#betsy-pochoda

#betsy-pochoda

Catherine Lacey reads her story 'Rate Your Happiness,' from the April 13, 2026, issue of the magazine, highlighting her narrative style and thematic depth.

Sigmund Freud believed that every crush has a strand of disgust, that people are attracted to what repulses them. The enchantment of an infatuation always counterbalances the reality that our lovers - irksome, confusing, and unflaggingly human - depart from whatever ideal archetype we have stored in our heads.

Plath excelled at baking, making six-egg sponges and hand-painting labels for honey, while also taking language lessons and writing poetry for the BBC.

If you don't read Nellie Bowles every Friday, you are leading a sad, barren, and empty existence. Everything she does is funny and wise. Her columns have the exact spirit of the 70's writers whom I adored and who were so damn funny-and also deeply in the know. She has been described as the lovechild of Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion and the funniest writer in America.

The opening pages introduce us to a world straight out of gothic fable. In an isolated manor house by a forbiddingly dark forest, a strange-looking baby is born. This unearthly child, Lajos, is fated to carry forward the family name of the Lazars, a noble dynasty with an alarming tendency to go mad, die violently, or both.

"Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era" quickly became one of my favorite nonfiction books written by a journalist. I appreciated how he showed the grueling, day-to-day work local journalism requires, and how many layers of people fought him in revealing the despicable work of the Ku Klux Klan.

Addie Citchens reads her story 'The City Is a Graveyard,' from the March 16, 2026, issue of the magazine. Citchens is a Mississippi Delta-born, New Orleans-based writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, 'Dominion,' was published in 2025 and was short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and long-listed for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize.

A crack of thunder, a flash of light, and a sulfurous mist flooded my apartment. Marax, President of Hell, stood before me. Marax entered my summoning circle, eyes burning with unholy fire, and I gave him the stack of homework to flip through while I brushed my teeth. Marax marked up the papers and fleshed out my bullet points into thoughtful feedback before I even got to my molars. Then-three hours of my life, saved!-I banished him back to Hell.

In 1968, a "good girl" is squeaky clean. She studies hard, follows the rules, gets into college and doesn't embarrass her parents. She doesn't lie or drink or do drugs. She doesn't participate in the Summer of Love or experiment with any of its alternative ways of living. She definitely doesn't have premarital sex, get pregnant and upend everyone's meticulously laid plans for her future.

Dilara, the protagonist of this début novel, is consumed by the absence of a stable home in her life. She and her family flee Turkey, where she is from, after a failed coup in 2016. When they end up in Italy, something inexplicable happens: Dilara's bathroom transforms into a cell in an infamous prison on the outskirts of Istanbul.

Trope, POV, backstory, character arc. In the 30 years since I was a student of that benign, pipe-smoking, elbow-patched man of letters Malcolm Bradbury, the private language of creative writing workshops has taken over the world. What writers used to say to small circles of students in an attempt to help them improve their storytelling technique has become a familiar way, often parodic and self-knowing, of interpreting the grand and not-sogrand narratives of our time.

You are leaving work, your suit still damp from the morning's downpour, the skin on your palms peeling. You are clutching two supermarket bags, tins of cream soup and tuna knocking against one another. The rain is hard and your anorak is cheap. You are on your way to Stockbridge, to your parents' house, which only your father inhabits now that your mother is gone.

In addition to writing fiction, you're a staff writer for the and a screenwriter. How do you think of your career? I think of myself as a storyteller. I'm nosy, so once I'm telling a story, I want to know what happens. I do find, with fiction, I can't toggle in and out of it. It's like acting, where you have to stay with that character, in that world.

Out today, Woman Down centers on writer Petra Rose, an author who has writer's block and checks into a remote cabin to finish her next book. Petra, who took a hiatus after fans blamed her for a producer's decision to cut a fan-favorite character out of the film adaptation of her book A Terrible Thing, has "learned the hard way what happens when the internet turns on you," a synopsis states.

Many editors languish in the margins of history, their contributions largely invisible despite how much they shape whom and how we read. But in recent years, amid a wave of books unearthing overlooked figures, biographers have turned their sights to pioneering book and magazine editors-including Malcolm Cowley of Viking, Judith Jones of Knopf, Bennett Cerf of Random House, and Katharine S. White of The New Yorker -anointing them as the unsung architects of the American literary canon.

but there's something comforting about knowing that even an ultrarich woman can't make a man act right. You can come from a good family, bring a couple of enormous trusts into the marriage, make some kids, build homes in both New York City and Martha's Vineyard if you'd like, but he'll still leave if he wants to. There's something relieving in that obviousness, in that inevitability, as if no one can truly get heterosexual marriage right, even those with all the resources in the world.

Years ago, I wrote a series of articles for my college newspaper about competing in contests for which I was comically unprepared: arm wrestling, archery, Scrabble. The compulsion to fail dramatically continued into my freelance writing career, when I finagled my way into the front corral at the Los Angeles Marathon. (I stuck with the élites for all of two hundred meters.) My inclination was Plimptonian.

We meet him as a Gumby-like figure, asleep on a dirt floor, with only a jug of water and a toy horse. He has no idea how he got there. When he's around seventeen years old, Kaspar meets his captor, rendered in the book as a shadowy, hatch-marked father: "The Man in Black." The man teaches him to write his name; he teaches him to take a few fumbling goose steps outside.

Sophia Stewart poses a choice that many biographers struggle with: "what to do with the boring bits."

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen

After finding this seam of gold, miner Michael dreams that his son will be able to go to school, rather than join the other children who work in the mine, like blind, bald rodents unearthing themselves in search of scraps of candlelight. In the novel, which won the 2023 Betty Trask prize, everything closes in on Michael: lungs clog, tunnels collapse, horse-drawn narrowboats are attacked by robbers in the sooty dusk. It's a vivid reminder of the cost, in bodily suffering, of resource extraction.

Two fiction books about good friends coming from different circumstances. Two biographies of people whose influence on American culture is, arguably, still underrated. One Liza Minnelli memoir. These are just a handful of books coming out in the first few months of 2026 that we've got our eye on. Fiction 'Autobiography of Cotton' by Cristina Rivera Garza, Feb. 3 Garza, who won a Pulitzer in 2024 for memoir/autobiography, actually first published Autobiography of Cotton back in 2020, but it's only now getting an English translation.