Complicating the Marriage Plot: A Reading List

By Alysia Li Ying SawchynAugust 4, 2026

For the past six years, I’ve been working on a project that I describe to strangers and casual acquaintances as “a book about flowers,” and to friends and family as “a book about flowers and my not-marriage.” Though the book’s

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Literature & Essays

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Awake Awake

All is recollection save for the slender membrane of now. Every present thought, every present feeling, collides with a league of their familial ghosts. And if our lives in this moment seem flimsy, that is because they are. We dwell

Lit Hub ExcerptsAug 5, 2026

Literary Hub

Rumpelstiltskin is My Unlikely Writing Companion

A few years ago, scrolling through social media when I should have been writing, I came across a photo of the Lady Bird edition of Rumpelstiltskin. Struggling to remember the specifics of the story, I googled it. There, in the

Louise NealonAug 5, 2026

The New Yorker

Free quota

An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist’s Afterlife as a BookTok Star

Jacqueline Harpman wrote her best-known works in the nineteen-nineties, but her fiction’s elegiac loneliness seems to anticipate our own solitary, screen-bound era.

Katy WaldmanAug 3, 202610 min read

Public Books

“Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins

How do the families and friends of those struggling with addiction perceive that addiction, cope with it, and try (or fail) to love that person anyway? The post “Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins appeared first on Public Books.

Megan CumminsAug 4, 2026

Public Books

B-Sides: “Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys” by Mariana Enriquez

“I spent my adolescence in Buenos Aires and made my own fumbling pilgrimages to that city’s cemeteries.” The post B-Sides: “Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys” by Mariana Enriquez appeared first on Public Books.

Imani RadneyAug 3, 2026

The Dial

Seven Literary Sins — The Dial

Bad habits and secret pleasures.

13 min read