Mikhail Kogan (from the George Washington Center for Integrative Medicine) for a conversation and book-signing!

Hosted by Busboys and Poets @ Takoma, 235 Carroll St., NW, Washington, DC. Learn more here.

When wildfires destroyed the city of Lahaina on Maui in 2023, it brought a number of issues to the public’s attention — ecological damage from plantation agriculture, for one, but also the dire lack of affordable housing for residents of Hawaii.

Mare: A Novel by Emily Haworth-Booth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Reviewed by Gretchen Lida. “All of this may make it sound like Mare is a stone-cold bummer, but there are glimmers of light and joy shining through the gloom. Lots of things in the narrative made my horse-girl’s heart sing, including the author’s inclusion of equine-specific sensory details and spot-on depictions of the human relationships that can flourish inside the barn and out. Rather than be more explicit and give anything away, I’ll leave it to readers to discover them on their own.”

A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South by Melvin Patrick Ely (Henry Holt and Co.). Reviewed by Elizabeth J. Moore. “This surprising blurring of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is evident in the court cases. Enslaved Blacks accused of capital crimes like rape and murder against whites were competently and even ardently defended by white slaveholding lawyers. White witnesses might take the side of accused Blacks against their own family members. And enslaved Black witnesses contradicted the testimony of whites without evident penalty. Yet none of this should be interpreted as humane treatment of enslaved Blacks. Often, those personal ties were why the defendants ended up in the dock in the first place.”

Raps of Resistance: How Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole Reignited a Hip-Hop Tradition by Jeremy C. McCool and Earl Hopkins (Bloomsbury Academic). Reviewed by E.A. Aymar. “For devoted fans of rap, much of that history will be known, but the authors’ retelling still makes for an enlightening read. Possibly informed by Hopkins’ background as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the authors write in compelling, mercifully non-academic prose that efficiently covers the genre’s record-spinning origins in the grimy streets of 1970s New York, the variety of its forms and regional influences, and its current worldwide acclaim.”

Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora; translated by Rahul Bery (Bellevue Literary Press). Reviewed by Jennifer Bort Yacovissi. “Reminiscent of the deadpan chaos of Patrick deWitt, especially his Undermajordomo Minor, Centroeuropa shares the same misty, fairytale quality within a hard reality. The bodies, of course, play a major role: First one, then two, four, eight, and 16 soldiers turn up during Redo’s digging, all from different eras of war in this region of Prussia. Indeed, the last, largest group of corpses is a mystifying contingent wearing uniforms and carrying weapons of advanced and unknown origin that won’t become familiar to local residents until more than a hundred years hence.”

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Putin’s Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse into Mercenary Chaos is a gripping, research-tome-sized account of the origins and ascent of Russia’s infamous private-military company, easily one of the world’s most notorious mercenary outfits (after Blackwater, of course). Aptly titled, the book makes the cogent argument that such “private” companies can be (and are) wielded by the state, as long as that collusion remains veiled in plausible deniability. 

In two brief sentences, we’re thrown into the deep end, challenged to keep up with the matter-of-fact but digressive and often fantastical tale related by “Redo Hauptshammer, born in a Vienna brothel at some point during the death throes of the eighteenth century.”

Reminiscent of the deadpan chaos of Patrick deWitt, especially his Undermajordomo Minor, Centroeuropa shares the same misty, fairytale quality within a hard reality. The bodies, of course, play a major role: First one, then two, four, eight, and 16 soldiers turn up during Redo’s digging, all from different eras of war in this region of Prussia. Indeed, the last, largest group of corpses is a mystifying contingent wearing uniforms and carrying weapons of advanced and unknown origin that won’t become familiar to local residents until more than a hundred years hence.

Redo stops digging because it’s clear the next set will consist of 32 soldiers, and that no good can come from finding them.

The bodies remain frozen no matter how long they’re aboveground; soldiers from the Roman Empire appear — just as all the others do — as though freshly fallen, captured at the very moment of death.

What is a person to do?

This is supposed to be farmland for crops, and cadaver-free acreage is quickly disappearing. Unwilling to keep digging, Redo takes the only available option and buries wife Odra in the soil under the small house that should have been their happy home.

Her freak-accident death — caused by Prussian soldiers pursuing an escaped French soldier firing into the crowded market square — occurs just as the couple is set to implement the final piece of their well-laid scheme. Adopting new identities, they’d left the brothel behind and planned to begin the farming life by claiming their legally deeded plot in the small municipality of Szonden, on the banks of the Oder River. Despite all joy in life having been snatched away by an errant bullet, Redo, with no place else to go, carries forward with their plan.

Critically, this is the exact moment when the ancient master-and-serf system is beginning to disintegrate. Redo and Odra were set to take possession of the first piece of privately owned farmland in an area where all other farmers remain vassals of the local noble — in this case, Baron von Geoffmann, “the Lord of Szonden” — whose rule is law.

All of this is so new that it’s unclear how Redo is to be treated or even addressed. To a snarky, officious servant, Redo says:

“I wish you a good day of labor and servitude, I’ll think of you in a few hours when I find myself once more in my liberated field, with no master or lord.”

Thus, when the bodies start to pop up on Redo’s land, no one is quite sure what to do about it. The baron, Mayor Altmayer, and the higher-up bureaucrats to whom the buck is passed all feel the bodies are Redo’s problem but object to every solution offered, especially when passers-by spot frozen corpses planted upright among the crops like so many icy scarecrows:

“There they remained, impassive, still frozen, independent of the sun and varying temperatures. From any corner of the land it resembled a macabre chessboard, with all the bodies turned toward the east so that the Oder could gather their gazes and carry away their detained horror forever.”

It becomes crucial to the powers up and down the hierarchy that the carcasses remain hidden and unacknowledged; they are a reminder of what war actually does to individuals and communities. As Redo expounds to Jakob, an historian, professor, and intellectual who becomes a dear friend:

“The citizens of Szonden are not horrified because they are corpses, but because they are young and recognizable, because their eyes are open and their flesh is still fresh, because it looks like their lives were only recently torn from their bodies. This is what no one wants to see. That war puts their sons in the firing line…If the horror is invisible, there is no horror.”

Beyond Jakob, Redo is surrounded by the town’s colorful characters: Hans, the unfailingly helpful peasant farmer next door; Udo, the giant; Johanna, Baron von Geoffmann’s lovely and voluptuous daughter, who keeps trying to seduce Redo; the baron himself; and Ilse, Szonden’s resident witch, who knows all the bodies’ — and Redo’s — secrets. 

The reader will almost certainly guess Redo’s core secret, which is teased throughout, but that doesn’t diminish the enjoyment of this quirky, unclassifiable fable whose riddles are related by a self-admitted unreliable narrator. Just go with it.

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s novel, Up the Hill to Home, tells the story of four generations of a family in Washington, DC, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. She reviews regularly for the Independent and serves on its board of directors as president. Follow Jenny on Bluesky at @jbywrites.bsky.social.

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett. Wonderful vignettes of the residents of a fishing village in Maine — charm without condescension.

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. A look at the lure of Hollywood and the madness it inspires.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. The story of a woman trying to cope with New York society during the Gilded Age, without the strength or means to do so for long.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Set against a backdrop of the Depression-era Dust Bowl, this story follows one impoverished family struggling to reach California — and hopefully a better life.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Over 100 years old, this book’s timeless themes — encompassing what feels like the whole of the human condition in small-town America — resonate yet today.

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride. A young boy, enslaved, falls in with John Brown and learns to find himself during the contentious years leading up to the Civil War.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. A nuanced account of justice (or injustice) in America, and how it impacts a young Black couple.

My Antonia by Willa Cather. A lyrical expedition into the life-on-the-frontier experience, with a slice of the immigrant experience added in.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth. A powerful exploration of how American assimilation can hollow out as much as it fills in.

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. The Civil War remains the fulcrum of American history, a brutal experience in confronting the original sin of slavery. This tells the story of that pivotal experience through the eyes of the soldiers — great and small — who fought.

Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain. Twain is the quintessential American writer. Everyone is represented in his work. Somewhere in some of his notes about this particular book, he said it started one way and finished another. One more thing: How could anyone not read a book about an enslaved person named “Valet de Chambre”?

Edge of Dark Water by Joe R. Lansdale. A trip downriver like Huck Finn on the dark side of the moon. If you’re new to Joe Lansdale, you’ve very lucky!

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. Race and family strife figure heavily in this gripping novel that’s by turns sweet, violent, devastating, and redeeming.

The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter. A romp through perhaps unfamiliar parts of Washington, DC. The story is set in the African-American upper-middle class, where the main character sets out to uncover the secrets of his father’s death.

Ormond by Charles Brockden Brown. Brown is often referred to as the first American novelist, and this Gothic novel, which is set in post-revolutionary Philadelphia, engages readers with themes of murder, disease, seduction, and impersonation.

Hope Leslie by Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Set in 17th-century New England, this historical romance recounts the complex relationship between colonists, Native Americans, and the British Empire. Unusually progressive for its time (it was published in 1842), this book contains strong female characters and challenges conventional views of Native Americans.

Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor. Naylor adapted Dante’s Inferno to construct a tale about class, race, and the true cost of achieving the American Dream.

Kindred by Octavia Butler. A first-person account of a Black woman who travels through time from California in 1976 to a plantation in Maryland in 1815.

The Son by Philipp Meyer. A sweeping, multi-generational tale of how the West wasn’t so much won as it was bought and paid for with blood.

[Editor’s note: Betcha didn’t think we’d trot this list out yet again…]

For devoted fans of rap, much of that history will be known, but the authors’ retelling still makes for an enlightening read. Possibly informed by Hopkins’ background as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the authors write in compelling, mercifully non-academic prose that efficiently covers the genre’s record-spinning origins in the grimy streets of 1970s New York, the variety of its forms and regional influences, and its current worldwide acclaim.

Along the way, the histories of Lamar and Cole are similarly explored. Although Lamar — riding high from the Pulitzer in his back pocket, the recent evisceration of his rival, Drake, and a Super Bowl performance — has eclipsed Cole in influence and fame, both are perfect antidotes to the authors’ contention that popular rap has strayed from its important foundational elements and has become, as they state in their preface:

“…an oversaturation of untalented emcees and online personalities-turned-musicians, who refuse to rap about the social, cultural, or political issues affecting real people, especially those in the very communities or enclaves they came from.”

Their complaint isn’t uncommon in hip-hop circles, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valid. And if you share it, then you, too, may see Lamar and Cole as rap’s necessary saviors. Both have achieved mainstream success with seemingly little compromise. And both have a history of addressing social causes such as the debilitating effects of mass incarceration, wavering mental health, the nihilistic attraction to violence and crime, and the trappings of lust and sex. Beyond that, both write openly about the Black experience. And, as the authors assert, “Black expression is the heartbeat and pulse of American music.”

Lamar and Cole have become two of the foremost documenters of the current American landscape. And their version of rap, defined in the 1990s as “conscious rap,” veers away from some of the criticism the genre has received but is no less controversial. Conscious rappers “tend to speak,” McCool and Hopkins write, “to the negative outcomes caused by the behaviors or circumstances, instead of glorifying the behaviors themselves…It’s not a weaponization of truth, it’s a platform of change with artists serving as its very agent.”

Like any definition of eras or movements, the artists don’t easily fit into this one, but Raps of Resistance makes a convincing argument that Lamar and Cole have, at least, heavily borrowed from the tradition of conscious rap to further their music. In the authors’ telling, the personal histories of both — Cole, college-educated and raised in North Carolina, and Lamar, a high-school graduate who grew up in Compton — are informed as much by the changes in hip hop as by their families, neighborhoods, and sociopolitical landscapes. They go on to discuss the influence of crime in the men’s youth all the way up to the effects of racism from the Trump administration.

The current landscape, in the authors’ estimation, is bleak both for the U.S. and for rap music, with the former’s cultural capitalism often undoing the latter. “Prolific emcees with powerful messages are shelved and overlooked by labels, while lesser talent is encouraged to push negative stereotypes about Black people for profit,” they contend. “Hip-hop music and culture have become overly commercialized, and are now being treated like the profitable commodities they are.”

This mirrors the exploitation of Black music throughout this country’s history, which the authors address in their closing pages as they ponder the future of rap and whether Cole and Lamar are examples of its final movement.

Still, I have some quibbles with the book. For as much stage time as Lamar and Cole are given, we’re generally told, not shown, how transcendent their music is. The authors frequently write about a topical issue — such as the 2016 election or the sexism women face in hip hop — and touch on how the two rappers have addressed it. But rather than being given a brief highlight on how a song has discussed politics or misogyny, I would’ve preferred a deep dive into the lyrics, particularly those from Lamar, whose songs often feature “layered storytelling, intricate wordplay, and advanced vocabulary” and have “encouraged academics to study and teach [them].”

It’s not just academics. Like with Taylor Swift nowadays or yesteryear artists like Bob Dylan or Gil Scott-Heron, fans dive down rabbit holes dissecting Lamar’s lyrics. It’s a missed opportunity that the authors don’t occasionally do the same.

Most rap enthusiasts would agree with Raps of Resistance’s central premise, that the mic skills and social focus embodying Lamar’s and Cole’s music are regularly overshadowed by chart-topping mediocrity. But isn’t that a feature, and not a bug, of any artistic tradition? Greatness, by definition, is always the exception.

Similarly, the standards of greatness change. I can remember when NWA was reviled (and not only by conservatives), only to later be reimagined as cultural heroes, such as in 2015’s glossy, intentionally forgetful biopic “Straight Outta Compton.” Who’s to say that today’s most popular mumblecore rappers, derided by purists but popular with casual fans, won’t likewise be considered visionaries 20 or 30 years from now?

God, I hope not, but I don’t make the rules.

There’s also only passing mention here of one of the most important components of rap: its vibrant underground scene, which often features artists who appreciate and embody the traditions the authors praise, and from which Lamar emerged. If any rappers whose music follows the patterns preferred by the authors (and me) are going to be appreciated in the future, there’s a good chance they’ll come from independent labels like Rhymesayers, Beatrock, Strange Music, Stones Throw, or Mello Music. It wouldn’t have made sense for Raps of Resistance, with its focus on Cole and Lamar, to explore these indies, but it’s important for readers to know that socially conscious, artistically determined outlets exist.

But these are observations, not complaints. As someone who’s grown up devoted to rap and has witnessed its volatile shifts and seen its titans and subgenres come and go, I believe Raps of Resistance is a necessary addition to any fan’s library. McCool and Hopkins have provided a worthy offering to a culture that has given so much to so many and that continues to evolve in unexpected, powerful ways.

Booklist wrote, of multiple Anthony Award-nominated E.A. Aymar’s most recent thriller, When She Left, “This would appeal to fans of Elmore Leonard…with high-stakes violence tempered by humor and disarmingly sympathetic antiheroes.” In 2025, When She Left was chosen by PEN/Faulkner as one of three books for their prestigious DC Reads program. A former contributor to the Washington Post, Aymar is a former member of the national board of the International Thriller Writers and an active member of Crime Writers of Color and Sisters in Crime. He was born in Panama and now lives and writes in the DC/MD/VA triangle.

To See Beyond: Essays by Anna Badkhen (Bellevue Literary Press). Reviewed by Sara Polsky. “Her essays call for a widening of the scales at which we think about seemingly contemporary problems. They are global, ancient, and impactful beyond regional or national boundaries, and solving them will require a return to — or a renewed awareness of — traditional practices and forgotten folklore. For Badkhen, who was raised outside of faith, that has even come to include prayer, which can ‘extend ourselves outside of our dailyness, to restructure our seeing and listening.’”

Questions 27 & 28: A Novel by Karen Tei Yamashita (Graywolf Press). Reviewed by David A. Taylor. “In Questions 27 & 28, Karen Tei Yamashita has created a stunning indictment of the fallout from two loaded queries on an obscure, long-ago bureaucratic questionnaire. In the process, she brings the historical archive, in all its messiness, to life.”

Men Like Ours: A Novel by Bindu Bansinath (Bloomsbury Publishing). Reviewed by Patricia S. Gormley. “While Bansinath alternates among many voices, the most important belong to women — both in the collective first-person-plural prologue and in the omniscient narrator’s relating of group conversations. That prologue is a master class in stage-setting: In it, the women describe the divisions and expectations in both gender and cultural norms. The titular men are hypocritical, lazy, careless, uninterested, and reliant on the women to do everything from keeping Desi culture alive to raising the children. It is visceral, cutting, and as sharply observed as anything by Jane Austen (if Austen had chosen to concern herself with oral sex).”

Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old by Mary Beard (University of Chicago Press). Reviewed by Gabrielle Stecher Woodward. “For Beard, classics represents not an idealized world worthy of untempered admiration but an invitation to think critically, perhaps for the first time, about the allure of antiquity on an individual level. Why does the classical world move us still? And why do we each seem to have our own unique stories to tell about those first private moments of recognition, when we realized there is something undeniably seductive (for better and for worse) about ancient Greece and Rome?”

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden (The Dial Press). Reviewed by Kitty Kelley. “In this unputdownable book, Burden proves to that college lunkhead Greg that she’s a writer of style and substance, something that may astound her ex-husband. As she dissects their divorce in searing detail, you can almost hear the waves of applause thundering across the country and driving the memoir to the bestseller list, where it remains six months after its release. Just as sweet for the discarded wife is the sale of her story to Netflix, with Gwyneth Paltrow contracted to play the lead.”

Mare: A Novel by Emily Haworth-Booth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Reviewed by Gretchen Lida. “Mare, also like ‘Fleabag,’ is a meditation on grief, not only for what was but for what never will be. The death of a dog sets the plot in motion, and the narrator’s struggle to have a baby keeps the wheels turning. One of the few characters who gets a name is Chelsea, a woman who writes a saccharine online newsletter about finding meaning while child-free. The narrator’s mother sends it to her in a hollow attempt to connect. The juxtaposition of the grief in the narrator’s lived experience with Chelsea’s painfully sunny emails creates such an exacting cognitive dissonance that I could feel it in my teeth.”

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