June 9, 2026 On Books The Vanishing Library: Timothy Ely’s Odd Little Book from Outer Space By Max Ross Borderline by Timothy Ely, front (left) and back (right) cover. Photographs by Max Ross. Late in the week I got an email from one of my book dealers. He was at a fair in New York and thought he’d found a buyer for Timothy Ely’s Borderline, a unique artist’s book I’d placed with him on consignment. It was welcome news; we’d been trying to sell Borderline for two years. Before traveling to New York, he’d asked if we might lower the price, from ten thousand dollars to seven thousand and five hundred, and I’d agreed that it seemed like time. Nothing was finalized, my dealer said, but he was optimistic. The prospective buyer had asked to be looped in if anyone else made an offer, and also wanted to know more about the book’s provenance. In my reply I explained how it had come into my possession: My father, a lawyer and book collector, had done some legal work for the founder of Granary Books, a publisher specializing in artists’ editions. As payment, he was able to buy titles from Granary at cost. He’d acquired a dozen or so through this arrangement, and Borderline was one of them. I’d inherited it when he’d died, about four years earlier. I didn’t want to sell Borderline, exactly. Like all the books I’d inherited, it was a little holy to me. To let it go would be to let go of another part of my father. I didn’t want to let more of him go. I’d begun to feel I was erasing him, forsaking him. He’d built his collection over four decades: a few hundred titles—first editions, special editions, illustrated editions—that, taken together, expressed him as vividly as a self-portrait. I knew who my father was because I’d worked to understand his tastes. His shelves held Joyce, Borges, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery; invention, philosophy, sensitivity, sensuality, beauty. (He’d joked once, after coming out, that he’d never been in the closet but between book covers.) Read More
June 8, 2026 On Translation The Summer of Lion Meat By Tere Dávila and Rebecca Hanssens-Reed Robinet Testard, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Translator’s Note: This piece uses the medieval-period translation technique of inserting metacommentary directly into the text when a detail is dubious or has no verifiably accurate translation. The technique is used here to highlight, play with, and contribute to Dávila’s own footnotes regarding unreliable facts within the autofictional narrative. This version adds another layer to the communally constructed story, first published in Spanish in 2019. That was the summer I had to choose, in a matter of seconds, how I wanted to die; I recommend avoiding as best you can the sort of ill-advised predicament I found myself in thanks to a heat wave that had descended on Boston. I’d just finished my third year of college and had decided to finally take the programming course I’d put off all those semesters, but instead of staying in a dorm, where I’d have to cram into a tiny room with a complete stranger, I joined three classmates who were looking for a fourth person to split the rent for a house. The pluses: I’d have my own room, and, though I didn’t know my new housemates well, I’d chatted a handful of times with one of them, Tom,1 who was not only friendly but also pretty cute. The minus: the house wasn’t in Cambridge, where the campus is, but in Somerville, a nearby neighborhood that had fallen into decline and was, therefore, where my roommates could afford to live. I no longer remember why I was so hell-bent on sticking to this meager budget—my parents would have helped me out if I’d wanted to find a nicer place—but I suppose I wanted to assert my independence by making my own decisions, even if they were stupid. My room in the attic seemed romantic at first, with a gable roof and a large picture window that let in lots of light, but by sundown I understood why no one else had claimed it (I was last to join the group). As the highest point in the house—like most old buildings in the Northeast, it was built for the cold, thus offering neither the perks of air conditioning nor a ceiling fan—that was where the heat accumulated from each protracted summer day. I quickly realized it was best to go up there only to sleep (or to attempt an uneasy approximation of sleep) and so I spent most afternoons languishing on the first floor, reading with a sheet thrown over the faux-leather sofa so my skin wouldn’t stick. But sometimes even this was unbearable. Then any excuse to escape the house was a good one—return a library book, make photocopies at Kinko’s,2 or, in one instance, go on an excursion that would take a very strange turn. I went out in search of a grocery store to satisfy a craving for cold, green, crisp grapes. “There’s a Foodmaster3 ten minutes from here,” Tom said, without offering to join. I wanted him to come with me. During that pre-GPS summer, in the prehistoric era before cell phones, if I made it anywhere based on the directions someone explained to me it was an act of God. My destination this time was somewhere within the uncharted territory of Somerville. I should have asked, but I didn’t dare. Twenty minutes later I had no idea where I was. Tom’s directions were shitty. I was nowhere near a supermarket and couldn’t even find anyone to ask for help. Houses were boarded up, the front yards overgrown; a sullen quiet occupied what had once been a neighborhood full of families dreaming of upward mobility, most of them workers for Ford Motor Company, who had left when the factories did. The houses had been split into apartments for cheap, short-term rentals, for people who didn’t have an interest in—rather, who didn’t have the means of—maintaining them. We could say they were transitory people, or people forced into transitory circumstances. I was delirious from the heat. Night was falling, but not the temperature. I was weighing whether to abort Misión Uvas (Mission Grape) and turn back when I saw a store that was open, not my Foodmaster but a small butcher shop. The sign read SAVENOR’S MEATS. Read More
June 4, 2026 On Art Idiots: On Munch and von Trier By Karl Ove Knausgaard Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (1855–1886), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The Sick Child by Edvard Munch is undoubtedly a highlight of Norwegian painting, still compelling and touching, still unsurpassed. The odd thing is that the painting seemingly came out of nothing: Munch was twenty-one years old when he painted it, he had hardly any education, hardly any experience as a painter, and he painted it on the very outskirts of provincial Europe, in a Kristiania where, only a few decades before, cows could be seen ambling through the streets. Equally odd is the fact that this painting, which marks the beginning of Munch’s artistic career, his first masterpiece, is also an end point: he never again made anything that came close to it. The Sick Child is an anomaly—it resembles nothing else from that period, and nothing else in Munch’s long life as an artist. He worked on it for a year, adding layer upon layer, then, scraping the paint off, added new layers, scraped them off, as if he were burrowing into something, or toward something. When he exhibited it at the Annual Autumn Exhibition in Kristiania in 1886 he still considered it unfinished, and titled it Study. At the exhibition the painting was ridiculed, people laughed and pointed at it, the newspapers slammed it. Nowadays this is difficult to understand. How could anyone ridicule something so palpably heartfelt and vulnerable, and so existentially threatening, for isn’t it the very image of deep emotion and existential threat? The Sick Child depicts a pale, gaunt, sickly girl propped up against a pillow in bed, her gaze directed at a woman sitting next to her and holding her hand. The woman’s head is bowed, we can’t see her face, only the girl’s. It is full of concern for the woman, who will have to go on with her life. The room is rendered almost without depth, our gaze has no way to travel into it, the surface stops it at every point. The bed, with its greenish covering, looks almost vertical. The walls, also greenish, in places dissolve into vertical, clearly painted stripes. There is a bottle of medicine on a chest of drawers in front of the bed to one side, to the other there is a small table with a half-filled glass. Both objects seem mere suggestions, painted just clearly enough that we can recognize them, but no more. The same applies to the girl’s and the woman’s hands, especially the girl’s one hand lying on the bedcover, it is unfinished, merely suggested, a “hand” rather than a hand. Read More
June 3, 2026 Triptych Hildegard, Tarkovsky, Citrus Trees By Nicolette Polek Photograph by Lazaregagnidze, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. I began growing kumquat trees after my German hairdresser—who fixes BMWs and fills his salon with large, flapping plants—pulled a pale fruit off one of his containers’ branches and told me to keep it in my pocket for three days to ripen. I wrapped the kumquat, the size of my thumb pad, into a Kleenex to be transported in my winter coat. It was a new year. I drove back to a house built in the 1700s—owned by a woman in her nineties who worked full-time and kept a fridge filled with Celsius energy drinks—where I was living in the attic. The pocket kumquat, forgotten until I unpacked from the holidays, tasted like a flower. A year later, no longer attic-bound, I bought three varieties from a nursery recommended for its eclectic catalogue, which includes honeyberries, yerba maté, oyster leaf (which tastes like oysters), and a sweeter, stronger blackberry developed by the University of Arkansas that has the “potential to change the blackberry market.” The happiest plant of my life was an unspecified citrus tree that I rescued from a greenhouse sale at age eleven. The citrus and I grew equal in height until I went off to college and it surpassed me, and though it never bore fruit, its leaves were glossy and in wintertime it towered at the end of my childhood bed, which was also in an attic. Citrus trees have always stalked me, with a meaning similar to what can be read in Saint John Climacus’s The Ladder of Divine Ascent: “The natural property of the lemon tree is such that it lifts its branches upwards when it has no fruit, but the more the branches bend down the more fruit they bear.” In humility and trials, fruit can emerge. In the time between when my German hairdresser gave me a kumquat to put in my pocket and when I received three varieties of kumquat trees in the mail, my childhood home, with its citrus tree and attic, burned down, and was rebuilt. *** For Hildegard of Bingen, the famous twelfth-century Benedictine abbess and mystic, the earth produces goods commensurate with every need of the human body. This conviction was rooted in her broader theological framework of viriditas, or “greening power,” a divine life force that animates all creation and expresses itself in various ways, including in the healing properties of plants. In her encyclopedic book Physica, she sought to codify the natural world—plants, elements, trees, stones, fish, birds, animals, reptiles, and metals—according to each component’s effects on the four temperaments. Citrus trees (more “hot than cold”), signify chastity. When boiled in wine and consumed daily, their leaves alleviate daily fevers. Radishes cleanse the brain. Horseradish makes a lean person strong. Chamomile is calming to the intestines, and mullein is good for those who are sad. Wild lettuce, whose milky sap would later be studied in the nineteenth century for its mild sedative quality, extinguishes “uncontrollable lust.” It can be made into a kind of lettuce soup, the liquid of which is to be poured upon hot stones in a sauna while placing the cooked leaves on one’s belly. The four temperaments, originally defined by the Greeks but interpreted by Hildegard in a more spiritually inflected way, are no longer reasonable medical categories, though I would be considered melancholic—the “iceberg temperament.” If not careful, I might be brought down by poisoned daydreaming. In the arduous process of rebuilding the house, we discovered that it had already burned down years before we moved in. My father recalled finding what may have been an arm bone when he dug around the side yard. The year of rebuilding was a task of inventorying and replication; insurance requires that the new house be the same, more or less, as the house that has been demolished. Read More
June 1, 2026 Bookmarks Perfectoid Spaces By Tarpley Hitt and Olivia Kan-Sperling Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month. —Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor Kevin Hartnett’s The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine is Transforming Math and AI (Quanta Books) tells the story of Lean, a proof assistant program. Here, an extract from a series of work messages from an ebullient but erratic expert in “perfectoid spaces”: Kevin Buzzard: This is going to be so much fun Kevin Buzzard: Lean is made for this sort of stuff Kevin Buzzard: Mario, this is what real maths looks like … Kevin Buzzard: it is a million miles from anything that has ever been formalized Kevin Buzzard: and it will be easy to formalize Kevin Buzzard: Lean is a big puzzle game Kevin Buzzard: and we will be able to make some really cool levels for this game … Kevin Buzzard: the type is the level, the term is the solution Kevin Buzzard: All the old levels are boring Read More
May 29, 2026 Dispatch Love in a Fallen City: Shanghai’s Marriage Market By Becky Zhang The market, May 2015. Photograph by Reinhold Möller, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. On a low-pollution Sunday last December, the weekend before Christmas, I headed to People’s Park on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road to visit the city’s so-called marriage market: a cluster of footpaths and lawns in the park’s northwest corner, where hundreds of parents gather each weekend to matchmake their unmarried adult children. It was the winter solstice: a particularly auspicious occasion this year, as an aunt had written to our family’s thirty-one-person WeChat group—a day on which it was said that heaven and earth would reunite. It had rained that morning, so the air was damp and cool. I’d come here before as a child, glimpsing the idling marriage brokers—the “aunties” and “uncles”—as my parents and I crossed the park to the city center. Though I was now of marriageable age, I doubted I’d find a husband here, a city from which I felt largely estranged. I’d grown up in Hong Kong and visited family in Shanghai every year until moving abroad over a decade ago. The cultural differences alone between any potential Shanghainese suitors and me foreclosed the possibility, I figured, of a real bond. But perhaps there was something to learn from the stand-in courtship practiced here, so radically different from the flirting and swiping I was predisposed to. What were the right conditions under which to find a life partner? Long a romantic, I had lately come to learn that love might instead be something worked toward, an earned outcome rather than a projection sustained until its inevitable end. The idea of courting prospective in-laws before spouses therefore seemed reasonable. This market was pragmatic: it conceded that familial compatibility could only help a relationship. It was to the point, with no beating around the bush about your finances or genetic ailments. I’d always enjoyed meeting the parents of friends and boyfriends—particularly the Chinese ones, who often seemed like strange permutations of my own: religiously preoccupied with their kids’ well-being and success, offbeat and quaintly crude, their politesse at odds with an inborn urge to voice their sometimes inflammatory convictions. Like the rule-abiding child I’d been, I was known to succumb to the flattery of my Chinese elders, who softened at my xiaoshun deference and fluent Mandarin—I’d spent months on the mainland as a child. I caved to cajoling missionaries at the supermarket in New York’s Chinatown, to the Mandarin-speaking Bank of America employee who convinced me to sign up for another credit card when all I’d wanted was to update my address. I entered the park through a western gate, next to which a Starbucks played Mariah Carey and Willie Nelson. The market emerged suddenly: crops of middle-aged Chinese huddled around laminated advertisements that littered the ground or were clipped to trolley bags and music stands. The otherwise quiet grounds, within these few thousand square feet, were beginning to teem with brokers and visitors alike. Fleece-clad aunties lined the shrubbery; raincoated uncles smoked under the wutong trees. I slipped into the sparse flow of people that circled the gardens and moved through sheltered walkways. Read More