Anyway, let’s get into it:

April Book Selections

This month, we’re reading 20th century-set office novels because why not!

Recommendations include:

The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe (1958) — An overnight sensation upon publication, The Best of Everything (1958) takes its name from The New York Times’s of-the-era advertisements promising young women “the best of everything: the best job, the best surroundings.” The novel opens with that notion as epigraph before unveiling it as mere myth over the next 400+ pages. As I write in the February 2024 Book Review:

The narrative initially focuses on three young women working in the typing pool of Midtown publishing house Fabian Publications — Westchester sophisticate and former Radcliffe girlie Caroline Bender, Colorado country bumpkin April Morrison, and aspiring actress Gregg Adams — before widening its aperture to encompass a broader chorus. Jaffe meanders through the lives of various women in and around Fabian, capturing an earnest snapshot of the era’s emotional texture through a decidedly female lens. As The New Yorker puts it: “Rona Jaffe’s best-seller from 1958, is what you would get if you took Sex and the City and set it inside Mad Men’s universe…it has the white-gloved, Scotch-swilling aesthetic of the fifties but also an unflinching frankness about women’s lives and desires — a combination that makes it feel radical, prescient.”

Office Politics by Wilfrid Sheed (1966) — A mid-20th century novel of manners from English-born American writer Wilfrid Sheed, Office Politics (1966) satirizes the ever-present political nuances of corporate life. Its close third-person perspective animates the nuances of left-leaning culture magazine The Outsider, primarily through the prism of recent college grad George Wren. As I write in the February 2025 Book Review:

After seeing a junior editor listing, George leaves his post at CBS for a new position at half the salary — and office half the size. English expat Gilbert Twining serves as executive editor, with sharks circling around his post in the form of strung-out office furniture Brian Fine (“white and sluggish from years in that terrible office…Brian Fine was the third stage of an editor’s life cycle”) and scheming social climber Fritz Tyler. When Twining travels out West, George, appointed as his boss’s eyes and ears, quickly learns that a smaller fishbowl brings tensions to a quicker boil (“CBS politics had been played on too large a playing field, so you couldn’t see the players at the far end. This stadium was just the right size.”)…Deflection defines each interaction, as workers seek to suss out others’ alliances before revealing their respective cards.

Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt (2011) — Written and set before the turn of the millennium, published a decade plus later, Lightning Rods (2011) “satirizes the specificities of mass corporate culture, an earlier iteration of it filled with faxes and frustrations around the introduction of blue M&Ms,” as I write in the February 2025 Book Review. American novelist Helen DeWitt expands the satirical framework that shapes Wilfrid Sheed’s Office Politics (1966); she skewers the shallow veneer of start-up culture, framing the workplace as a microcosm of global sexual politics in the waning years of the 20th century.

This inventive office sex comedy follows the rise and fall of encyclopedia-turned-vacuum salesman Joe, who sets out to curb the rampant problem of sexual harassment in the workplace by enlivening his long-running masturbation fantasy. In his 2011 review for The Millions, author Garth Risk Hallberg writes: “Joe’s particular insight is to…not only bring it to life but monetize it. I wouldn’t want to spoil for you the pleasure of discovering that fantasy yourself. Nor would I want to give away exactly how — with the help of a future Supreme Court justice, an adjustable-height toilet, several pairs of PVC undergarments, and a dwarf named Ian — Joe manages to realize it. Suffice it to say, the genius is in the details.”

Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery (2023) — The first novel from Irish author Nicole Flattery inhabits a different kind of workplace, weaving the history of Andy Warhol’s Factory into a compelling coming-of-age story. Nothing Special (2023) toggles between the 1960s and the 2010s as an elderly iteration of the 17-year-old main character, Mae, looks back on her mid-20th century Manhattan upbringing, her first job as a typist in an unexpected space. Warhol himself fulfills an analogous function as Joan Didion in John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas (1974), an offstage figure who influences the ideological order of the narrator’s world. In a 2023 piece for The Rumpus, literature professor Emma Staffaroni explains: “I found it satisfying to read a novel that, on the whole, doesn’t frame Andy as the most interesting person in the room. Rather, the characters who do come to life through Mae’s point of view are almost all working women: in addition to the girls at Drella’s studio, there is also her fellow typist-turned-friend, Shelley; Mae’s mother, a career waitress at a diner; and some chic, dry-witted secretaries (who prefer not to be called receptionists).”

As It Turns Out by Alice Sedgwick Wohl (2022) — To better understand the environment Nicole Slattery enters in Nothing Special (2023), turn to this non-fiction book from Edie Sedgwick’s sister, Alice. ICYMI: the downtown it girl of her era, Edie served as Andy Warhol’s ultimate muse, their singular relationship riddled with envy and adoration. She appeared on the pages of Vogue and LIFE in 1965, her cultural impact, especially alongside Warhol, immeasurable inside that particular year. (Case in point, Roy Lichtenstein and his wife dressed as Andy and Edie for Halloween that fall.) But the honeymoon phase sputtered to a stop when Edie fell out of the Factory scene and started dating Bob Dylan. Her life came to a premature close in 1971 at age 28 after multiple psychiatric ward stints and an ill-fated barbiturate overdose, her place in the American cultural mythos unmoved.

With As It Turns Out (2022), Alice Sedgwick Wohl (who I had the pleasure of seeing speak live with her fabulous transatlantic accent back in 2022) reexamines the presumption of exploitation that drives Jean Stein’s oral history, Edie: American Girl (1982). Per McNally Jackson: “Wohl tells the story as only a sister could, from their childhood on a California ranch and the beginnings of Edie’s lifelong troubles in the world of their parents to her life and relationship with Warhol within the silver walls of the Factory, in the fashionable arenas of New York, and as projected in the various critically acclaimed films he made with her. As Wohl seeks to understand the conjunction of Edie and Andy, she writes with a keen critical eye and careful reflection about their enduring impact. As It Turns Out is a meditation addressed to her brother about their sister, about the girl behind the magnetic image, and about the culture she and Warhol introduced.”

Upcoming Content to Consume

In keeping with April as the month of the office novel apparently, The Criterion Channel has announced a new capsule dedicated to corporate thrillers. Debuting today, the collection captures how, “in the years between 1987’s Black Monday stock-market crash and 2008’s global financial meltdown, Wall Street, white-shoe law firms, and Fortune 500 companies held a special fascination for Hollywood…competing ambitions, ruthless backstabbing, and murky ethical politics ris[ing] to the realm of the Shakespearean.”

Now, here’s what’s on IRL:

The Paris Theater: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) (Date: 4.2) — Long-time subscribers will remember The Spring I Made Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) My Entire Personality. Based on the eponymous 1962 play by Edward Albee, this personal-favorite film from Mike Nichols — famously starring married again, divorced again lovers Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton — plays at The Paris to kick off the month!

For those of you unfamiliar, the narrative centers on college professor George and his wife, Martha (played by Burton and Taylor, respectively), a set of middle-aged spouses who invite a younger couple over for drinks after a faculty party. Truth and artifice morph and blur over the course of the evening, then morning, a “private subtext playing out below the public face of their [George and Martha’s] relationship,” as Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (2024) author Philip Gefter describes.

The Metropolitan Review Print Launch (Date: 4.2) — Tomorrow night, New Yorkers can head to Hurley’s in Midtown, the saloon’s second-floor library bar, for the launch of ’s first-ever print publication! The literary magazine, which launched at the start of 2025, has been churning out bangers lately, from a new Brandon Taylor short story to ’s in-depth profile of Bret Easton Ellis (more on that in a minute).

Tickets come at two prices: $20 for admission, $45 for admission and a copy of the new issue. You can check out details and book here!

IFC Center: Blue Velvet (1986) (Opening Date: 4.3) — David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, with a new 4K restoration marking the occasion at Metrograph. Kyle MacLachlan stars as mystery-loving college student Jeffrey Beaumont, who recruits the local police chief’s daughter, Sandy Williams (played by the inimitable Laura Dern), to help him uncover the story behind a severed ear found in a field. Their search sparks a spiral into the seedy underbelly of their small town, launching a genre-bending blur that, upon its initial premiere, solidified a Lynch’s specific subcategory of neo-noir.

The Egyptian Theatre’s Noir City: Hollywood 2026 Series (Opening Date: 4.3) — Subtitled “Face the Music!,” this 20-film line-up from American Cinematheque and the Film Noir Foundation features a slate that shows “genuine musical legends performing alongside film noir favorites including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ida Lupino, Kirk Douglas, and Ann Sheridan.” Live musical performances, actor Q&As, and more will accompany screenings of Blues in the Night (1941), All Night Long (1962), and A Man Called Adam (1966), among other movies.

My personal top pick comes in the form of one of my Letterboxd top four: To Have and Have Not (1944). Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall met and fell in love filming the very loose adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s eponymous 1937 novel, birthing one of Hollywood’s most famed romances, a professional and romantic partnership that lived unto death. It basically functions as Casablanca (1942) with better chemistry and a lighter ending. I would also recommend The Long Goodbye (1973) with Elliott Gould in person, but it unfortunately already sold out.

You can check out showtimes and additional details here!

Vista Hollywood: American Graffiti (1973) (Dates: 4.3-4.4) — Catch a late-night screening of American Graffiti (1973) at The Vista this weekend! George Lucas’s first foray into feature filmmaking reanimates his teenage years in Central California at the start of the 1960s, the height of cruising culture. It follows the adventures of a sprawling cast of characters — including cameos from then-unknown Harrison Ford and Suzanne Somers — over the course of one evening, the last night before summer vacation comes to a close. Packed with a 41-song soundtrack, American Graffiti captures the texture of a particular time and place, while also operating as a prelude to the perennial loss of innocence that comes with adulthood.

The Paris Theater: Goodfellas (1990) (Dates: 4.3-4.8) — As ever, flagging that Goodfellas (1990) is playing!

The Academy Museum: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) (Date: 4.5) — Robert Mulligan’s film adaptation of the classic 1960 novel by Harper Lee plays in 35mm this month! Gregory Peck’s daughter, Cecilia, will make a special appearance, discussing her father’s “warm and restrained performance as attorney Atticus Finch.” (Robert Duvall, who passed away in February, notably fills the role of the Finch family’s reclusive neighbor, Boo Radley, in his film debut.)

As Roger Ebert notes in his 2001 review, the film “uses the realities of its time only as a backdrop for the portrait of a brave white liberal,” cultivating a faulty savior myth. But its narrow perspective stems from the worldview of its narrator, Scout Finch (played by Mary Badham), a young girl growing up in the segregated town of Maycomb, Alabama alongside her brother, Jem (played by Phillip Alford), and best friend, Dill (played by John Megna, based on Lee’s real childhood best friend, the one and only Truman Capote). Atticus, her father, defends Tom Robinson (played by Brock Peters), a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, drawing his daughter toward adulthood in the process.

Village East’s Heeere’s Kubrick! Series (Opening Date: 4.8) — This month, Village East will mount a four-week series dedicated to iconic director Stanley Kubrick. A la the theater’s annual fall festival, Hitchcocktober, a new film will screen every Wednesday, this time on 35mm. The line-up includes A Clockwork Orange (1971), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining (1980). Having only seen The Shining, I’m hoping to use this opportunity for a deeper dive into Kubrick’s filmography. You can book tickets here!

Albertine: The Fifth Annual U.S. Goncourt Prize Selection Ceremony (Date: 4.11) — Spend your Saturday afternoon at Villa Albertine and discover the winner of the U.S. Goncourt Prize! Now in its fifth year, the award serves as the U.S. iteration of France’s most prominent literary prize. This year’s shortlist includes Nathacha Appanah’s La nuit au cœur by (2025), Emmanuel Carrère Kolkhoze (2025), Caroline Lamarche’s Le Bel Obscur (2025), and Laurent Mauvignier’s La maison vide (2025).

Per the site: “Established for the first time in 1998 in Poland and now in 40 countries, the International Goncourt Selection is a global literary barometer to gauge how the Goncourt Prize’s shortlisted titles resonate with young audiences from around the world. The [U.S.] selection additionally serves a dual purpose of promoting French and Francophone contemporary literary works in their original language and encouraging the translation and publication of selected titles in English.”

The process will play out live for audience members, as Villa Albertine welcomes student jurors from 11 universities — including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, UVA, USC, and more — who studied the four shortlisted books. The group will debate and decide on a winner, with a cocktail reception to follow.

You can check out additional details and RSVP for free here.

Museum of the Moving Image’s Marilyn Monroe in New York Series (Dates: 4.11-4.12) — Celebrations around Marilyn Monroe’s centennial continue! This two-day festival includes a selection of three films set in New York: Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), and, my personal favorite pick, The Seven-Year Itch (1955).

The Seven-Year Itch, to me, marks Marilyn’s comedic peak, perhaps a tie with Some Like It Hot (1959). She stars as a model and actress who sublets an un-air conditioned apartment at the height of a New York summer. Seeking relief from the heat, her unnamed character — credited as “The Girl” — befriends the publishing executive downstairs, Richard Sherman (played by Tom Ewell). For her, his marital status signals the possibility of a platonic friend (“A married man, air conditioning, champagne, and potato chips. This is a wonderful party!”). Richard, however, has other ideas.

This particular screening will include a Q&A between film scholar Imogen Sara Smith and archivist Melissa Stevens, whose grandfather, Sam Shaw, photographed the starlet on set and over the course of her career. Per the Museum of the Moving Image’s website: “ACC Art Books has published the beautiful volume Dear Marilyn: The Unseen Letters and Photographs by Sam Shaw (2025). Through Shaw’s words and photographs, Dear Marilyn offers newly discovered correspondence and never-before-seen, digitally remastered photographs from the original 1940s–1960s archival material, from behind the scenes of The Seven Year Itch to candid images of her on the streets of New York City and in love at the beach in Amagansett.”

You can see showtimes and book tickets here!

The Academy Museum: Alfie (1966) (Date: 4.12) — See the film that catapulted Michael Caine to his first Best Actor nomination in 35mm! A wry dramedy with frequent fourth wall breaks, Alfie (1966) stars Caine as the eponymous chauffeur who womanizes his way through London at the height of the Swinging Sixties. In his original 1966 review for The Hollywood Reporter, James Powers lauds: “Caine…moves into the select class of top international stars. His low-key style, his immobile face, his deliberately flat voice, all seem to work against the role of invincible bird hunter…It is Caine’s success that he uses all these negatives to create a positive, a screen personality of compelling interest and impact.”

Metrograph: The Paris Review’s Spring Revel After Party (Date: 4.14) — Every April, The Paris Review hosts its annual Spring Revel. Held at Cipriani 42nd Street, this year’s fundraiser will honor Pulitzer winner Edward P. Jones as the latest Hadada Award winner. He joins the ranks of icons including Joan Didion, Paula Fox, and Norman Mailer, among other writers. Meanwhile, Bud Smith and Renny Gong will receive The Susannah Hunnewell Prize and The George Plimpton Prize for Fiction, respectively, with comedy icons John Early and Wallace Shawn serving as Masters of Ceremonies. Ticket prices begin at an out-of-budget $1200, but Metrograph hosts an after party starting at 11:00 PM. I am unsure how easy it is to get into, but worth a try if you’re out and about on the Lower East Side that night!

NYPL’s World Literature and Arts Festival (Dates: 4.15-4.30) — April marks the World Literature and Arts Festival at the New York Public Library (NYPL)! It kicks off in tandem with the city’s Immigrant Heritage Week and, per the site, “brings together trailblazers across disciplines to celebrate storytelling — through books, performances, culinary traditions, and beyond — while shining a spotlight on NYC’s diverse and vibrant communities.” You can check out details here.

Vista Hollywood: Cape Fear (1991) (Dates: 4.17-4.18) — For its late-night show the weekend of 4.17, The Vista will screen Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991)! This remake of the 1962 original stars Robert De Niro as Max Cady, a criminal who stalks one of the core witnesses in his case upon release. You can check out full thoughts on the film, as well as the 1962 version, here!

Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl (Dates: 4.18-4.25) — Spend the week leading up to Independent Bookstore Day (more on that in a minute) scoping out some of the best shops in Brooklyn!

Pick up a “passport” from one of the 34 participants across five zones as early as 4.18, then stop by as many of those indies as possible. You’ll get a stamp or signature at each one, earning 25% off any one purchase in a particular zone once you finish all the stores inside of it.

Then, if you wish, you can move onto the remaining four zones! Anyone who visits all 34 stops will win a grand prize by emailing a completed passport picture to brooklynbookstorecrawl@gmail.com.

The Center for Fiction: Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (2002) with August Thompson (Date: 4.23) — Join Anyone’s Ghost (2024) author August Thompson for a discussion of Train Dreams (2011), Denis Johnson’s novella that The Paris Review initially published in parts over the course of 2002. Like Clint Bentley’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation, it follows the life of railroad worker and logger Robert Grainier — a man who relishes in “the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him” — from an omniscient third-person perspective.

You can register here! You can reserve your spot with a hard copy or read the text here courtesy of The Paris Review.

Independent Bookstore Day (Date: 4.25) — Stop into your favorite local, independent bookstore on this particular Saturday! Most shops have special promotions and treats no matter where you’re based.

For New Yorkers, I recommend a visit to Three Lives & Company in the West Village, which typically has tasty homemade treats and special bookmarks. The Brooklyn Bookstore Crawl also continues through this day, culminating in the annual afterparty at The Center for Fiction; bring your “passport” for admission and arrive by 5:00 PM for the chance to enter a raffle!

The Paris Theater’s Academy Museum Branch Selects Series (Timing: Ongoing in April) — For the past three years, The Paris Theater and The Academy Museum partnered to present this annual festival, its programming featuring picks from all 19 branches of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Per the site, it “offers audiences a one-of-a-kind journey through film history, with each Academy branch selecting a film that represents a major achievement in the evolution of moviemaking and its unique disciplines.”

The April line-up includes Anatomy of a Murder (1951) for the Music Branch, Chinatown (1974) for the Production Design Branch, Eraserhead (1977) in 35mm for the Sound Branch, Taxi Driver (1976) for the Costume Designers Branch, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) in 35mm for the Cinematographers Branch, and more, with the series continuing into June.

Miscellaneous Musings

Introducing Dirt Books — Entertainment and culture magazine Dirt has always held a literary sensibility, having previously published everything from short fiction to book reviews to craft analyses (see: “Conspicuously Absent,” a personal-favorite piece on the absence of money in contemporary fiction that I discuss in the June 2024 newsletter). Now, the media company has announced the launch of its first-ever imprint: Dirt Books.

According to Literary Hub, the new house will “shake up the old publishing playbook by exploding notions of genre and form, and celebrating the subcultures driving artistic innovation…Starting this year, Dirt Books will publish at least two titles per annum, with a focus on strong voices and unique perspectives.” The first two acquisitions include writer musician, and visual artist Lauren Napier’s Tattooed, Pierced & Fucked-Up: A Scene Memoir 2004–2008 (2026) — an assemblage of diary entries, photos, and interviews designed to distill the aughts pop punk scene — and Geoffrey Mak’s Total Depravity (2026) — a debut novel framed as Gillian Flynn meets Donna Tartt that “follows a young trans woman as she falls in with a shadowy cast of nightlife characters who partake in strange rituals.” Watch this space!

Haruki Murakami and…Harry Styles? — Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami and British pop sensation Harry Styles, an unlikely intergenerational pairing, recently chatted about how running nourishes their creative lives for Runner’s World. Murakami has long credited the sport as a key source of creative stamina, part of the physical engine that keeps his mental acuity channeled toward the page (“When I was in my teens, musicians died so young. Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix. I think they couldn’t wait — live fast, die young. But that is not a thing that I wanted.”). He discusses this notion in two non-fiction works: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007) and Novelist as a Vocation (2015). Having read the former, Styles lauds the author as a personal hero, underscoring how the notion of an entwined creativity and physicality freed him from the archetype of the tortured artist (“Your point is that being healthy makes you able to be an artist for a long time, that you can be a structured, healthy person and make great work. So I have a lot of gratitude to you for that.”).

One of the most compelling exchanges, to me, centers on movement as not only a source of stamina, but also a creative incubator. Styles explains: “Personally, I’ve found the hypnotic, meditative aspect of music to have a lot of synergy with the meditative aspect of running. When I’m running is when I have…time to think a lot about what I’m making.” Meanwhile, Murakami experiences the act as vacuity shaped by a more subtle infiltration of thought (“When I’m running, I’m just running. I don’t think much. I listen to music mostly. When I come back to sit in front of the desk I begin thinking, but when I’m running, I’m kind of empty. Something comes into me, but I don’t notice it. To be empty is one of my purposes with running. I feel that training your body is the way to create the perfect vessel, building a foundation for the ideas to come into.”). (This portion personally resonated with me; while you will simply never catch me running, my formative fiction revelations often emerge from an emptied out brain during a walk or workout class.)

Not an AI Novel, Smh — ICYMI: UK-based writer Mia Ballard had her novel, Shy Girl (2026), pulled for suspected (read as: nearly definitive) AI use. Good! Here’s the thing. Ballard claims that a friend proofed a draft of her novel and dropped in suggestions to make it more “literary” (heavy on the air quotes), inserting ChatGPT-generated alternate language. I…have a lot of questions here. First off, not a single sentence in the excerpts I’ve seen falls under the umbrella of “literary” (“The bows on my pigtails pull too tight, yanking the skin and stretching my head into something neat, into something pleasing, a quiet violence made beautiful.” Jfc.). Secondly, who takes edits from a so-called friend wholesale like that? What happened to discernment! To taste!

While Reddit rabbit holing (likely thing for me to do), I found this thread, which points out Ballard’s seemingly AI-generated responses to an earlier author interview. Interesting! It also includes several astute observations around how to actually identify AI writing. Non-writers tend to cling to details, from the implementation of em-dashes to the avoidance of “be” verbs (a best practice I personally learned in middle school English) to a laundry list of certain LLM-prone words. Many Redditors in this thread — writers, English teachers, and editors — advocate for a necessary look at structure over specifics.

LLMs implement em-dashes in very particular ways, often stringing together two short sentences in place of a period or semicolon. As one user points out: “I cannot stress this enough, the phrasing: ‘This wasn’t just victory — it was hope.’ is usually AI. It isn’t so much the use of em-dashes that people have popularly clung to, but the phrasing. I think a lot of authors use em-dashes incorrectly, mostly because they want to indicate a sudden separation, or ‘slashing’ of their thought-process.” Writers also tend to cling to certain ticks; for instance, think of Bret Easton Ellis describing a set list’s worth of songs over the course of his novels. An LLM can mimic stylistic flourishes if prompted, but those kinds of descriptive signatures — sometimes good, sometimes bad — tend to steep into a writer’s subconscious rather than stem from overt intent.

Anyway! Consider these musings a call to look at the full picture rather than a few select words or punctuation choices when screening for AI writing.

A Bretaissance? — So, the last I heard, Bret Easton Ellis went through the process of adapting his latest (and best IMO) book, The Shards (2023), into a television program for HBO before the project stalled. Ripe material for a televised teen thriller, the novel follows a group of LA private school students stalked by a serial killer called The Trawler. Set over the fall of 1981, it encapsulates the long-gone local and cultural landscapes of Ellis’ teen years through the nostalgia-laced first-person lens of his older self.

I thought the project died and stopped paying attention, but apparently it got picked up by Ryan Murphy for FX, with filming recently wrapping? It stars a slate of newcomers, plus Kaia Gerber as Susan, the disaffected best friend of fictional teenage Bret. One newcomer? Homer Gere — the son of 80s icon and Ellis’s longtime celebrity crush, Richard Gere — as Robert Mallory. Consider me intrigued but skeptical (@ Ryan Murphy)!

While The Shards’s TV adaptation goes through post-production, check out ’s very thoughtful profile on the full trajectory of Bret’s career for .

Lou Reed Poems to Read to Your Lover — To commemorate the late Lou Reed’s birthday last month, published a string of song lyrics from and beyond his time with The Velvet Underground. Reed held literary aspirations and positioned his lyrics as poetry, able to stand on their own without music; this particular post celebrates that notion.

Supplemental Reading

As always, don’t forget to use archive.ph if you can’t access these pieces or any of the ones throughout my Substack!

Fiction:

• Harper’s BAZAAR: Ottessa Moshfegh Wants to Write an Ending That Messes With You

• Screen Splits: The Enigma of Rona Jaffe

• : There’s No Substitute For Reading: A Roundtable With Four Literary Magazine Editors

• : What Not Reading Does to Your Writing

• The Paris Review: Announcing the 2026 George Plimpton and Susannah Hunnewell Prizewinners

Film:

• New York Times: Angelika Saleh, the Angelika of Angelika Film Center, Dies at 90

• Air Mail: The Promising Young Women of the Nouvelle Vague

• Vanity Fair: An Oral History of the Vanity Fair Oscar Party

• Harper’s BAZAAR: Chase Infiniti Wears the Ultimate Ruffled Dress at the 2026 Oscars

• Vogue: Elle Fanning Used Fashion to Honor Her Childhood Home at the 2026 Oscars

• ELLE: Sofia Coppola Was Always in Fashion

• GQ: Harrison Ford’s 34 Best Outfits of All Time

Social Media Round-Up

A section aggregating tweets, TikToks, Notes, etc. that made me smile or laugh in the past month:

@estatesalefreaksWho else is doing this?? Love you @Los Angeles Public Library !!!! #losangeles #lapl #library #stamp

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Cocktail of the Month

Channel the 20th century American workplace of this month’s novel picks with the…

Gibson —

A favorite of the fictional Roger Sterling on Mad Men (2007-2015), this savory martini variation calls for two and a half ounces of Beefeater gin and half an ounce of dry vermouth. Stir both ingredients together in a mixing glass with ice, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Top with a cocktail onion, and enjoy!

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

March Book Selections

Pisces Szn means the vibe is artistic existential crises.

Accordingly, recommendations include:

Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (2025) — A welcome warm weather novel amidst seemingly unending cold, Minor Black Figures (2025) reanimates the summer of 2022 in New York, a specific sociopolitical moment marked by Dobbs decision disillusionment and a post-lockdown social upswing. In his first novel set outside the Midwest, Brandon Taylor adopts his usual third-person vantage point to trace three months in the life of Wyeth, a gay Black painter living on the Upper East Side. Central Park sunsets, buildings looming and “peering like giants from some other world,” spackle the setting as Wyeth grapples with the gripes that prod at his present moment.

The narrative melds with the minutiae of Wyeth’s daily life, drawing the reader through his discovery of forgotten artist Dell Woods. An unexpected intimacy also emerges between Wyeth and a former Jesuit priest named Keating, the novel’s pace yielding to the slow agony of yearning. As I write in the November Book Review: “Minor Black Figures, above all, operates as a portrait of the artist at a crossroads. Keating and Dell stoke, then restore, Wyeth’s stuttering sense of purpose. As a result of their influence, Wyeth comes to create a new piece that confronts the contours of contemporary Black artistry — and recaptures conviction in his craft.”

Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard (1984) — The Austrian novel that shaped the structure of Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love (2025), Woodcutters (1984) inhabits the headspace of an unnamed narrator returning to Vienna after a long escape to London. He immediately encounters the Auersbergers, a singer-and-composer husband-wife duo whose very name “brings on third-degree nausea.” Wound back into their web, the narrator attends an artists’ dinner party at their apartment. He watches the hosts and their guests from the perch of a winged chair, his frustrations with the social set unspooling from a single paragraph.

Time tints his perspective. For instance, the narrator reflects: “Thirty years ago, I thought, I used to love this music room, which I always described as the most beautiful Josephine room I had ever seen. But later I realized that it was simply too beautiful, too perfectly furnished, and hence unbearable.” Through Woodcutters, Bernhard dissects the delineation between so-called high and low art, while also capturing “the disorientation of returning to a city that calcifies into a place of impediment, to a set of people whose meaning morphs through maturation,” as I write in the November Book Review.

Luster by Raven Leilani (2020) — Lauded by Esquire as “a masterpiece of carnal doom,” Luster (2020) centers on 23-year-old aspiring painter Edie, one of two Black women working at a New York publishing house (“On her first day, she came to the office meek and gorgeous, primed to be a token…When she found me, when we looked at each other that first time, finally released from our respective tokenism, I felt incredible relief.”). Her narration blends lyricism with bone dry humor, capturing the acute sense of dread that characterizes the contemporary condition (“I think about sending him [Eric] a comprehensive list of things that he is allowed to do to me, so that we are on the same page, but when I have a draft it has a kind of Helga Pataki vibe.”). A byproduct of Bushwick, Edie soon slips into the web of a white suburban family, first by way of her affair with middle-aged Eric, then through connections artistic and racial, respectively, with his wife, Rebecca, and daughter, Akila.

Beyond the obvious open marriage propelling the plot, Luster unspools the artistic process and preoccupations of its Gen Z narrator. Discussing the novel from the vantage point of 2022, Leilani explains: “Now that it has been a few years since the book came out, I feel more able to articulate how my own life — my relation­ship to making art, how I was paying my bills, the ways I had been indoctrinated into specific social codes regarding carnality and misbehavior — shaped the preoccupations of the book. While I was writing about a black girl grappling with her artistry, I was grap­pling with my own. The book came in a panic, the fastest I’ve ever written anything, and it happened, like Edie’s paintings, between working hours. It was personal. Everything I do starts in the personal, and if it doesn’t, it dies.”

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (1964) — This posthumously published memoir traces Ernest Hemingway’s time in 1920s Paris, younger years spent married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and at Gertrude Stein’s salons alongside the likes of Lost Generation icons from Sylvia Beach to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway describes Stein as aesthetically akin to “a Roman emperor,” Fitzgerald’s talent as “natural as the pattern that was made by the dust of a butterfly’s wings.” A Moveable Feast (1964) knits together assorted memories, minute moments that gain gargantuan importance through the crystalline lens of hindsight. Paris cradles each page like a living memory, nestling the narrative in nostalgia. Hemingway explains: “There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

Upcoming Content to Consume

The Strand: Medium Rare (2026) Launch Event (Date: 3.4) — The second novel from The Portrait of a Mirror (2021) author A. Natasha Joukovsky hits shelves this month! Her debut reimagines the myth of Narcissus through a set of upper crust East Coast couples in the summer of 2015. Now, Medium Rare (2026) “transforms the myth of Icarus into a blazing romp through bureaucracy, B-list fame, and college basketball,” per Penguin Random House.

For its launch event, Joukovsky will discuss the book alongside The Ten Year Affair (2025) author Erin Somers and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler at The Strand’s Rare Book Room. You can reserve a seat for $13.61 or a seat and signed copy of Medium Rare for $25.21 here!

IFC Center: An American Werewolf in London (1981) (Dates: 3.6-3.7) — IFC’s Waverly Midnights Series takes a more specific turn this March, celebrating the rare set of genre films that broke through at the Oscars. My personal favorite pick? An American Werewolf in London (1981), which took home the gold for Best Makeup and Hairstyling at the 54th Academy Awards.

As I write in the June 2024 Movie Review, John Landis’s cult classic horror comedy “is pure fun; it’s silly, gory, and campy, as epitomized by Dunne’s depiction, Rick Baker’s monster makeup, and the movie’s soundtrack of moon-themed bangers, from ‘Moondance’ to ‘Bad Moon Rising’ to countless ‘Blue Moon’ covers. The film opens with two American grad students, David (played by David Naughton) and Jack (played by Dunne), trekking across the English moors. They pull into a local pub, met with an assortment of odd townspeople who urge them to stay on the road and beware of the full moon. David and Jack continue their journey without heeding that advice. While Jack gets mauled to death, David lands in a London hospital, where he falls in love with his nurse, Alex (played by Jenny Agutter). Meanwhile, a decaying undead Jack visits David, urging his friend to kill himself before he can hurt others during the upcoming full moon.”

Book your tickets here!

Metrograph’s What Price Hollywood? Series (Opening Date: 3.6) — Celebrate Oscars season with this series dedicated to “cinematic poison pen letters.”

Per Metrograph: “A place ‘where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul,’ per Marilyn Monroe; the ‘market where lies are bought,’ according to Bertolt Brecht. Where else but Hollywood — the name understood to refer to the popular American film industry as a whole more than to one Los Angeles neighborhood — the ‘city’ that loves to self-hate…Stars past their sell-by date…pernicious producers who’ll stop at nothing to succeed…actresses looking for a big break who wind up broken…You’ll find all these, and lots of beautiful people doing hideous things, when you go sifting through the tawdry detritus of Tinseltown.”

The line-up lists favorites including Sunset Boulevard (1950), In a Lonely Place (1950), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019). You can check out specific showtimes here!

MoMA’s Marilyn Monroe: Celluloid Dream Series (Dates: 3.12-3.25) — This June marks 100 years since the birth of Gemini icon Norma Jeane Mortenson, aka: Marilyn Monroe. In anticipation, MoMA is mounting a series dedicated to the comedy legend and her enduring influence.

Per MoMA: “In 1952, she helped bring sex into American homes when Playboy published nude photos of her in its inaugural edition. Monroe admitted to having made them without shame, revealing a sexual candor that infused the unforgettable persona she introduced in the torrid Niagara (1953), her first film with top billing. Though she is frequently described as the greatest sex symbol of all time, that distinction fails to capture the true depth of her talent. For Hollywood, Monroe was the perfect ‘dumb blonde’ bombshell, an embodiment of the wildest fantasies of a male audience. For Norma Jeane, ‘Marilyn’ was a persona, crafted by an actor who dreamed of playing Dostoevsky’s Grushenka, that masterfully exposed the inanity of those male fantasies by becoming one of the greatest comedic performers of all time.”

The festival features favorites including All About Eve (1950), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), and Some Like It Hot (1959). You can see the full line-up here!

McNally Jackson Seaport: J.R. Thornton presents Lucien (2026) in conversation with Graydon Carter (Date: 3.19) — An upcoming release that has caught my eye! Described as an exploration of class and ambition in the vein of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and The Secret History (1992), Lucien (2026) centers on Christopher “Atlas” Novotny, the son of working-class Czech immigrants at Harvard on scholarship who gets wound into the web of his wealthy roommate.

Author J.R. Thornton will discuss his new novel alongside Air Mail co-founder and former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter at McNally Jackson Seaport. You can reserve a seat for $5 or a seat and copy of the book for $18.99 here!

Bibliotheque: Clueless (1995) and Legally Blonde (2001) Double Feature (Date: 3.23) — For those of you unfamiliar, Bibliotheque operates as a bookstore and cafe by day, wine bar by night, featuring all sorts of film and fiction programming. (My friends and I had a blast at literary trivia last October! The head sommelier made the move over from Eleven Madison Park, so you’re guaranteed a winning list of wine options too.)

Every month, the SoHo space features four sets of double features on Monday evenings, with March focused on female-led films for Women’s History Month. Catch the ultimate chick flick double feature with Clueless (1995) and Legally Blonde (2001) on 3.23! You can book here and see the full line-up here.

McNally Jackson: Rob Franklin teaches Joan Didion on Place (Start Date: 3.24) — This virtual course consists of four, hour-long online sessions dedicated to Joan Didion’s exploration of place. Curriculum will include essays “Goodbye to All That” (1967), “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1967), and “The White Album” (1979), plus excerpts from South and West (2017), coalescing to craft a discussion of how her form and content captures the spirit of California, New York, and the American South.

Great Black Hope (2025) author Rob Franklin will teach. His debut novel dissects the social stratum New York and Atlanta, providing a peek into the particular lens Franklin will bring to these sessions. You can reserve a seat for $235, a price inclusive of a copy of South and West, here!

The Academy Museum: 2026 Oscars Programming (Timing: Ongoing in March) — March is a bit of a big deal for the folks over at The Academy Museum, their whole raison d’être, if you will.

In the lead-up to the 98th Academy Awards, visitors can enjoy screenings of current and past nominated films, panels with select nominated filmmakers, and more (details here and here), culminating with The Official Oscars Watch Party at the museum.

Museum of the Moving Image’s 2001: The Year, Not the Movie Series (Timing: Ongoing in March) — I just became aware of this series that started in February, dedicated to celebrating the cultural impact of cinema from 2001, a cultural and sociopolitical watershed year.

Per the site: “In both cinema and the world at large, there was before 2001 and there was after 2001. For movie lovers, there will always be the cinematic and cultural meaning of the year as enshrined by Stanley Kubrick in 1968 as a beacon of future shock and a symbol of human endeavor. But when that year finally came, it was indeed a herald of larger shifts that had begun to take place at the turn of the millennium. We had made it through the clamor and paranoia of Y2K, but the internet had only begun to transform our relationships to ourselves and others; the dot-com bubble had already burst; and the harbinger of early digital video was starting to make itself known, many years before it would change the way movies were shot, distributed, projected, and consumed. And, of course, the cataclysmic events of September 11 changed how we saw and experienced the world. It also happened to be a spectacular movie year, many films of which seem unusually remarkable in their greatness and for the prescient ways they predicted the century to come, in both theme and form.”

The March line-up includes favorites from Mulholland Drive (2001) to The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) to Gosford Park (2001) to Ghost World (2001). You can check out the full schedule here!

Miscellaneous Musings

In Response to Lili Anolik on Dorothy Stratten — ICYMI: I had some thoughts in response to Lili Anolik’s recent piece on Pisces princess Dorothy Stratten, the emerging actress, Peter Bogdanovich partner, and former Playboy Playmate brutally murdered by her promoter-slash-pimp ex-husband.

Inside the Shady Operating Practices of Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) — , a newsletter from writer Tasbeeh Herwees dedicated to LA happenings, recently ran a thoughtful piece revealing the rot beneath Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB). Interweaving testimonials from six former staffers, Herwees crystallizes the magazine’s cracked culture, from its attempts to publish thoughts from an “idiotic IDF sniper himbo” that failed fact-checking to a former editor’s “extended, approximately three-minute impersonation of [another editor] as a baby” during a performance review.

First launched on Tumblr in 2011, LARB owns a name that suggests singularity, the journal as the ultimate source for literary connection in Los Angeles. The title touts legitimacy without warrant. Its sheen swaddles a shallow interior, an odd allegory somehow synonymous with the spectacle of the city it represents. One former editor notes: “The best thing the founders of the LA Review of Books did was name it…because the name gave it a sense of tradition and belonging in this milieu of publications it just does not belong in.”

Herwees goes on to explain: “Los Angeles has few, if any, literary institutions with any name recognition. The need for a serious writing outlet is pressing in a city decimated by malicious investors and billionaires. But it remains dubious that a magazine run by a board of directors that seems divorced from the realities of writers and the workers in the trenches of magazine editing can be that outlet.”

Vladimir (2022) Adaptation Premiering This Month! — Last April, we discussed Netflix’s plan to adapt Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir (2022) into a limited television series, with the author writing and executive producing a la Sally Rooney. As I explain in that newsletter, the source material “inhabits the perspective of an unnamed narrator, an older woman who teaches at a liberal arts college in New England alongside her husband. While he undergoes an investigation for his consensual relationships with female students, a new professor, Vladimir, starts at the school, sparking a dangerous obsession.” The cast includes Rachel Weisz as the narrator, John Slattery (!!!) as her husband, and Leo Woodall as Vladimir. Episodes drop on 3.5!

Big News for Sofia Coppola Stans (Me) — Château de Versailles has announced an exhibition to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), a film that had unparalleled impact on my aesthetic sensibility and music taste as a teenager (hardly a unique experience for women in my age bracket).

Opening this September, Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola will take place at the late queen’s favorite space, Petit Trianon, and celebrate the enduring influence of the distinctive aesthetic Coppola cultivated. It will include displays of “original costumes by Milena Canonero, filming accessories, storyboards, annotated scripts, set photographs and set design sketches. Screenings will allow visitors to revisit sequences filmed in the very rooms where they were shot, offering a unique immersive experience in which the historic space and its cinematic reinterpretation resonate with one another,” per the site.

Los Angeles Public Library Merch — As LAPL centennial celebrations continue, local clothing brand Online Ceramics has unveiled a capsule collection to mark the occasion. Check it out here!

“Buyline” from Byline — Byline, the quarterly literature and culture magazine architected around creative expression, has introduced a new shopping column. Cleverly called “Buyline,” it features what people are buying and wanting to buy. Chic!! A welcome break from the deluge of influencer Amazon wishlists!

Supplemental Reading

As always, don’t forget to use archive.ph if you can’t access these pieces or any of the ones throughout my Substack!

Fiction:

• Vogue: The Brontë Renaissance Continues With Aimee Lou Wood as Jane Eyre

• McNally Editions: An Awfully Big Announcement

• The New Yorker: Dorothy Parker’s Profile of Ernest Hemingway

• Study Hall: The Afterlife of Dinah Brooke

• The Guardian: Francis King’s Obituary

• Town & Country: Ralph Lauren and Gatsby Together Again?

• The Creative Independent: Writer and Comedian Amy Silverberg on how to take the pressure off the process

Film:

• Architectural Digest: Kristen Stewart’s Bold Plan to Bring a Beloved Los Angeles Theater Back to Life

• The Paris Review: Frederick Wiseman, The Art of Documentary No. 1

• IndieWire: Former Sundance Head Tabitha Jackson Will Next Lead NYC’s Film Forum

• Vanity Fair: Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert Duvall: Three Friends Who Went from Rags to Riches

• PEOPLE: BAFTA Film Awards 2026: Full List of Winners

• Los Angeles Times: On Dawson’s Creek: James Van der Beek Taught Millennials How to Cry

• Page Six Hollywood: Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan to reunite at Oscars for emotional Rob Reiner tribute

Social Media Round-Up

A section aggregating tweets, TikToks, Notes, etc. that made me laugh in the past month:

Cocktail of the Month

Mix up an Oscar night cocktail in the form of the…

Red Carpet Kickoff —

To make it, combine one ounce each of No. 3 London Dry Gin, Tempus Fugit Alessio Vermouth Di Torino, and Luxardo Bitters in a shaker over ice. Shake well, and serve in a coupe class. Cheers!

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

February Book Selections

The debut of Emerald Fennell’s much-discussed “Wuthering Heights” (2026) falls this month, which means we’re reading “love stories,” emphasis on the quotation marks.

Recommendations for the month ahead include:

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938) — My new favorite Gothic novel! As I write in the forthcoming January Book Review:

The psychological thriller famously opens with a dream, a memory, recounted by an unnamed narrator who has “come through…crisis, not unscathed, of course.” She recalls an abandoned country estate, “a jewel in the hollow of a hand,” “an empty shell” left to linger in her mind. She describes: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited.” The story then loops backward as its narrator’s identity — or lack thereof — crystallizes. A woman in her early twenties, she travels alongside the acrid, older Mrs. Van Hopper — whose “sharp and staccato” voice “cut[s] the air like a saw” — as a lady’s companion. In Monte Carlo, the narrator meets and falls for mysterious widower Maxim de Winter. They marry and return to his famed home, Manderley; upon arrival, the enduring chokehold of the prior Mrs. de Winter, the novel’s namesake, emerges.

Rebecca (1938) prefigures the structure that forms contemporary favorites from The Shards (2023) to Playworld (2025) to Good Girl (2025). Much like Bret Easton Ellis’s Bret, Adam Ross’s Griffin, and Aria Aber’s Nila, the second Mrs. de Winter embodies adolescent naivety (“‘Put a ribbon round your hair and be Alice-in-Wonderland,’ said Maxim lightly; ‘you look like it now, with your finger in your mouth.’”). All four novels trace its slow incineration, recounted by an older iteration of its primary character…This structure serves the simultaneous purpose of cultivating suspense. Every few pages, Mrs. de Winter hints at forthcoming fractures (“When I look back at my first party at Manderley, my first and my last, I can remember little isolated things standing alone out of the vast blank canvas of the evening.”). Paranoia plagues her, perception morphing into an immovable imagined reality. She remains nameless from start to finish, her husband’s surname serving as her sole identifier. This choice from author Daphne du Maurier imbues the narrator with an amorphous sense of self that bleeds into Maxim’s identity and blurs under Rebecca’s legacy.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925) — The ultimate “for the girlies” novel, a “love story” that emphasizes diamonds and female friendship as forever. Lauded by Edith Wharton as “the Great American Novel,” Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) encapsulates flapper culture at the pinnacle of Prohibition. It adopts an epistolary form, consisting of diary entries from single New Yorker Lorelei Lee as she travels abroad with her best friend and hard-boiled foil, Dorothy Shaw, with the objective of “getting educated.” As the pair pops champagne at every Ritz-Carlton from New York to London to Paris to “the Central of Europe” and back again, Lorelei — described by Happy Hour (2020) author Marlowe Granados as “an archetypal faux-naïf…[who] uses her perceived naïveté to get the better of the gentlemen around her” — chronicles their schemes and adventures.

The Big Love by Mrs. Florence Aadland (1961) — This engrossing, completely batshit biography details the predatory relationship between washed-up actor Errol Flynn and underage performer Beverly Aadland from the perspective of her fame-hound of a mother. Publisher Spurl Editions rightly describes it as a “bizarre, seedy time capsule of the 1950s,” explaining:

There is nothing subtle or sympathetic about this memoir: It is outrageous, grotesque, surreal, notorious — an intimate look at Hollywood exploitation and decay. On the one hand, The Big Love (1961) depicts the deterioration of Errol Flynn, an actor who is quickly losing relevance after years of playing irresistible swashbucklers in films such as Captain Blood (1935) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). He is riddled with medical problems, drinking himself to death. On the other hand, there is Mrs. Florence Aadland, also an alcoholic, an uncultured stage mother psychotically pushing her daughter Beverly forward even at the cost of her own marriage.

Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady by Dinah Brooke (1971) — A well-written Eat Pray Love (2006) for Lana del Rey fans, Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady (1971) upends the archetypal narrative of a woman searching for enlightenment in Italy. As I write in the December Book Review, “this deliciously dark novel…slips into the headspace of Miranda, a young British mother married to an American actor named Louis, from a third-person vantage point (“Her profile was totally inexpressive; not exactly inexpressive, but still to him, after more than a year of marriage, impenetrable.”). The couple rents a cold, dark Italian villa alongside their infant (“If they ate in the dining room, it was difficult to distinguish between the sugar and grated parmesan, and if they ate outside wasps homed in on every mouthful.”). When Louis gets called away to a shoot, Oreste, his acquaintance from a nearby town, arrives at the villa and pulls Miranda into the undertow of sexual awakening, followed by perpetual paranoia.”

Free Love: The Story of a Great American Scandal by Robert Shaplen (1954) — A la Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), Free Love: The Story of a Great American Scandal (1954) first published as a series of articles for The New Yorker. Journalist Robert Shaplen examined over 3,000 pages of court transcripts, love letters, and newspaper reports to reconstruct the tale of a church scandal that shook 1870 Brooklyn: prominent housewife Elizabeth Tilton confessing to an affair with pastor Henry Ward Beecher — founder of the most fashionable church in Brooklyn Heights, a presidential hopeful, and an influential supporter of Abolition and the campaign for women’s suffrage. As I write in the August 2024 Book Review, “Shaplen distills a recognizable flavor of what Publishers Weekly calls an ‘American media frenzy…a vision of sweaty, prurient absurdity’ that feels both of its era and timeless.”

Upcoming Content to Consume

Between special Valentine’s Day screenings and the Academy Awards lead-up, February’s looking more film than fiction heavy!

If you’re looking for a comprehensive guide to community-driven literary events in and around New York, London, and LA, don’t forget to subscribe to Scremes Report for a week-by-week breakdown. A couple standouts in the coming weeks include the latest iteration of STAGE BREAK, which I wrote about back in August, and Limousine and Angel Food Magazine’s Readings on Love, a portion of proceeds going toward the Immigrant Defense Project, at Rodeo.

Before we get into IRL screening opportunities, The Criterion Channel has a few stellar collections to check out this month, from Celebrate Black History to Yearning to Gangsters, Gold Diggers, and Grifters: Mervyn LeRoy’s Pre-Code Films. Plus, you can stream Wuthering Heights’s 1933 and 2011 adaptations, respectively, before the ~controversial~ new Emerald Fennell version hits theaters.

Now, here’s what’s happening live:

Film Forum’s Tenement Stories: From Immigrants to Bohemians Series (Opening Date: 2.6) — This upcoming festival celebrates films set in New York’s tenement districts, from Brooklyn to the Bronx to, of course, the Lower East Side. Spanning over a century of cinema and presented in partnership with The Tenement Museum, it includes over 50 movies from the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Charlie Chaplin, Hal Ashby, Elia Kazan, John Huston, William Wyler, and Sean Baker, among others.

Ample guest speakers will appear, with fourteen of the silent films in the series featuring live piano accompaniment. Plus, per Film Forum: “Valentine’s Day will be celebrated with love stories set in tenement neighborhoods: the romantic comedies Rafter Romance (1933), starring Ginger Rogers; Raoul Walsh’s Me and My Gal (1942), starring Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett, followed by a special presentation by Bruce Goldstein, originally created for the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood; Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928); and Preston Sturges’s Christmas in July (1940) — with the day topped off by the original, multi-Oscar-winning 1961 version of the Leonard Bernstein/Jerome Robbins musical West Side Story (1961).”

You can check out the full line-up for and beyond Valentine’s Day here!

Vista Hollywood: Before Sunrise (1995) (Dates: 2.6-2.7) — Head to The Vista for a midnight screening of Before Sunrise (1995) next weekend! The Richard Linklater cult classic stars Ethan Hawke as Texan tourist Jesse and Julie Delpy as French Sorbonne student Céline, a pair of strangers who meet on a Eurail train barreling away from Budapest. The duo disembarks together in Vienna, spending the evening wandering through the city before Jesse’s flight back to the United States.

As I write in the June 2024 Movie Review: “Before Sunrise captures youth and transience in equal measure. The entire film more or less consists of an ongoing conversation between Jesse and Céline, meandering through topics ranging from gender to purpose to religion…Their philosophical openness, to me, reflects a kind of curiosity about life, about the future, that tends to wane with age, that becomes shackled to, then buried by, reality and responsibility; it belongs to a moment that, inevitably, will calcify.”

Metrograph’s Orangey, Hollywood’s Favorite Feline Series (Opening Date: 2.7) — A screening series of great importance to me! Metrograph plans to mount a celebration of midcentury feline film star(s?) Orangey, who appeared in the likes of Rhubarb (1951), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), among other movies.

Per the site: “The feline has never enjoyed quite the same prestige on-screen as the endlessly tractable, hungry-for-approval dog — there has never been a calico Rin Tin Tin, nor a tortoiseshell Lassie. But there was Orangey, the shorthair marmalade tabby of movie animal wrangler Frank Inn, never exactly a household name, but to date the only cat to win two Picture Animal Top Star of the Year awards (PATSYs)…Was the phenomenon known as ‘Orangey’ in fact a composite of more than one animal’s performances? Inn has confessed as much, but this detracts nothing from the fact that there is only one Orangey, and, in this series, Metrograph celebrates and sings the praises of him…of them…whatever you prefer. Viva Orangey!”

You can check out showtimes here!

The Paris Theater: All About Eve (1950) (Date: 2.9) — This absolute masterpiece stars the incomparable Bette Davis as Broadway veteran Margo Channing, who makes the grave mistake of taking fan and aspiring actress Eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter) under her wing. Eve presents as a naif before her true colors, a more sinister set of shades, emerge.

Roger Ebert, in a 2000 review, compares Davis with Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950). The films hold undeniable similarities, from cyclical narratives to established leading ladies. Ebert writes: “When you compare the performances by Davis and Swanson, you see different approaches to similar material. Both play great stars, now aging. Davis plays Margo Channing realistically, while Swanson plays Norma Desmond as a gothic waxwork. Sunset Boulevard seems like the better film today, maybe because it fits our age of irony, maybe because Billy Wilder was a better director than Joseph Mankiewicz. But Davis’ performance is stronger than Swanson’s, because it’s less mad and more touching.”

Metrograph: Lolita (1962) (Date: 2.13) — Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) screens at Metrograph this month as part of a series dedicated to the discomfort of awakening sexuality. As I write in the September Movie Review:

Directed by Stanley Kubrick with a script by Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1962) adapts the controversial eponymous novel for the big screen against the backdrop of early 1960s censorship…The film mimics…[the novel’s looping] narrative structure — with a few notable changes in content…Regardless, it distills the tone and tenor that distinguishes its source material. In the original text, Nabokov uses “alliteration and double entendres to create a simmering sense of unnerving sexuality,” as I write in the January 2024 newsletter. This same sense translates to Kubrick’s adaptation; every line contains multiple layers of meaning. For instance, Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze (played by Shelley Winters), says she “goes limp” every time Humbert touches her, to which he laments “know[ing] the feeling,” and Lolita summers at Camp Climax for Girls. These insertions edge the film into the realm of dark satire that shapes later Kubrick works like Dr. Strangelove (1964). Lolita’s actors, especially Winters and [Peter] Sellers, deal in high-caliber comedy, but each entrancing performance — in particular, those given by [James] Mason [as Humbert] and [Sue] Lyon [as Lolita] — remains earnest, grounding the film.

The Egyptian Theatre: American Cinematheque’s Nitrate Film Festival 2026 (Opening Date: 2.13) — This month, American Cinematheque will mount a series of rare Nitrate screenings — presented in partnership with the George Eastman Museum, MoMA, Filmarchiv Austria, the Library of Congress, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive — at The Egyptian.

So, what’s nitrate exactly? The primary property that people used to create 35mm film from the 1890s through the 1950s. Eventually, it got phased out because of its high flammability and, as you can imagine, storage complications, getting relegated to properly cooled archives across and beyond the country. As the British Film Institute describes: “Aesthetically, nitrate film was unparalleled in its time. Its luminosity and metallic lustre came perhaps from all that silver. It took colour well. From the earliest days, films were offered in hand-coloured, stencilled or tinted and toned prints with a jewel-like quality. Later ‘natural colour’ systems seem flat by comparison, like the difference between a printed picture and a stained glass window.”

American Cinematheque’s line-up includes My Man Godfrey (1936), Blithe Spirit (1945), and Samson and Delilah (1949), among others. You can check out the current showtimes here!

The Academy Museum: Retro Romantics: An Academy Film Archive Trailer Show in 35mm (Date: 2.14) — My Valentine’s Day pick for Angelenos! Presented entirely in 35mm, this 70-minute long program slices together romance-riddled film trailers pulled from the Academy Film Archive. Per the site: “This vintage compendium of coming attractions explores the agony and the ecstasy of art-house amour, from red-blooded lust and lovelorn lotharios to feverish melodramas and tortured obsessions. Presented entirely on 35mm film, these pre-show entertainments of the last several decades function as miniature films in their own right — many of which haven’t been seen since they originally screened in theaters.”

Village East: Casablanca (1942) (Date: 2.14) — My Valentine’s Day pick for New Yorkers! A perfect film screening on 35mm! For those of you unfamiliar, Casablanca (1942) centers on American expat Rick Blaine (played by Humphrey Bogart), who runs a Casablanca-based bar crawling with German and Vichy officials. He stays out of hot water, out of the mechanics of World War II as it rages through Europe and North Africa, through his professed neutrality. But when Rick’s ex, Ilsa Lund (played by Ingrid Bergman), walks into his club with her husband, Czech resistance leader and fugitive Victor Laszlo (played by Paul Henreid), that stance that gets shaken

Syndicated BK: Romeo + Juliet (1996) (Dates: 2.14-2.15) — My (other) Valentine’s Day pick for New Yorkers! Catch Baz Luhrmann’s stylized adaptation of the Bard’s doomed romance at Bushwick’s best (and possibly only?) dine-in theater. Romeo + Juliet (1996) stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as the titular characters, reimagining fair Verona as Verona Beach. In 2021, critic Stephanie Zacharek revisited the maximalist mid-90s time capsule for its 25th anniversary, writing: “Luhrmann’s film is a dizzying assemblage of fast cutting and mad camera swirls; scenes sometimes chop off abruptly, leaving you reaching out, longing for more — but even that is part of the movie’s brash, prismatic lyricism.”

IFC Center: 2026 Oscar Nominated Shorts (Opening Date: 2.20) — Starting President’s Day weekend, IFC Center will hold a series of feature-length screenings, each one encompassing the short film nominees in the Live Action, Animated, or Documentary category ahead of this year’s Academy Awards. Head here for details!

The Paris Theater: Gosford Park (2001) (Date: 2.21) — Set in the same interwar twilight that shapes Brideshead Revisited (1945), Gosford Park (2001) serves as Robert Altman’s twist on the traditional murder mystery. It centers on a cluster of upper crust Brits who find their weekend at a country estate disrupted when host Sir William McCordle (played by Michael Gambon) turns up dead after dinner. As I write in the September Movie Review, “the traditional whodunit expands to explore the class stratification that shaped the sociopolitical texture of Britain between the wars.”

The Paris Theater: Nashville (1975) (Date: 2.22) — Another Robert Altman classic! As I write in last year’s March Movie Review:

Screened a year ahead of the United States’s Bicentennial, Nashville (1975) follows a sprawling cast of 24 characters through the “Country Music Capital of the World,” with early-era performances from the likes of Lily Tomlin, Shelley Duvall, and Jeff Goldblum. It blurs the line between celebrities and politicians, unveiling the kernels of criticism now synonymous with the populist swell of 2016. Unconventionality runs through all aspects of the film; Altman managed casting through chemistry meetings rather than traditional auditions, encouraged improvisation in crowds without a predetermined sense of the camera’s focus. Per Kael, “the deepest tensions play out in the quietest scenes.” This approach results in a slice-of-life saga punctuated by an unnerving ending, one shaped by the violence lurking beneath American culture.

Miscellaneous Musings

Nur Jahan —> Mumtaz-Mahal —> Elizabeth Taylor —> Margot Robbie — ICYMI: Margot Robbie stepped onto the red carpet at the world premiere of “Wuthering Heights” (2026) wearing one of the most iconic necklaces in the late Elizabeth Taylor’s collection, a gift from Richard Burton for her 40th birthday.

Dubbed the Taj Mahal necklace, the piece bears an inscription that reads “Love is Everlasting” alongside the name of empress Nur Jahan, who received it as a gift from her husband, Shah Jahangir, Mughal emperor of India from 1605 to 1627. Per Vanity Fair: “Although it is not known whether Nur Jahan ever wore the jewel, it appears that it later ended up in the hands of his son, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, who gave it as a gift to his own beloved wife, Mumtaz-Mahal, who died in childbirth after bearing him 14 children. Overcome with grief, he had the world-famous Taj Mahal mausoleum erected for her in her memory in Agra, India, for which only the finest materials available in the world were used.”

Cartier acquired the diamond in 1971, with designer Alfred Durante refashioning it into the necklace we know today, complete with rubies, jade detailing, and adjustable gold tassels. The piece remained in Taylor possession until her 2011 death, after which it sold for $8.8 million at auction.

An undoubted emblem of enduring romance, the kind of love that looms above time and space, the Taj Mahal necklace also seems to reflect an era when Cartier cobbled together pieces drawn from and inspired by other cultures sans collaboration. Discussing The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Cartier exhibition in last July’s newsletter, I write: “The initial room reflects an early-days fixation with far-off cultures, borderline appropriative designs drawing on the aesthetics of Iran, Japan, Russia, and, of course, India, then part of the British empire. As it grows, Cartier moves away from colonialist copies and toward genuine collaboration. For instance, one of my favorite pieces featured stems from a commission made by María Félix, a Mexican actress who dominated Latin American screens throughout the 1940s and 1950s. In 1968, she worked with Cartier to design a necklace that adopts the shape of a snake, with the diamonds on its underbelly chosen to match the colors of the Mexican flag.”

Sweet Pickle Sequel — Sweet Pickle Books, the celebrity-favorite Lower East Side staple that allows customers to swap used books for fresh pickles, has expanded with a second store next door. Toward the start of January, owner Leigh Altshuler posted a silhouetted selfie in the storefront window to announce its opening. The new shop — Sweet Pickle Books: Rare, Fine, and Fancy — specializes in rare and out-of-print books, while also selling stationary, ephemera, and, of course, pickles.

The new offshoot operates on an appointment-only basis. To book, email rff@sweetpicklebooks.com or call (917) 262-0797!

An Ode to the Art of the Home Chef in the East Village — Speaking of indie bookstore openings, longtime Three Lives & Company manager Troy Chatterton announced his departure from the beloved West Village bookshop, effective at the end of February. After 15 years, Troy’s leaving to launch Wild Sorrel Cookbooks — a new, Laurie Colwin-coded store devoted to the home cook — in the East Village this spring. In the meantime, I’ve been languorously making my way through British food journalist Diana Henry’s Around the Table: 52 Essays on Food & Life (2025) on his recommendation.

Los Angeles Central Library Centennial — This year, LA’s Central Library — an architectural landmark of downtown added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 — turns 100! Celebrations kicked off last week with the opening of a time capsule placed in the building’s cornerstone during its original construction and will continue all year with various exhibitions celebrating its history and offerings. If you’re based in LA, stop into any branch for a limited edition library card!

Save the PCC Update — Last year, I wrote about the potential closure of Prince Charles Cinema (PCC), an indie theater located in London’s Leicester Square that screens repertory films alongside new releases. In June, the Westminster Council named it an asset of community value (ACV), “distinguish[ing it] from other local cinemas by means of its independent ethos, unparalleled programming, and a close relationship with the local community,” per Prince Charles Cinema’s site.

Last week, the theater shared an update on Instagram in tandem with the one-year anniversary of its Save the PCC campaign; while the ACV recognition marked a win, overall progress toward a permanent long-term lease remains slow. In the meantime, if you’re based in London, check out the PCC’s stellar slate of programming to show support.

New Emma Cline Loading — Doesn’t it feel like fresh copies of Emma Cline’s sophomore novel, The Guest (2023), just filled a bevy of beach blankets out east, many bought with blind devotion to the novel’s sun-soaked setting? Well, Cline announced a new release, Switzy (2026), hitting bookstores this September.

One of my favorite contemporary novelists, Cline considers borrowed time, the knowledge that comes with staring down its barrel, as her latest book’s basis. Per People, the narrative centers on retired executive David Hastings, who “embarks on a personal pilgrimage as he begins to lose his memory. Accompanied by his personal assistant Cody, the two begin a voyage together, including stops in London to see David’s daughter and a trip to France to meet with an estranged friend, before David makes his final stop in Zurich.”

Winter’s Hottest Accessory: The Lost Lambs (2026) Earmuffs — FSG has upped its game since the dreaded days of the Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) bucket hat. The press package for Madeline Cash’s new novel, Lost Lambs (2026), includes a campy pair of lamb earmuffs. My dream merch! Cute!!

Nancy Allen on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast — Actress and philanthropist Nancy Allen appeared on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast in January, making for an especially compelling episode. For those of you unfamiliar with her work, she most famously appeared in a trio of Brian de Palma cult classics: Carrie (1976), Dressed to Kill (1980), and Blow Out (1981).

Beyond discussion of her marriage to de Palma and his directorial style, Allen reflects on everything from the coke-addled set of Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (1979) to ill-fated experiences filming RoboCop 2 (1990) to her shift toward shaping the WeSpark Cancer Support Center as Executive Director. The charming conversation sparkles with insights, and Allen gives one of the best responses to Bret’s perennial closing question: “What do you think about The Eagles?” (“I love The Eagles! I dated Glenn Frey.”)

The White Lotus Does The Cannes Film Festival? — Mike White’s HBO mega hit recently announced a fourth season set in the South of France. With a new slate of stars — from Chris Messina to Helena Bonham Carter — preparing to shoot at Airelles Château de la Messardière in Saint-Tropez, rumors of a potential plot integrating The Cannes Film Festival have surfaced. Consider me intrigued!

Supplemental Reading

As always, don’t forget to use archive.ph if you can’t access these pieces or any of the ones throughout my Substack!

Fiction:

• Literary Hub: In the Twin Cities, indie bookstores are stepping up to ICE

• PBS: Los Angeles in Buildings: The Central Library

• Cultured Mag: 6 Small Press Editors Explain Why the Hottest New Thing in Lit Is Out-of-Print Books

• Cultured Mag: Move Over, Hysterical Realism: Debut Novelist Madeline Cash Is Inventing a New Microgenre

Film:

• The Hollywood Reporter: “The King on Main Street”: What Robert Redford Meant to Sundance

• Air Mail: The Last Movie Star

• New York Times: Oscar Nominations: Sinners (2025) Breaks Record With 16

• KCRW: Cinerama Dome Memories: Dancing, Lightsabers, and Strippers

• Vogue: The 2026 SAG Awards Nominations Are In! See Them All Here

Social Media Round-Up

A section aggregating tweets, TikToks, Notes, etc. that made me laugh in the past month:

Cocktail of the Month

As I am always saying, Valentine’s Day is simply Halloween with a better color scheme. Get into the mood with the…

Toblerone —

To make this dessert cocktail, spoon chocolate syrup onto a plate. Dip the rim of your cocktail glass in it, then put said glass in the fridge to chill.

Fill a shaker with ice and add three quarters of an ounce each of Baileys, Frangelico, and Kahlúa, respectively, followed by an ounce of heavy cream and half an ounce of honey syrup. You could probably also add an ounce of vodka for more of a kick.

Shake until well-chilled. Then, strain the mixture into the prepared glass, shave a Toblerone bar on top as you like, and enjoy!

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for the January Book Review. I am also down a rabbit hole on the Bling Ring, but we will talk about that in a few weeks…

xo,
Najet

This post marks Content Corner’s 100th, so thank you for hanging out for the equivalent length of five seasons of an aughts TV show. Something fun is coming to mark the occasion.

In the meantime, let’s get into it:

January Book Selections

If you’ve been here a while, you’ll recall that, every January, instead of the usual book recommendations, I share my top ten favorite reads of the prior year, with description excerpts pulled from past recommendations and reviews.

Here we go:

1. Playworld by Adam Ross (2025) — Playworld (2025) memorializes a year in the life of child actor Griffin Hurt, bubbling to its denouement over a summer split between Manhattan and Long Island. Written from the perspective of Griffin as an adult, it opens with an arresting prologue that reads: “In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.” The narrative then loops backward to chronicle “a lifetime of damage and blind endurance crammed into one extremely long, harrowing year,” as Helen Schulman puts it in her Air Mail review.

   Much like Bret Easton Ellis’s latest book, The Shards (2023), Playworld gets narrated from the first-person perspective of its primary character — but an older version of him. Ross more or less maintains a child’s perspective, zooming out on occasion for the sake of contextualization; this vacillation affords a welcome balance of innocence and insight…Ross describes his new novel as “rhyming” with his life, a notion that equally applies to Bret’s serial killer-infused reanimation of his senior year. Both narratives deal in dense doses of nostalgia, something that, for me, feeds their compulsive readability. Bret enlivens Los Angeles circa 1981, from The Sherman Oaks Galleria on a fall afternoon to Mulholland Drive at midnight. Ross captures comparable corners of New York…a map of a “lost city,” what Bret would call the last gasps of American empire…Playworld has a loose shape that becomes one of its distinguishing factors, imbues it with the texture of life.

2. Good Girl by Aria Aber (2025) — Set in the summer of 2010, Good Girl (2025) centers on Nila, an 19-year-old Afghan girl born and raised in Berlin to immigrant parents. At a bunker-turned-club, she meets Marlowe, an American novelist twenty years her senior (“I usually liked my men blond and severe or dark and tar, but Marlowe was neither, somewhere smack in the middle, with a square jaw and dimpled chin, the nose of an emperor…He was a prince who moved through rooms as if they belonged to him, surrounded by a large group of friends, among them his blond girlfriend, who in my memory always wore a Sonic Youth shirt.”). A fraught artistic and sexual connection emerges, catalyzing Nila’s public and private exploration of identity (“Marlowe and I had been ignoring each other — we danced through the cosmos of parties, but the moment he came too close to me, I would move in the opposite direction.”).

   Raised in Germany by Afghan parents, Aber writes in English, her third language. She cites James Baldwin, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Rhys as influences, while praising the contemporary work of Raven Leilani and Garth Greenwell. Speaking with American author Kyle Dillon Hertz for Interview Magazine, Aber explains: “I really love her [Rhys’s] take on the stream of consciousness and the kind of deranged exilic woman stumbling through a city.” Good Girl operates as a 21st century enactment of that literary tradition, capturing the post-9/11 Arab and Persian experience through the particular prism of Berlin. Hertz praises Good Girl as a “poet’s novel,” a fitting description for a novel with language as its crown jewel. For instance, describing the connection Nila feels to Marlowe, Aber writes: “The eros…drew strings between us sometimes so taut they produced a sweet and secret sound. But the friction was frail — it was never meant to make real music, just to suggest its existence, like a violin encased in glass at a museum, so old and brittle it would fall apart if you tried to play it.”

   Told from an intimate first-person point of view, Good Girl bears structural similarities to Adam Ross’s Playworld (2025) and Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards (2023). All three novels trace a transformative year in the lives of their respective protagonists, recounted by an older iteration of that individual…[In Good Girl,] the option of ethnic ambiguity propels dramatic tension. Nila passes as Greek, as a whole host of backgrounds other than Afghan, to evade the discrimination that accompanies her real identity. The possibility of discovery drives her anxiety, its stakes heightened by the setting of Berlin — a city “particular and historical and shattering.” Discrimination in all its forms — from islamophobia to antisemitism — lurks, then creeps to the foreground…[Aber] distill[s] the reality of what it means to pass as an ethnicity other than your own. Physical ambiguity coaxes people into revealing their prejudices, blinded by the illusion of unmixed company.

3. In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes (1947) — A perfect literary thriller, In a Lonely Place (1947) inhabits the headspace of World War II veteran Dix Steele from the remove of a third-person perspective. It captures the atmospheric chill of Southern California, the sense of danger lurking beneath the bougainvillea (“He was slightly chilled; there was a definite hint of autumn, if only in the mildness of California autumn, in the air tonight.”). The novel opens on the California Incline, with Dix surrounded by fog. He follows a woman down the slope of the hill, toward the beach, bewitched by her resemblance to someone he once knew. The aperture of Dix’s world then broadens to reveal the texture and scope of his Los Angeles.

   A New Jersey native, Dix struggles to adjust to his new reality (“He didn’t get a chance to build a dream.”). His social world stays constricted, confined to his old war buddy-turned-detective, Brub Nicolai, and Brub’s wife, Sylvia. A series of strangulations, one woman per month, haunts Brub and casts a fear over the whole of the city…Dorothy B. Hughes subverts the traditional tropes of the detective novel, a historically male-dominated genre. As crime writer Megan Abbott points out in her afterword to the NYRB edition, Sylvia occupies the genre’s “good girl” archetype, while Dix’s neighbor, Laurel Gray, emerges as the femme fatale. But their behavior cracks the confines of those categories as the narrative throttles toward its conclusion, a reversal fueled by Hughes’s female authorial gaze.

4. The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West (1939) — Before Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis, Los Angeles had Nathaniel West, the original literary scribe of LA culture…A West Coast answer to The Great Gatsby (1925), The Day of the Locust traces a cast of characters who inhabit the fringes of the entertainment industry at its advent, with Yale alum Tod Hackett at its center. A painter, Tod arrives in Los Angeles to decorate sets while working on his magnum opus: a painting called “The Burning of Los Angeles.” An omniscient third-person narrator announces the fact of the piece’s completion; then, the ensuing narrative colors in the events that fuel its final image.

   From prose to characters, West distills the mood and atmosphere that have shaped Southern California, unsettling artists from Raymond Chandler to David Lynch, for decades (“He reached the end of Vine Street and began the climb into Pinyon Canyon. Night had started to fall. The edges of the trees burned with a pale violet light and their centers gradually turned from deep purple to black.”)…Darkness burns at the perimeter of paradise, pulling West’s characters close to, then over, the edge.

5. Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard (1984) — Thomas Berhard’s Woodcutters (1984)…[deconstructs a] strain of Viennese artistic society in the 1980s…shaped by what Bernhard calls a “shabby-genteel” aesthetic…[It] opens with an unnamed narrator drudging through the depths of a dull dinner party, the cocktail hour on the verge of its crescendo, hosted at the home of the Auersbergers, a singer-and-composer husband-wife duo. After avoiding the couple since the 1950s, “the very mention of the name Auersberger…[bringing] on third-degree nausea,” the narrator finds himself dragooned an an invitation after the suicide of a shared friend, Joana. Following her funeral, the guests now await the arrival of an actor from the Burgtheater, Vienna’s on-stage equivalent of Hollywood in the prism of prestige. Watching from a winged chair, the narrator reflects on the vapidity of Vienna after returning from London, “plunged…into profound despair and utter hopelessness.” The narrative unspools from a single paragraph, a story shaped by stream of consciousness that finds firmer external form when the guest of honor arrives…Through Woodcutters, Bernhard captures the disorientation of returning to a city that calcifies into a place of constriction, to a set of people whose meaning morphs through maturation.

6. Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno (2025) — Happiness and Love (2025) siphons its form and subject matter from Woodcutters (1984), transplanting Thomas Bernhard’s comparable critique of the art world from 1980s Vienna to 2020s New York. Zoe Dubno’s debut opens in the middle of a downtown dinner party. Its unnamed narrator sits at the end of a white couch. From this perch, she observes the surrounding social swirl, reflecting on her recent return to the city after a five-year stint in London…Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), set against the backdrop of aughts-era artistic excess, feels like a forebear to Happiness and Love. Both books skewer the cultural elite through satire, driven by an unnamed narrator drowning in disillusionment. Entitlement emerges in each story, revealing unchanged contours of the city over two plus decades. The absurdity of the art world, however, has an individuated impact on each narrator; it enables scattered ennui for Moshfegh’s, cultivates quiet rage in Dubno’s.

   Artifice constructs this cultural community, a reality the narrator acknowledges internally; over the course of the evening, its faulty foundation crumbles externally too. The guest of honor — an unnamed Hollywood actress who Nicole, Eugene, and their guests consider her socially superior, but intellectually inferior — facilitates that public fracture. Happiness and Love reaches its denouement as the actress, a harbinger of West Coast culture, pops a hole in the social order of this specific East Coast set. She skewers the smug sense of superiority shaping the evening…[and] comes to vocalize what the narrator feels, catalyzing the clever catharsis that closes the novel.

7. A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner (2025) — On the Upper East Side, the summer of 1986 simmered out with shockwaves when an early morning jogger discovered the body of a young girl covered in bruises, bra twisted over her head, on the final Tuesday in August. Writer Cynthia Weiner experienced the brutality of this event secondhand as a Chapin grad, the safety of her teenage world shattered when the cute guy in her circle, a boy whose anger bubbled below the surface, emerged as a murderer.

   Weiner’s debut novel, a literary coming-of-age thriller, projects this moment, the real-life murder of Jennifer Levin at the hands of “Preppy Killer” Robert Chambers, through the prism of fiction. The narrative opens with a girl “found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum — half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head…larynx crushed,” then jumps back to June, filling in the details that lead to its dark denouement with a finer brush.

   A coming-of-age story a la Emma Cline’s The Girls (2016), A Gorgeous Excitement (2025) — which draws its name from Sigmund Freud’s description of the sensation spurred by cocaine — follows 18-year-old Nina Jacobs through the summer of 1986. Nina recently graduated from her all-girls private school and has one primary plan before leaving for Vanderbilt: losing her virginity to Gardner Reed. Nights at Flanagan’s — a fictionalized iteration of Dorrian’s [Red Hand] — serve as the backdrop for her pursuit, a welcome counterbalance to the bore brought on by her daytime temp jobs. She toggles between her friendships with Leigh and Meredith, childhood relics and part of the Flanagan’s crew, and Stephanie, a Long Island born-and-bred newcomer with a coke habit, all while managing her mentally ill mother…Weiner captures the contours of a bygone era, the dark mania that defined Manhattan during Reagan’s reign…The novel’s pop cultural accouterments couple with the near-constant presence of coke, with a weeks-long manic episode from Nina’s mother, to create a mood of invincibility laced with fragility.

8. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (1987) — The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) first published as a serial in Rolling Stone a la In Cold Blood (1965) with The New Yorker before getting edited and reissued as a standalone book. Clocking nearly 700 pages, the finished product paints a sprawling picture of the social, political, and racial tensions lurking beneath the opulent veneer of Reagan-era New York — “the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening.” A rare instance of literary fiction with luscious prose and commercial appeal, the novel filled subway car after subway car in its heyday.

   Tom Wolfe’s close third-person lens flickers across a broad cast of characters, presenting each person through multiple vantage points. But the narrative focuses most frequently on Wall Street bond trader Sherman McCoy, a self-described “Master of the Universe” with a “Yale chin,” as it traces his fall from grace. Sherman lives with his wife, Judy, and six-year-old daughter, Campbell, in a full-floor Park Avenue apartment while working at Pierce & Pierce, the fictional firm that also employs Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (1991) (“Pierce & Pierce was the power, and he was wired into the power, and the power hummed and surged in his very innards.”). After a wrong turn into the Bronx, where Sherman and his mistress, Maria, hit a young Black boy named Henry Lamb, that bubble of white privilege bursts. The Lamb case becomes a political lightning rod, a reflection of rightful rage around the socioeconomic inequity bubbling just below the sheen of the city.

   Wolfe captures and satirizes the penchant for ethnic categorization that distinguishes the East Coast mentality…Everyone sticks to their segregated social, economic, and racial spheres, alternate iterations of New York lurking alongside the version each character occupies. The Lamb case fractures these firewalls. When Sherman visits Killian’s office for the first time, Wolfe writes: “In all the years he had lived in New York and worked downtown, Sherman had never noticed the Criminal Courts Building, even though it was one of the biggest and grandest buildings in the City Hall area.” His awareness expands, greater geographic consciousness generated through forced circumstance. One of the most striking scenes shows Sherman shut up in his Park Avenue apartment, a protest playing out in front of his building (“The sight of the perfect yellow spring tulips of Park Avenue falling before the mob paralyzed him with fear”). To me, that particular image — pristine Park Avenue tulips pressed up against an unruly crowd — epitomizes the cultural collision at the core of The Bonfire of the Vanities.

9. Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin (2025) — The Great Gatsby (1925) by way of Negroland (2015) with a dash of Bright Lights, Big City (1984) and Less Than Zero (1985)! With Great Black Hope (2025), Rob Franklin delivers that rare literary fiction novel capable of balancing poetic prose with a propulsive plot. It operates in the continuum of Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020), of Aria Aber’s Good Girl (2025).

   Told in a close third person, Franklin’s debut opens with an arrest in Southampton at the end of summer, the detention of David Smith for cocaine possession. A Stanford graduate, Smith — referred to almost exclusively by his surname — inhabits a world of figures who flit through the upper crust of downtown Manhattan society “at bars, brunches, birthdays, holiday soirees in which black tie was optional — and, before New York, in freshman seminars and frat parties, and, before that, on teen tours or tennis camps, where they’d been acne spotted, their original forms intact.” His arrest couples with the sudden death of his close friend, Elle England, to rattle the cage of respectability politics governing a certain kind of Black bourgeoisie, a notion diced and dissected as the novel’s narrative aperture widens.

10. American Bulk by Emily Mester (2024) — A nonfiction collection from Iowa MFA grad Emily Mester, American Bulk (2024) addresses the reality of American consumerism through a combination of history, data, and memoir. It consists of nine essays, with stories about her beloved grandmother, a conservative keyboard warrior and notorious hoarder, punctuating its beginning, middle, and end. Mester explores different types of excess, from bulk buying to overeating to compulsive shopping…A daughter of the Midwest, Mester writes about “the hot American urgency of 7-Eleven” and Sunday trips to Costco with the intimacy of an insider (“We were nominally Catholic, nobody ever went to church. Costco was our mass.”).
    

    Sharp observations rooted in empathy shape her work. For instance, she notes how the East Coast considers certain tiers of taste synonymous with class. Meanwhile, in the Midwest, quantity signifies wealth; everyone shops at the same stores, eats at the same restaurants, with quantity proportional to financial comfort. Through research and reflection, Mester paints an incisive portrait of American consumer culture, blending the personal and sociological into a supersize cocktail.

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order): My Heavenly Favorite (2024), Office Politics (1966), Lightning Rods (2011), Lord Jim at Home (1973), The Anthropologists (2024), The Seas (2004), The Pilgrimage (1961), The Sellout (2015), A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Vegas (1974), Rattlebone (1994), Pan (2025), I Can Give You Anything But Love (2015), Minor Black Figures (2025), Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady (1971)

Speaking of 2025 favorites…

Top Movies of 2025

A ranking of my favorite new-to-me films, from first-time releases to repertory screenings, of 2025! I rewatched It Happened One Night (1934), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Last Picture Show (1971) this year as well, but it doesn’t seem right to include those longstanding favorites here.

Now, let’s get into it:

1. Shampoo (1975, dir. Hal Ashby) — A favorite of the late great film critic Pauline Kael (and now of mine), this 1970s sex comedy operates in the grand tradition of French farce, Molière for Beverly Hills bed hoppers.

   Warren Beatty stars as George Roundy, a hairdresser who dreams of wriggling out from under his boss’s thumb. Despite living with his girlfriend, actress Jill Haynes (played by an underrated early career Goldie Hawn), George maintains an affair with married customer Felicia Karpf (played by the brilliant Lee Grant, part of her career’s second act after an intermission forced by the Hollywood blacklist). Felicia connects George with her husband, Lester (played by Jack Warden), who considers offering up a loan that would allow George to open his own salon. This generosity, built on a gross misinterpretation of sexual orientation, starts to erode as George’s only serious ex-turned-Jill’s best friend, Jackie Shawn (played by Beatty’s IRL ex, British actress Julie Christie), emerges as Lester’s mistress. This precarious web of connections becomes the scaffolding for a story deceptive in its surface-level simplicity.

   Legendary screenwriter Robert Towne, who won Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Chinatown (1974) just two months after Shampoo’s premiere, partnered with Beatty on the script. Its narrative unfolds over the course of the 1968 U.S. Presidential Election, beginning on Election eve and closing the morning after Richard Nixon’s ill-fated comeback. The politics of it all never dominates the story, instead occupying the peripheral place it would have in these characters’ lives; a Republican watch party serves as the site for the story’s denouement, with results contained to television screens. Towne and Beatty approach the past from a position that bears similarities to Whit Stillman’s screenplay for The Last Days of Disco (1998). Where Stillman examines the final days of Studio 54 from the vantage point of the late 90s, Towne and Beatty satirize the sexual freedom of the late 1960s during the dusk of Watergate, at the dawn of Gerald Ford’s America. Paul Simon’s spare score punctuates this feeling of a bygone era.

   Director Hal Ashby and Hungarian-American cinematographer László Kovács imbue Shampoo with a distinctive LA listlessness, the kind of ennui that unnerved novelists from Nathaniel West to Joan Didion to Bret Easton Ellis. In a Criterion video, critics Mark Harris and Frank Rich make the excellent point that Shampoo can operate comfortably in a trilogy alongside The Long Goodbye (1973) and Chinatown (1974). Kovács captures detailed interiors of the time and sweeping shots of the city, the most memorable coming toward the movie’s close as George looks out over the Hollywood Hills. A precursor to Richard Gere’s Julian Kay in American Gigolo (1980), George fucks his way through the film, his clinical veneer disguising a modicum of depth. In this final moment, emotion finally wells up in George; too little, too late.

2. Paper Moon (1973, dir. Peter Bogdanovich) — A perfect film! Five stars, no notes!! When nine-year-old Tatum O’Neal lights up a cig? That’s cinema, baby!

   Set against the backdrop of the Depression-era Dust Bowl, Paper Moon (1973) stars real-life father-daughter duo Ryan and Tatum O’Neal as Moses “Moze” Pray (lol) and Addie Loggins, a pair of con artists swindling their way from Kansas to Missouri. After meeting Addie at her mother’s gravesite, Moze agrees to give the little girl a ride to her aunt’s house across the state border. The student quickly becomes the master, as Addie enhances Moze’s “business” of selling overpriced Bibles to widows — while also sabotaging his relationship with exotic dancer Trixie Delight [played by the inimitable Madeline Kahn, who also stars in What’s Up, Doc? (1972)] and skirting a few sticky binds on their behalf. As Roger Ebert writes in his 1973 review: “[Peter] Bogdanovich takes the con games only as the experience which his two lead characters share and which draws them together in a way that’s funny sometimes, but also…deeply touching.”

   Where What’s Up, Doc? functions as an homage to the pre-war screwball comedy, to the madcap structure of a Looney Tunes episode, Paper Moon subverts the tradition of 1930s-set road movies like It Happened One Night (1936). It bears certain aesthetic and narrative similarities, from black-and-white cinematography to the trials that come with a long-haul trip, but the unexpected dynamic at its core, pseudo father and daughter in place of a will-they-or-won’t-they couple, pioneers new ground. The connection between Moze and Addie bubbles to the brim in the film’s final moments. It comes across as heartfelt, but not saccharine, cultivating a poignancy propelled by the steely stare, that veneer capping vulnerability, that earned Tatum O’Neal a Best Supporting Actress Oscar at age ten. As Ebert notes, the power of Paper Moon lies in its ability to help its audience “see the Depression through the eyes of characters who are allowed to be individuals.”

3. It Was Just an Accident (2025, dir. Jafar Panahi) — This Palme d’Or winner from Iranian director Jafar Panahi marks my favorite of the films in this month’s round-up, one best seen — much like John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) — with as little context as possible. As the title implies, it opens with a happenstance twist of fate, a simple accident that spirals into an Anora (2024)-esque romp meets Jaws (1975)-style revenge story before burrowing into a bone-chilling ending. Google nothing except upcoming showtimes and, run, don’t walk! Movie of the year!!

4. Halloween (1978, dir. John Carpenter) — A film so good they named a holiday after it: Halloween (1978). Director John Carpenter opens in 1963 with an iconic tracking shot from the perspective of his killer. Six-year-old Michael Myers (played by Will Sandin, Tony Moran, and Nick Castle) murders his sister, Judith (played by Sandy Johnson), in cold blood before breaking out of an asylum fifteen years later to the day. On Halloween night, Michael returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois to wreak havoc on teenager Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends, Annie Brackett (played by Nancy Kyes) and Lynda Van Der Klok (played by P.J. Soles). I imagine many of you have seen this horror classic, but, for the sake of those readers who haven’t, I’ll echo Roger Ebert’s 1978 review: “That’s all I’m going to describe, because Halloween is a visceral experience — we aren’t seeing the movie, we’re having it happen to us,” a sensation sharpened through the immediacy of Carpenter’s spine-chilling score.

5. No Other Land (2024, dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor) — Filmed between 2019 and 2023, with production wrapping in October 2023, No Other Land (2024) chronicles the erosion of Masafer Yatta, a collection of Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli military. An Israeli court order reallocates this site filled with Palestinian families and farmland as a military training ground. Day after day, Palestinian activist Basel Adra records as Israel’s military bulldozes the homes and farms that comprise his community.

   A co-production between Palestine and Norway, No Other Land won the 2025 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film. It stems from a collaboration between Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers: Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor. Abraham and Szor, both Israeli, traveled to Masafer Yatta to write about these forced displacements in 2019. Upon arrival, they met and befriended Adra and Ballal, leading to the documentary’s development.

   Contrast shapes No Other Land. Adra and Abraham converse throughout the documentary, the gap in their living conditions emblematic of the oceanic breach between Israeli and Palestinian autonomy. Meanwhile, images of animals grazing, the sun setting, over arid land juxtapose with the bulldozers’ man-made destruction…[No Other Land] makes a case for collaboration, underscoring the need for a cross-cultural fight toward Palestinian freedom.

6. One Battle After Another (2025, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) — Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film operates as a contemporary adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990). The novel explores the spirit of rebellion that marked the 1960s through the straight-laced lens of the 1980s. It opens in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan’s reelection, and follows former hippie Zoyd Wheeler and his teenage daughter, Prairie, as they seek to evade federal agent Brock Vond. One Battle After Another (2025) reimagines the narrative through the lens of our current culture. Anderson’s iteration transforms Zoyd Wheeler into Bob Ferguson (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), a former member of the French 75, a far-left militant group, under witness protection with his mixed race daughter, Willa (played by Chase Infiniti). The pair find protection in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, California until military Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (played by a genuinely terrifying Sean Penn) — a white supremacist who holds a fetishized fixation with Pat’s former partner and Willa’s long-gone mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Tenaya Taylor) — comes to town.

   Where Pynchon examines the United States’s sociopolitical transformation from the 1960s to the 1980s, Anderson, in updating Vineland’s 1980s-set narrative to match present times, underscores the right-wing influence ricocheting through both decades and the eternal relevance of resistance. Immigration emerges as a major focus of the film. Stunningly shot on VistaVision by Michael Bauman, who previously partnered with Anderson on Licorice Pizza (2021), the opening scene shows the French 75 freeing folks from a detention center. In the present timeline, a formative plot thread focuses on Willa’s karate instructor, Sergio St. Carlos (played by Benicio del Toro in one of the film’s best performances), protecting the undocumented community in Baktan Cross. As Bob — high out of his mind and plagued with paranoia — loudly spirals over Lockjaw, Sergio quietly shuttles hordes of Latinx migrants to safety, telling his friend: “We’ve been laid siege for hundreds of years. Don’t get selfish.” This line underscores the perennial plight of the immigrant population, epitomizing the timely and timelessness of One Battle After Another.

   Anderson pads its heavier themes with an exhilarating pace, and DiCaprio’s performance perhaps best distills this combination of fun and feeling. He blends the best of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas (1990) (specifically in the helicopter chase scene), Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski (1998), and Liam Neeson in Taken (2008), constructing a tender portrait of a man past his prime, driven by a heart-led hunt for his daughter. Infiniti holds up the other end of this connection, her vulnerability a vessel for the audience’s anxiety.

7. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936, dir. Frank Capra) — Frank Capra’s follow-up to his first smash hit, It Happened One Night (1934), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) tells the story of tuba-playing greeting card poet Longfellow Deeds (played by Gary Cooper), an everyman from Mandrake Falls, Vermont who makes the move to Manhattan after inheriting $20 million — yes, in 1936 dollars — from his uncle. Sharks circle as soon as he arrives in the city. “Mocked as a ‘cornfed bohunk,’ and then, thanks to the wily reporter Babe Bennett (played by Jean Arthur), cast in the press as the clueless ‘Cinderella Man,’” per J. Hoberman for The New York Times, Deeds must decide who and who not to trust.

   Capra characters often take the form of a midcentury David up against a systemic Goliath, from legal challenges to financial constraints to government corruption. Much like the filmmaker’s later pictures, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town deals with themes of the individual versus the collective, hoarding versus sharing wealth, and small town life versus big city culture through the prism of tragicomedy.

8. Lolita (1962, dir. Stanley Kubrick) — Directed by Stanley Kubrick with a script by Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1962) adapts the controversial eponymous novel for the big screen against the backdrop of early 1960s censorship.

   As I write in the February newsletter, the source material “delves into the perverted first-person perspective of Humbert Humbert, a French literature professor who develops a fixation with 12-year-old Dolores Haze, aka: Lolita. The novel begins with a foreword from John Ray Jr., a fictional editor of psychology books. It establishes the fact of Humbert’s fate, of his death…[then] moves into Humbert’s mind…tracing his childhood in France and, notably, the death of his first love, Annabel Leigh, from typhus. This event developmentally stunts Humbert, spurring his sexual fixation with girls aged nine to 14 years old. His immigration to the small New England town of Ramsdale during World War II brings him to Lolita, ‘the daughter of his landlady, whom he marries with murderous intent,’ as Charles J. Rolo describes in his original 1958 review.”

   The film mimics this narrative structure — with a few notable changes in content…Regardless, Lolita (1962) distills the tone and tenor that distinguishes its source material. In the original text, Nabokov uses “alliteration and double entendres to create a simmering sense of unnerving sexuality,” as I write in the January 2024 newsletter. This same sense translates to Kubrick’s adaptation; every line contains multiple layers of meaning. For instance, Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze (played by Shelley Winters), says she “goes limp” every time Humbert touches her, to which he laments “know[ing] the feeling,” and Lolita summers at Camp Climax for Girls. These insertions edge the film into the realm of dark satire that shapes later Kubrick works like Dr. Strangelove (1964). Lolita’s actors, especially Winters and Sellers, deal in high-caliber comedy, but each entrancing performance — in particular, those given by Mason and Lyon — remains earnest, grounding the film.

9. A Woman is a Woman (1961, dir. Jean-Luc Godard) — Within the confines of a simple story, Jean-Luc Godard weaves together various genres, cultivates an experimental masterpiece. In A Woman is a Woman (1961), exotic dancer Angela (played by Danish-French actress Anna Karina, Godard’s muse and future wife) wants to have a baby. She begs her long-time boyfriend, Émile (played by Jean-Claude Brialy, who François Truffaut characterized as “the French Cary Grant”), to take advantage of her imminent ovulation, but he refuses, instead focused on his upcoming bicycle race. Meanwhile, his best friend, Alfred (played by French New Wave icon Jean-Paul Belmondo), who longs for his own relationship with Angela, offers to step up to the plate.

   Shot in CinemaScope, A Woman is a Woman inhabits the same pop-filled color palette perfected in Godard’s later work, Contempt (1963), dialed to eleven in Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). It includes verbal and visual touchstones toward Hollywood and other French New Wave films, including a meta reference to Godard’s first feature, Breathless (1960). As Vulture film critic Bilge Ebiri describes, A Woman is a Woman “has the rhythms, gestures, and mood of a musical, often without the actual music. A song might start right before cutting out completely in the next shot. Direct sound clashes with expressionistic (and sometimes just plain nutty) audio choices. Loud, cartoonish sound effects punctuate each line in a lovers’ squabble. An ostensibly serious scene starts with the actors curtseying to the audience.” Through these idiosyncrasies, the film’s singularity emerges.

10. Mildred Pierce (1945, dir. Michael Curtiz) — What Ben Mankiewicz said.

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order): The Swimmer (1968), I’m Still Here (2024), Nashville (1974), A Man and a Woman (1966), 8½ (1963), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Avanti! (1972), Valley Girl (1983), Shoot the Moon (1982), Risky Business (1983), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), Notting Hill (1999), What’s Up, Doc? (1972), Apocalypse Now (1979), Gosford Park (2001), Marnie (1964), Bell, Book, and Candle (1958), Frankenstein (2025), Sentimental Value (2025), Hamnet (2025), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Marty Supreme (2025)

Upcoming Content to Consume

Metrograph’s Touch Me with Your Eyes Series (Opening Date: 1.2) — A series dedicated to voyeurism in film, Touch Me with Your Eyes includes favorites Rear Window (1954) and Blue Velvet (1986), as well as movies on my to-watch list like Blow-Up (1966) and Body Double (1984).

You can see a couple current screening times here. Check back throughout the month for additional options!

The Paris Theater: 8½ (1963) (Date: 1.3) — Start 2026 with a screening of Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) at The Paris! As I write in the April Movie Review:

A cinematic masterpiece, Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) inhabits the headspace of Italian director Guido Anselmi (played by Marcello Mastroianni). In the midst of shooting his forthcoming science fiction epic, Guido grapples with director’s block, a creative crisis that reflects a midlife one…Dream sequences, funhouse reflections of Guido’s innermost preoccupations, pepper the film…A pinprick of surrealism accentuates each character, feeds into an undercurrent of absurdity…Where confusion engulfs 8½’s Guido, Fellini architects his directorial vision with precision, prefiguring and pioneering the Lynchian lexicon.

The Academy Museum: Gaslight (1944) (Date: 1.7) — Head to The Academy Museum for a screening of one of my all-time favorite films, Gaslight (1944), featuring Ingrid Bergman at her very best. As I write in the December 2023 Movie Review:

In this psychological thriller adapted from Patrick Hamilton’s eponymous 1938 play, Paula Alquist (played by Bergman) returns to the London townhouse where she found her aunt-slash-guardian brutally murdered years earlier, joined by her new husband, Gregory Anton (played by Charles Boyer). After training to become an opera singer in Italy solo, followed by a two-week whirlwind romance, Paula hopes to make a fresh start. But soon, night after night, she begins hearing knocking in the walls, seeing the gas lighting dim throughout the house. When her experience differs from Gregory’s, Paula begins to question her grip on reality…Without spoiling specifics, Gaslight delivers an all gas, no breaks (no pun intended) plot in tandem with careful characterization brought to life by an incredible cast of actors. Beyond starring Bergman and Boyer, this noir marks Angela Lansbury’s debut as Paula and Gregory’s maid, Nancy, and features Joseph Cotten [aka: Uncle Charlie from Shadow of a Doubt (1943)] as Inspector Brian Cameron.

Selected by the Actors Branch of The Academy for this upcoming screening, Gaslight amassed seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress for Lansbury, and Best Screenplay. Bergman took home the award for Best Actress, while Cedric Gibbons, William Ferrari, Paul Huldschinsky, and Edwin B. Willis won for Best Art Direction: Black-and-White. You can reserve tickets starting at $5 here!

McNally Jackson Seaport: Madeline Cash Presents Lost Lambs (2025) in Conversation with Natasha Stagg (Date: 1.12) — Madeline Cash, the writer behind short story collection Earth Angel (2023) and co-editor of Forever Magazine, has a debut novel hitting bookshelves! Lost Lambs (2025) refashions the archetypal family saga for the 2020s.

Per McNally Jackson: “The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic orbits: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone — or something — is monitoring the town’s citizens. Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy — one that may just bring them closer together.

You can reserve a seat for $5 or a book and a seat for $28 here!

New Beverly Cinema: The Long Goodbye (1973) and Night Moves (1975) Double Feature (Dates: 1.13-1.15) — An LA noir double feature! Catch Elliott Gould and Gene Hackman as Philip Marlowe and Harry Moseby, respectively, in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975).

With The Long Goodbye, New Hollywood auteur Robert Altman adapts Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel of the same name into a satirical neo-noir set in the hippie-era Hollywood Hills. While the environs adapt to meet the contemporary moment, Gould’s Marlowe — a character played by the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and James Garner — remains entrenched in the values set of his original era. As I write in the January 2024 Movie Review: “In satirizing its parent genre, The Long Goodbye, in many ways, declares noir dead. But…it does so by positioning the principles of its era of inception as at odds with the then-modern world of the 1970s. This disparity, to me, feels most pronounced in how Marlowe compares to his neighbors. While he wears a suit even on the beach, the all-female cohort of hippies next door practices yoga on their porch in the nude. Their interactions consequently become a juxtaposition of new and old guards — albeit a friendly one…A man untainted by the moral landscape of the 1970s, Gould’s Marlowe emerges as a relic, an intentional anachronism.”

Meanwhile, Night Moves, which still sits on my to-watch list, stars Gene Hackman as former pro football player-turned-detective Harry Moseby in what The New Bev calls “spellbinding, first-rate thriller where solutions to murderous riddles don’t come easily.” From Bonnie and Clyde (1967) director Arthur Penn, the film features Melanie Griffith and James Woods toward the start of their careers.

Playing for three nights, you can check out showtimes for the double feature and book tickets here!

McNally Jackson Seaport: McNally Editions presents A Domestic Animal (1970) by Francis King feat. Rumaan Alam and Rob Franklin (Date: 1.13) — Celebrate a new reissue, a long-forgotten love story from one of England’s finest novelists.

Published only three years after the UK’s decriminalization of homosexuality, A Domestic Animal (1970) follows Antonio Valli, a 30-something Italian philosopher who abandons his wife and children in Florence for a year-long fellowship at a British university. He rents a room from middle-aged novelist Dick Thompson, who falls in love with the Italian philosopher, a first fixation of its kind in years for Dick. But, per the McNally Jackson site, “the games the manipulative Italian plays with him throw the older man’s life into chaos.”

Writers Rumaan Alam and Rob Franklin will discuss the novel at McNally Jackson’s event. You can reserve a seat for $5 or a book and a seat for $19 here!

If you’re based outside of New York, I recommend checking out Alam’s foreword to the new edition on the McNally Editions Substack here.

Skylight Books: Madeline Cash Presents Lost Lambs (2025) (Date: 1.14) — Angelenos also can catch Madeline Cash discussing Lost Lambs (2025)! Head to Skylight Books for a talk with the author at 7:00 PM on 1.14. Access is free on a first come, first serve basis!

Film Forum: Sunset Boulevard (1950) (Opening Date: 1.16) — A new 4K restoration of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) debuts at Film Forum this month! ICYMI: the creepy classic, an all-time favorite Hollywood noir, opens with a dead body floating face down in a Beverly Hills swimming pool. The deceased narrator reveals his identity as screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by William Holden) as the story slips back in time to reveal his ill-fated encounter with former silent film star Norma Desmond (played by Gloria Swanson).

Vista Theater Hollywood: A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969) (Dates: 1.17-1.19) — Over Martin Luther King Jr. Weekend, The Vista will screen the first-ever feature-length Peanuts cartoon on 35mm as its matinee selection. Per the site: “When Charlie Brown (Peter Robbins) enters the school spelling bee, the perpetually crabby Lucy (Pamelyn Ferdin) predicts his humiliation. But with the help of his best friend, Linus (Glenn Gilger), and faithful dog, Snoopy (Bill Melendez), Charlie Brown not only wins the spelling bee, he’s chosen to attend the national spelling bee in New York City, leading to many misadventures in the big city.”

In a heartfelt ode to the film, journalist Patrick Galvan writes: “Despite playing on a single screen for most of December, the first Peanuts movie earned $60,000 on its first Saturday and $290,000 during its second week. Occupying the number one spot in box office charts until the stateside release of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Charlie Brown drew favorable reviews epitomized by the New York Times’s Vincent Canby: ‘[I]t’s difficult — perhaps impossible — to be anything except benign towards a G-rated, animated movie that manages to include references to St. Stephen, Thomas Eakins, Harpers Ferry, baseball, contemporary morality (as it relates to Charlie Brown’s use of his ‘bean ball’), conservation and kite flying.”

The Paris Theater: Punch-Drunk Love (2002) (Date: 1.18) — The Paris Theater has mounted a series dedicated to Adam Sandler, an undoubted promotional technique from Netflix to generate buzz around Jay Kelly (2025), but we’ll take it.

A PTA classic somehow nominated for zero Oscars, Punch-Drunk Love (2002) features Sandler’s first widely acclaimed dramatic performance. He plays Barry Egan, a surrealist rom-com hero with severe anxiety who falls for Lena Leonard (played by Emily Watson), his sister’s co-worker. As Roger Ebert writes in his 2002 review:

The film is exhilarating to watch because Sandler, liberated from the constraints of formula, reveals unexpected depths as an actor. Watching this film, you can imagine him in Dennis Hopper roles. He has darkness, obsession and power. His world is hedged around with mystery and challenge. Consider an opening scene, when he is at work hours before the others have arrived, and sees a harmonium dumped in the street in front of his office. It is at once the most innocent and ominous of objects; he runs from it and then peeks around a corner to see if it is still there.

The Paris Theater: Shampoo (1975) (Date: 1.19) — Catch the Content Corner top movie of 2025 (from 1975) on the big screen at The Paris!

The Academy Museum’s Wild at Heart and Weird on Top: A Tribute to David Lynch Series (Opening Date: 1.19) — This month marks one year since the death of David Lynch, and The Academy Museum plans to celebrate his sustained impact on cinema through a one-week tribute featuring Q&As with frequent collaborators Kyle MacLahlan and Laura Dern.

The line-up includes Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006). While I have yet to see Lost Highway, I can wholeheartedly recommend the rest of the slate. (Have coffee beforehand if you opt for Inland Empire though.) You can check out showtimes and reserve tickets here!

The Center for Fiction: The Literarians Reading Group — Flesh (2025) by David Szalay (Date: 1.21) — Each month, The Center for Fiction hosts a reading group called The Literarians. Free for members, the event occurs online via Zoom and zeroes in on one key contemporary novel. In January, David Szalay’s Flesh (2025), the most recent Booker Prize winner, will serve as the topic of discussion.

Per The Booker Prize’s Substack: “A spare but propulsive novel, Flesh follows a man from adolescence to old age as he is unraveled by a series of events beyond his grasp. Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor — a married woman close to his mother’s age — as his only companion…As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the 21st century’s tides of money and power…until they threaten to undo him completely.”

You can reserve a spot here!

Miscellaneous Musings

Bringing Bridget Jones to Life: The Paris Review in Conversation with Helen Fielding — In my book, nothing says New Year’s Day like a screening of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). Last month, The Paris Review sat down for a delightful conversation with Helen Fielding, the author behind the eponymous 1996 novel that spawned the cult favorite rom-com, my personal favorite film alongside Goodfellas (1990) (something I’m saying with my whole chest). Speaking with London-based journalist Rosa Lyster, Fielding talks about everything from her original mid-90s column in The Independent to Colin Firth’s Pride and Prejudice (1995)-era chokehold on UK culture to the lore behind the now-long-gone Cones Hotline.

A solid portion of the conversation centers on writing process. Like so many other authors, Fielding keeps a file of funny finds, splices together stray social observations in Scrivener. Reaping the rewards of a dynamite debut novel, she moved from London to Los Angeles for more space at half the price — and beckoned in a welcome boost of productivity. Living in a concentrated city comes with intrinsic distraction, and the pop of that pressure can generate greater creative freedom. Fielding acknowledges this notion, explaining: “I gathered the material [for her later London-based books] in England, but it was easier to write at a distance, even just for concentrating, because London is so social and busy and you can’t walk out the door without somebody saying, ‘Oh, hello, do you want to come for coffee?’ Whereas LA is a famously isolated city and people are just driving around in their cars or in their houses. It does give you those long stretches of time to write in.”

Of course, Fielding also discusses her output, from the tricky tone behind its surface-level simplicity to narrative framing afforded by Jane Austen. On the first topic, she reflects: “Well, what happens is that everyone thinks they can write Bridget. Because it’s a franchise now — it’s four films — but what’s the franchise? There are no fast cars or things blowing up or superheroes or wizards. There’s just one woman and her perspective and tone and everyone thinks, ‘Oh, I want to do that, I know how to do it.’ But it is a very specific point of view, and it is very, very easy for it to be off.” That “very specific point of view” stems from a carefully crafted breach in self-awareness, an intentional chasm between author and character. The epistolary novel, as a form, necessitates a lack of narrator reliability — and Bridget’s characterization dials that notion to eleven. Fielding explains: “I did deliberately have her [Bridget] be a bit like Lorelei in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). Lorelei is both knowing and not-knowing, if you know what I mean? That’s the joke. So I’d have fun with that.”

RIP Rob and Michele Reiner — Over the past several weeks, so many people have put out touching tributes to Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. One of my favorites stems from Shawnee Mead, the Substacker behind Nora and New York. In “The Real Harry Burns: Remembering Rob Reiner,” Mead discusses Reiner’s character and filmography, as well as its impact on her own life (“I know that the word nice has become totally blasé, but in a world where it seems to be becoming a rare quality, Rob Reiner was a genuinely nice and decent man, and human being. By all accounts he was incredibly funny and astute, was a kind, supportive and collaborative director, a wonderful friend, and a person who always stood up for what was right…Like Nora [Ephron], Rob Reiner was a storyteller who dealt in the human condition. No matter the genre, be it mockumentary, coming of age drama, fantasy romance, psychological horror, or courtroom drama, at their core his films were about people being people.”).

My favorite part of the piece, of course, centers on When Harry Met Sally (1989), how Reiner and Nora Ephron functioned as the ideological bases for its titular characters. As several social media carousels have showcased, Reiner and Ephron originally intended Harry and Sally to part ways — until he met Michele during filming and flipped the script. Mead recounts the Reiners’ first meeting with what reads like one of film’s on-camera couple interviews, writing:

Early in the production process, Barry [Sonnenfeld], the film’s DP, attempted to pull Rob from his single slump by setting him up with a friend, photographer Michele Singer. “I have a friend in New York… You’re going to marry her.” Sadly this attempt failed, with Rob declining to meet her after discovering she was a smoker, “I’d been married to someone who smoked a lot and I just didn’t want it.”

Fate decided to intervene several months later, when Susan, Barry’s girlfriend, and Michele came to set. Wrapping up the wagon-wheel disposal scene outside of Marie and Jess’s brownstone, “a very attractive woman” standing with Susan caught Rob’s attention, “I said to Barry, who’s that woman with Susan? And he said ‘That’s Michele Singer’. I said, ‘What’s she doing here?’ He said, ‘We’re just going to have lunch.’ I said, ‘Maybe I’ll join you.’” After the lunch, a smitten Rob asked Barry to find out whether Michele would be open to him calling her. He got the ok, and the rest as they say is history, with Rob and Michele marrying in May 1989, only seven months after their first meeting.

Eve Babitz’s Diary — The Huntington Library in Pasadena acquired Eve Babitz’s archives after her death, their contents the inspiration behind Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz (2024). The Paris Review recently published excerpts from Babitz’s journals, starting in 1969 and moving through 1970, found in that collection (“I [started] this because I read Virginia Woolf’s diary and, undaunted, decided, what the hell?”). “A record of her life…at once gossipy, hilarious, and vulnerable,” per The Paris Review, these snippets detail everything from acid trips to holidays at the Didion-Dunne home ahead of the publication of Babitz’s debut, Eve’s Hollywood (1974). The online paywall is a bit of a pain, but you can check out the full text easily in the print copy of the Winter issue!

Celebrity Cocktails of 1968 — Before we put the holidays behind us, I’d like to take a moment to highlight Town & Country’s iconic 1968 feature rounding up celeb-favorite seasonal cocktails, a piece the outlet recently resurrected. Personal favorite picks include:

“Scotch with a little water. And peace. That’s what I want at Christmas.” - Cary Grant

“Vodka on the rocks — with a small slice of sour pickle in it.” - Maria Callas

“Beer, especially St. Pauli’s beer. I drink ten or more beers every day, and if it’s good enough to be my favorite for the rest of the year, it’s good enough for special occasions.” - Paul Newman

“A Cool Yule punch is what I serve. In a mixing bowl half the size of my punch bowl, I put six small apples and six candied peaches, arranging neatly with stems up. I cover with water, leaving room in the container for ice to expand — and I freeze this. Then, when I’m about ready to serve, I place the ice block with the fruit in a punch bowl, pour over it three quarts of California champagne and a quart and a half of vodka and stir gently to blend. Drink cautiously, for it’s kicky.” - Katharine Ross

“Chablis and soda…that’s the drink I like best of any season.” - Maria Farrow

Cin cin!

What Authors Wear to the Airport — Speaking of lists, we must discuss New York Magazine’s “What 34 Stylish People Wear to the Airport.” The piece — which features favorite authors Marlowe Granados, Zoe Dubno, and Rob Franklin — prompted social media swirl for its attitude toward in-flight sweatpants. Whatever, man! I got some cutie outfit inspo for my daily life and still plan to wear my Relax Lacrosse pants on planes for the foreseeable future.

Supplemental Reading

As always, don’t forget to use archive.ph if you can’t access these pieces or any of the ones throughout my Substack!

• Interview Magazine: Life Lessons From Rob Reiner’s Final Interview

• Cosmopolitan: Save the Theaters. Go On a Movie Date.

• Town & Country: A Snob’s Guide to Jane Austen’s England

• Coveteur: The Women of Twin Peaks Would Be Style Icons Today

• Interview Magazine: The Francesca Scorsese Guide to Moviegoing in New York City

Social Media Round-Up

A section aggregating tweets, TikToks, Notes, etc. that made me laugh in the past month:

Cocktail of the Month

Of course, you can always try one of Town & Country’s seasonal celebrity cocktails of 1968 at home. (Vodka on the rocks with a small slice of sour pickle a la Maria Callas anyone?)

Alternately, enjoy a bittersweet winter drink in the form of the…

Enzoni —

To make it, muddle five seedless grapes in a cocktail shaker. Then, add three-quarters of an ounce of lemon juice and half an ounce of simple syrup, followed by one ounce each of Campari and dry gin, with ice. Shake until chilled.

To serve, double strain the drink into a rocks glass over fresh ice. Garnish with an orange slice and a green grape, and enjoy!

That’s all for now! See you sooner than you might expect…

xo,
Najet

If you’re new here and need a gift guide, check out this book-focused one I developed last December. Shawn Cremer also organized all of the books mentioned across Scremes Report this year into a single post!

Now, let’s get into it:

December Book Selections

To me, December marks a time for reflective reads rife with engulfing emotion, for stories of fractured love refracted through prisms familial, romantic, and platonic. This month’s picks capture this spirit on an international scale, stemming from Norway, France, and Japan. Plus, we’ll close with a bonus pick from the U.S., a nonfiction book that uses humor to grapple with the complex contours of grief.

Suggestions include:

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth (2022) — The fourth novel from Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth, Is Mother Dead (2022) adopts the first-person perspective of Johanna, an artist estranged from her family. Three decades prior to the start of the story, she drops out of law school after falling in love with an American artist. Now, still reeling from the death of that painter, her late husband Mark, Johanna returns to Oslo from Utah for a retrospective exhibition of her work — and falls headfirst into a landmine of memory.

Time flattens across the narrative as past and present infuse into a cloud of confused feeling. Hjorth masters the art of close first-person narration, wrenching the reader into Johanna’s viewpoint. As I explain in the December 2024 Book Review, “reviewing Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), I write: ‘Her careful use of a close third-person perspective establishes a sense of unwanted emotional intimacy that defies logical thought; she leaves the reader rooting for the novel’s sociopathic titular character without real reason, a high-wire act that underscores the unnerving subjectivity of morality’…Hjorth accomplishes a comparable feat, burrowing so deeply into Johanna’s mindset that her actions become subjectively conscionable despite their objective insanity.”

Chéri and The Last of Chéri by Colette (1920, 1926) — These novels from French author Colette, often published as a pair, follow the ever-changing yet unyielding connection between Léa de Lonval and Fred Peloux in the lead up to and on the heels of World War I. Léa, a courtesan, grapples with a coupled set of conclusions as her sexual career and long-standing relationship with Fred, referred to as Chéri, come to a close. A man half her age, Chéri moves on and marries, confined by their surrounding social structure, while Léa looks to the future with a sense of loss. As Malaysian writer Tash Aw writes in a 2022 piece for The New York Times: “Léa is caught between the urge to keep him and the realization that their affair has come to an end. Her hesitation…sums up the novel’s primary concerns, that of aging and femininity, and the tensions between optimism and reality: ‘A hope, as senseless as the hope that can strike people mid-descent as they fall from a tower, shimmered between them and disappeared.’”

I went down a Colette rabbit hole toward the start of 2020, so I read Roger Senhouse’s translation from 1951. But, since then, Rachel Careau has translated both books to critical acclaim, with a new introduction by Lydia Davis. Aw lauds the new edition as “rich in the sensuality for which she [Colette] is widely known — but also in the sharpness of her social observations, so ahead of her time that they come across as radical even by contemporary standards. Above all, Careau captures the technicality of Colette’s prose. She manages shifts in mood and characterization as well as the complexity of Colette’s sentences — sometimes terse, sometimes richly metaphoric — and she does so in a way that feels at once faithful to the author’s era and utterly timeless.”

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami (2009) — Mieko Kawakami amassed acclaim for Breast and Eggs (2008), but I personally prefer Heaven (2009). The latter novel, translated into English by Europa Editions in 2021, traces the tie between two teenagers struggling with bullying. Its male narrator, “Eyes,” has a lazy eye, while Kojima, a 14-year-old girl dealing with her parents’ divorce, neglects her appearance to the cruel frenzy of their female classmates. When Kojima begins slipping secret letters into Eyes’ school desk, a quiet connection emerges (“We only ever wrote about unimportant things, but over time we came to understand each other.”). They come to consider their shared suffering a form of martyrdom, submissive endurance a kind of strength, and construct a private, protected world in the form of friendship. Per Kirkus Reviews: “Kawakami has a unique knack for burrowing into discomfort, and she does it in a startlingly graceful way…illuminating the perils within the social structures we’ve been taught to trust.”

Grief Is For People by Sloane Crosley (2024) — If you’re missing someone this holiday season, this memoir might carry a bit of catharsis. In Grief Is For People (2024), humor writer Sloane Crosley mourns her best friend, Penguin Random House publicist Russell Perreault, who died by suicide in the summer of 2019. As I write in the May 2024 Book Review:

This memoir captures the landmines of loss through clever, captivating prose (“They assure me I won’t feel like this forever. Oh, yeah? Everyone’s a psychic when you’re sad”)…[and] its uniqueness lies in how it distills a distinctive kind of friendship. Crosley met Russell, a gay man twelve years her senior, working in the publicity department of Penguin Random House’s Vintage Books imprint. Their relationship quickly morphed into an indefinable partnership within and beyond the professional sphere, with Crosley writing: “He is my favorite person, the one who somehow sees me both as I want to be seen and as I actually am, the one whose belief in me over the years has been the most earned (he is not my parent), the most pure (he is not my boyfriend), and the most forgiving (he is my friend).”

I recall a 2010-era Tumblr platitude that said something along the lines of: “If a writer loves you, you can never die.” Over the course of the book, Crosley preserves her friend’s quirks and preoccupations, his best and worst qualities. In her review for The Washington Post, Becca Rothfeld writes: “Grief may follow a familiar path in every instance, but Russell himself was fiercely original, and Crosley paints a vivid and moving portrait of a singularity — a man who signed up for catalogues using his dogs’ names and wrote Crosley emails from an address he created for her cat. He was sharp, funny, unsentimental and given to light chiding of those he loved. ‘Why are you dressed like a traffic cone?’ he once asked Crosley when she wore a bright orange dress.”

Crosley decries authors who write “not ‘I miss this person,’ but ‘Miss this person as I do,’” as “too much laundering of empathy.” In Grief Is for People, she avoids this pitfall by illustrating how and why she misses Russell with such searing specificity that a diluted dialect of her loss emerges in the reader.

Upcoming Content to Consume

First, as always, most of the independent cinemas across New York and LA have special screenings of the wide range of holiday films that have become expected and unexpected classics, from The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) and Gremlins (1984) to Die Hard (1988) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). This newsletter would be even longer if I called out each and every one I enjoy, so I recommend skimming some of the individual theater sites to find your personal favorite seasonal films.

Second, The Criterion Channel announced its December line-up, with one particular series standing out: Hotels on Film. The collection celebrates “cinema’s most iconic hotels, where souls in transit meet, identities shift, and the by turns liberating and lonely experience of being far from home heightens every interaction,” per the site, and includes Content Corner favorites like 8½ (1963), The Shining (1980), and Lost in Translation (2003).

Third, I am once again reminding you that Content Corner is newly on Instagram! Follow @read.contentcorner for real-time reminders and recommendations.

Now, here’s what’s on this month across both coasts:

New Beverly Cinema: The Conversation (1974) (Dates: 12.3-12.4) — Notifying you of a screening of The Conversation (1974), as I am wont to do! As I write in the March 2024 Movie Review:

I texted half my contact list upon leaving The Paris Theater’s screening of this film, urging them to watch it on Netflix immediately. To quote the randos on Letterboxd:

“Catholic wiretapper; forgotten profession”

“Every scene in this movie I go ‘oh this is my favorite part’”

“fuses my two favorite things: jazz and worrying”

SO true.

Written in the late 1960s, The Conversation fortuitously hit theaters on the heels of the Watergate scandal, during a moment when notions of surveillance loomed large in the American public’s collective conscience…[it] opens over a bustling Union Square in San Francisco. Jazz hums and bleeds into garbled audio. The image becomes clearer. Filmed documentary-style, a couple (played by Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) weaves in and out of the frame, between mimes, musicians, hedges. Bits of their conversation — the conversation — crash over, fade behind, the sounds of the square. Their state of surveillance becomes apparent, a job at the hands of expert wiretapper Harry Caul (played brilliantly by Gene Hackman). The narrative unravels from, loops back to, this point, as Harry, faced with delivering the tapes to to an executive known as “the Director” (played by Robert Duvall), begins to fear for the couple’s life.

The Center for Fiction: First Novel Fête (Date: 12.5) — Every year, The Center for Fiction hosts a party to honor the seven authors shortlisted for its First Novel Prize. This year’s event will celebrate Colwill Brown, Rickey Fayne, Justin Haynes, Alejandro Heredia, Darrell Kinsey, Mariam Rahmani, and Shubha Sunder, including readings from the finalists’ work, snacks and drinks over an open bar, and prizes at the door from sponsors.

Tickets start at $75, with proceeds benefitting The Center for Fiction’s KidsRead program with local public schools, fellowships and awards for emerging writers, and community programs.

IFC Center: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) (Opening Date: 12.5) — Multiple theaters screen this holiday classic every December (see: Village East on 12.10, The New Bev on 12.11 and 12.12, etc.), but its annual run at IFC Center always marks my favorite option. Each year, Donna Reed’s daughter, Mary Owen, introduces a week’s worth of screenings! This year, you can catch her from 12.16 through 12.19 at the 6:45 PM show.

As I write in the December 2024 newsletter: “For those of you unfamiliar, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) traces the life of George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart), the string of sacrifices that lead to a moment of suicidal contemplation. Faced with death, George has the opportunity to see a version of the world without his impact, gaining perspective on how his seemingly minute existence influences the people around him.”

Books Are Magic: Patti Smith Presents Bread of Angels (2025) (Date: 12.11) — New York icon Patti Smith will head to St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn Heights to discuss her new memoir, Bread of Angels (2025), as part of an event hosted by Books Are Magic. I’ve seen Patti speak and perform many times, and fewer experiences have left me with a warmer feeling. She never disappoints. Get your ticket here!

Film Forum’s Hitchcock and Hermann Series (Opening Date: 12.12) — This month, Film Forum will mount a series celebrating the storied collaboration between director Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann, one of the greatest partnerships in the history of cinema [see: the Psycho (1960) score].

The line-up includes all eight of the duo’s collaborations, namely The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Wrong Man (1956), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), North by Northwest (1959), Vertigo (1958), Psycho, The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964). You can probably skip The Trouble with Harry tbh, and I can’t speak to The Wrong Man and The Man Who Knew Too Much since I still need to see both films, but you can’t go wrong with any of the other picks!

This festival comes in tandem with the publication of Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship & Film Scores That Changed Cinema (2025), a new book from Hollywood history guru Steven C. Smith, who will host an illustrated talk and book signing on 12.14. You can check out the full schedule here!

Academy Museum: 35th Anniversary Screening of Home Alone (1990) (Date: 12.13) — The Academy Museum will celebrate 35 years of this iconic holiday classic, what one Letterboxd user rightly calls “Die Hard (1988) for kids,” with a special screening featuring director Chris Columbus and star Macaulay Culkin in person! While currently sold out, the museum may release last-minute tickets at 9:00 AM on the morning of the event here.

Cinema 123 by Angelika: Some Like It Hot (1959) (Date: 12.15) — Catch this absolute serotonin shot of a film at the Angelika’s uptown location! As I write in the May Movie Review:

Some Like It Hot (1959) follows two Prohibition-era jazz musicians, saxophonist Joe (played by Tony Curtis) and double bass player Jerry (played by Jack Lemmon), who witness a mob murder in their hometown of Chicago. To avoid local boss (played by George Raft) Spats Colombo’s desired destruction of any and all witnesses, Joe and Jerry dress in drag as Josephine and Daphne, respectively, the newest members of an all-women band bound for Miami (read as: Southern California’s extremely haunted Hotel del Coronado). Both become fixated with its star singer, Sugar (played by Marilyn Monroe), catapulting the trio into a gender-bent love triangle that twists and expands its shape as the narrative progresses.

Simply put, Some Like It Hot surpasses the gold standard for screwball comedy. It clips along at a perfect pace, with the three leads delivering memorable, embodied performances. Lemmon creates a character barricaded by neuroses, then freed through the circumvention of his assigned sex…While the premise holds the potential for aging like a carton of unrefrigerated milk, Wilder’s execution results in a film far ahead of its time — that also avoids the pitfall of taking itself too seriously.

Metrograph: 35th Anniversary Screening of Metropolitan (1990) (Date: 12.19) — I am once again reminding you that Metropolitan (1990) is a holiday movie! It takes place the week between Christmas and New Year’s, making it an ideal seasonal watch. To mark the film’s 35th anniversary, director Whit Stillman will participate in a Q&A to accompany Metrograph’s screening.

Per the site: “An irresistibly quotable comedy of manners and a tour through an Upper East Side peopled by teenage patrician debutantes and dandies, the film follows bright-eyed downwardly mobile Princetonian Edward Clements as he encounters a group of contemporaries self-dubbed the ‘Urban Haute Bourgeoisie,’ fresh affections and rivalries are forged, and the newcomer is introduced to their manipulations, cruelties, and endless over-intellectualization of emotions.”

Los Feliz Cinema: Christmas in July (1940) (Date: 12.19) — This screwball comedy from Preston Sturges — called “warm, witty and original” by The New York Times upon its premiere — centers on Jimmy MacDonald (played by Dick Powell), who “wins” a $25,000 cash prize through a slogan contest for a coffee company. After taking his girlfriend, Betty (played by Ellen Drew), on a mid-summer shopping spree, Jimmy finds himself faced with the consequences of what turns out to be a prank created by his coworkers. Clocking just over an hour in running time, this deep cut has sat on my watch list for a while!

Metrograph: Holiday Fleischer Cartoons (1933) (Date: 12.21) — Metrograph has some of the best vintage cartoon programming, and, this month, will present a string of holiday-focused classics from Fleischer Studios, home of Betty Boop, Popeye, and more.

Per the site, the slate includes “Modeling, in which Koko the Clown escapes Max Fleischer’s pen to run amok; Christmas Comes but Once a Year, in which Boop series regular Grampy has a solo outing saving Christmas for the residents of an orphanage; Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, an utterly charming visualization of Robert L. May’s 1939 poem of the same name; Thrills and Chills, in which Mme. Boop and her dog Pudgy find themselves in deep trouble while staying at a ski resort; Somewhere in Dreamland, the Fleischers’ first venture into three-strip Technicolor, in which two impoverished children of the Great Depression frolic through an imaginary land made of sweet comestibles; and Ker Choo, in which we witness a stock car race featuring La Boop, Koko, and Bimbo among the competitors.”

This assemblage appears as part of Holidays at Metrograph, a series that also includes classics like The Shop around the Corner (1940), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Gremlins (1984), The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), and more. You can check out the full line-up here!

New Beverly Cinema: La Dolce Vita (1960) (Date: 12.26-12.28) — The week between Christmas and New Year’s, Angelenos can take a break from bed rotting with Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) at The New Bev! The cinephile staple, which has sat toward the top of my to-watch list forever, “follows a tabloid journalist (played by Marcello Mastroianni) in Rome over of a week of episodic adventures that skewer celebrity and religion while highlighting the emptiness behind all the glitz and glamour,” per the site.

Film Forum: The Lost Weekend (1945) (Opening Date: 12.26) — While Angelenos head to La Dolce Vita (1960) at The New Bev, New Yorkers can spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s with an underrated Billy Wilder classic at Film Forum!

One of my favorite movies, The Lost Weekend (1945) “opens with our protagonist and resident alcoholic Don Birnam (played by Ray Milland) getting ready to go away for the weekend with his brother, Wick (played by Phillip Terry) at the encouragement of his girlfriend, Helen St. James (an iconic media girlie with a fabulous leopard-print coat who frequents the Met Opera and works at TIME Magazine, played by Jane Wyman). Instead, things go a bit sideways as we follow Don on a weekend-long bender,” as I write in the first-ever newsletter.

Set against the backdrop of a bygone New York, The Lost Weekend weaves a harrowing, artful portrayal of addiction; its non-linear narrative mirrors Don’s addled memory, capturing the cyclicality that continually confines his life.

New Beverly Cinema: When Harry Met Sally (1989) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993) Double Feature (12.30-12.31) — Every year, I recommend a screening of When Harry Met Sally (1989) around New Year’s Eve, obviously. As I write in last December’s newsletter: “For those of you unfamiliar, the Nora Ephron classic…asks the age-old question: Girls and gays aside, can men and women really be friends? Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan star as Harry Burns and Sally Albright, a pair of acquaintances-turned-friends whose lives converge and diverge over a 12-year period, with the narrative coalescing to a crescendo in the final hour of 1988.”

While New Yorkers can see it at Village East on 12.29 and Syndicated on 12.31, the best showing, to me, comes from The New Bev in the form of a Nora Ephron double feature alongside Sleepless in Seattle (1993).

Miscellaneous Musings

Marty Supreme (2025) Christmas Day !! — As Fast Company’s Grace Snelling puts it, “Timothée Chalamet’s best role yet is your weirdly intense coworker on Zoom.” ICYMI: the actor brought Gen Z brain rot to the Oscar race in the best way, with an 18-minute spoof of a Zoom call to promote his upcoming A24 film, Marty Supreme (2025). In the online video, uploaded to his Instagram with the caption “video93884728.mp4,” Timmy parodies the archetype of out of touch actor; through what Snelling calls “a surrealist comedy of errors about how not to behave in a Zoom meeting,” he pulls out increasingly absurd ideas for PR stunts that leave the movie’s marketing team scrambling. Tune in for a random orange square, an ode to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005), and a blimp!

The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2025 — Last week, The New York Times Book Review unveiled its list of 100 notable books published this year across genres, with Content Corner favorite Playworld (2025) making the list alongside personal TBRs like David Szalay’s Booker Prize-winning Flesh (2025), Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds (2025), and Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket (2025). If you’re not sure where to start, the editorial staff has categorized the list by vibe here!

Supplemental Reading

As always, don’t forget to use archive.ph if you can’t access these pieces or any of the ones throughout my Substack!

• The Guardian: ‘It’s notoriously hard to write about sex’: David Szalay on Flesh (2025), his astounding Booker prize-winner

• Interview Magazine: Sissy Spacek and Ethan Hawke Enter the Flow State

• The Creative Independent: Writer Zoe Dubno on the importance of good mentors

• Coveteur: Frankenstein (2025) is the Gothic Fashion Film We’ve Been Waiting For

• Curbed: The Novelists are Fighting over Desks at The Center for Fiction

• Variety: Nobody Knows How to Win It: Inside Oscar’s Most Mysterious New Casting Category

Social Media Round-Up

A section aggregating tweets, TikToks, Notes, etc. that made me laugh, smile, etc. in the past month:

Cocktail of the Month

Try out a festive twist on a classic tequila cocktail with the…

Cranberry Paloma —

Pour some sugar onto a small plate. Rub one side of a Collins glass with grapefruit wedge, then dip it into sugar. Turn the glass upward and add ice.

Pour two and a half ounces of cranberry juice, two ounces of tequila blanco, and one and a half ounces of fresh grapefruit juice into a glass. Top the mixture with soda water and use a bar spoon to stir it.

Garnish the drink with a grapefruit twist and cranberries, then enjoy!

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for the November Book Review.

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

November Content Selections

This month, we’re doing something a little bit different. In the spirit of Friendsgiving, I asked four film and fiction Substackers whose work I adore to pick the content they think you should consume this November.

I’ll kick us off with my pick, and then pass the imaginary mic to Alana Johnson from Alanaland, Shawn Cremer from Scremes Report, and Rebecca Deczynski from Mezzanine Society to talk about the books they selected for you. Then, Anatomy of a Film’s Tope Eletu will close us out with a proposed film double feature to usher in the start of the holiday season.

Suggestions include:

My Pick: Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno (2025) — A debut with a denouement that feels like a spiritual successor to the Gossip Girl Thanksgiving dinner scene! As I write in the October Book Review:

Happiness and Love (2025) siphons its form and subject matter from Woodcutters (1984), transplanting Thomas Bernhard’s comparable critique of the art world from 1980s Vienna to 2020s New York. Zoe Dubno’s debut opens in the middle of a downtown dinner party. Its unnamed narrator sits at the end of a white couch. From this perch, she observes the surrounding social swirl, reflecting on her recent return to the city after a five-year stint in London…Past, present, and future conflate. Stream of consciousness shapes the novel, a story stripped of chapter breaks and told in a single paragraph…[its climax comes as the evening’s guest of honor, an] actress, a harbinger of West Coast culture, pops a hole in the social order of this specific East Coast set. She skewers the smug sense of superiority shaping the evening, lamenting: “People who believe that by reading Proust they’re geniuses…actually lock people out of having life-changing aesthetic experiences by acting like those things are harder to understand than they really are…I mean, why did you invite me here tonight to your cultural evening, as I think you described it on the invitation, when it’s been one of the most culture-less evenings of my life, when all I’ve heard conversation about is travel itineraries and gossip and clothing and wine?…I came to discuss ideas but instead I feel like a pilgrim who has walked for weeks only to find his holy site littered with trash and covered in graffiti.”

Alana’s Pick: The Girls by John Bowen (1986) — The last time a fellow Substacker asked me for a book recommendation, it was to kick off 2025, and, now that I’m being tasked with suggesting another one for the end of the year, I’m going to cheat and pick the same title. It’s honestly a delightful read year-round, but it does have a coziness to it that I find fall-appropriate. Also, I simply want everyone to read it!

That book is The Girls (1986), John Bowen’s darkly hilarious English masterpiece from 1986 brought back into print by McNally Editions. Tonally, it reminds me of a mash up of my two favorite Barbaras, Pym and Comyns (this is as highly as I will praise any piece of writing). After writing and deleting several plot summaries, I’ve decided that you should go in nearly blind to the story mechanics if possible. Just think: lesbians, the Cotswolds, craft fairs, and murder! You’ll love it.

Subscribe to Alanaland for…the best beyond-the-obvious book picks and perfume profiles.

Shawn’s Pick: In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honoré (2004) — As I’ve written about in Scremes Report, my love of magazines burgeoned in the mid-twenty-teens, largely thanks to the Portland/Copenhagen-based Kinfolk. Touted as a “slow lifestyle magazine,” Kinfolk was, when I discovered it, exactly what nineteen-year-old me craved. Volume 15, “The Entrepreneurs Issue,” features an interview with Canadian writer Carl Honoré and an excerpt of his book, In Praise of Slowness (2004). I was so inspired by these few pages of thinking about how slowing down one’s life can actually give one back control over one’s time, that I sought out the full text.

In Praise of Slowness has a chapter for each aspect of life — food, work, sex, medicine, leisure, etc. — in which Honoré explores the many facets of modern existence where finding slowness can bring great benefit. When I think of November, I think of slowing down, inching toward a distilled essence of hibernation; of gathering loved ones around candlelit tables laden with russet and jewel-tone foods warding against the outer cold; of long mornings nestled under overstuffed down comforters, head on a lover’s shoulder. I also think of working thoughtfully, steadily, slowly; of the dual act of revising and planning. I think of praising the reduction of speed that this season can bring.

Subscribe to Scremes Report for…monthly reading syllabi and a weekly rundown of go-to lit scene readings across New York, LA, and London.

Rebecca’s Pick: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino (1979) — The best way to approach this novel-in-stories by Italian writer Italo Calvino is to just roll with it. That is, it’s impossible to predict the outcome or understand what the story is building to until its very end. But here’s what I’ll say: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) explores the pleasures of reading and how the search for a great story can lead you to unexpected places. Expect plenty of meta moments around ideas like authorship and criticism, a touch of mockery regarding certain literary tropes, and a bit of mystery that’s threaded throughout. I’m not much of a re-reader, but, as soon as I finished this novel, I had an immediate desire to read it all over again. At the tail end of the year, there’s something particularly delightful about a book that can entwine you in such a reverie.

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Tope’s Double Feature: Home for the Holidays (1995) and What’s Cooking? (2000) – 84 million families gather on the fourth Thursday in November — and wonder why. This thought is not only the theme of my double feature, but also the tagline of one of the films I’ve chosen. Fall isn’t just about vibrant foliage and sweater weather; it also signals the time for us all to brace ourselves for family gatherings. Interestingly, both movies I selected are directed by women. Huzzah!

Home for the Holidays (1995), directed by Jodie Foster (yes, that one), brings together the Larson family in Baltimore for Thanksgiving. Claudia Larson (played by Holly Hunter) has just lost her job, made out with her boss, and finds out her daughter isn’t even coming to Thanksgiving, leaving Claudia to handle her dysfunctional family alone. This movie is extremely relatable, from the struggles of traveling during the holidays to the stressful preparations for dinner to the perils of obnoxious guests. And you can’t beat the cast — Hunter as Claudia and Robert Downey Jr. (during his peak cocaine era) as her brother, Tommy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this movie becomes a regular holiday watch for you, just as it is in my household.

Similarly, director Gurinder Chadha, known for Bend It Like Beckham (2002), also delivered another great Thanksgiving movie called What’s Cooking? (2000). Set in Los Angeles, it follows the chaotic lives of four families from different backgrounds as they come together for the holiday. Family secrets and deep feelings surface, creating an explosive gathering. A visual treat, Chadha’s film showcases how each family brings their own cultural dishes to this American tradition. I really enjoyed this movie, which has so many of my favorite actresses: Julianna Margulies, Kyra Sedgwick, Alfre Woodard, Joan Chen, and many others. Look out for the quote that made my day: “So, is the baby Jewish?!”

These movies very beautifully highlight how, despite our differences, we all have to deal with messy family dramas during the holidays. Enjoy!

Subscribe to Anatomy of a Film for…themed film picks and creatively curated double feature pairings.

Upcoming Content to Consume

The Paris Theater’s Knives Out Mystery Marathon (Dates: 11.1-11.4) — Yesterday, The Paris Theater kicked off its three-day Knives Out mystery marathon with the original 2019 film. ICYMI: the Knives Out films follow the format of a traditional Agatha Christie story, with detective Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig) at the center of each one’s sprawling cast and sharp pace. The series continues today with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) and over the next few days with sneak peek screenings of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025), coming to Netflix on 11.26, with live commentary from director Rian Johnson. You can check out details here!

Village East: Back to the Future (1985) 40th Anniversary (Date: 11.1-11.6) — The cult classic celebrates its 40th anniversary this year! ICYMI: Back to the Future (1985) follows Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox) as he gets blasted back in time to 1955 courtesy of a DeLorean time machine created by his mentor, Doc Brown (played by Christopher Lloyd). The film becomes a race against the clock for Marty to get his parents back together, then “back to the future.” You can catch it this week at Village East, as well as at various theaters nationwide!

Egyptian Theatre: All the President’s Men (1976) (Date: 11.1) — Angelenos can start the month with a special screening of All the President’s Men (1976) to celebrate the life and legacy of Robert Redford. The biographical Watergate thriller, based on the book of the same name, stars Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, the two journalists who brought down Richard Nixon with their investigative reporting for The Washington Post. Presented by American Cinematheque, the film screens today (11.1) at 2:00 PM PT.

American Cinematheque’s Starring Diane Keaton Series (Opening Date: 11.2) — Speaking of tributes from American Cinematheque, a festival dedicated to the late, great Diane Keaton opens this month across three LA theaters: the Aero, Los Feliz 3, and the Egyptian. The line-up starts tomorrow (11.2) with Annie Hall (1977) and continues with Shoot the Moon (1982), Marvin’s Room (1996), Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), Love and Death (1975), The Godfather (1972), and The Godfather: Part II (1974) this month, followed by Reds (1981) in December. (You know my suggested pick is Shoot the Moon!) You can check out the showtimes here.

As a bonus, Cinespia will honor Keaton in November as well with a screening of First Wives Club (1996) at the Palace on 11.15.

Film Forum: Edward Said: The Last Interview (2004) (Date: 11.2) — Tomorrow, you can catch a special screening of Edward Said: The Last Interview (2004) at Film Forum. The feature-length interview will play as part of Edward Said Days — a global festival commemorating the 90th anniversary of Said’s birth across New York, Berlin, and Ramallah — and conclude with a conversation between his wife and daughter, Mariam and Najla, both writers and activists.

As I explain in the September 2023 Movie Review, “Edward Said was a Palestinian-American public intellectual, literary critic, and activist. His 1978 book, Orientalism, became a backbone for studies of the Arab world, as well as the broader breach between concepts of Orient and Occident. He held a firm belief in the marriage between intellectual discourse and political action, a conviction he embodied throughout his life. Raised between Egypt and Palestine in the 1940s, Said immigrated to the United States to attend a Massachusetts boarding school at his parents’ behest in 1951. In the 1960s, Said stepped into an assistant professor position at Columbia University, where he taught until his death at age 67.”

Said battled leukemia for nearly 15 years. He filmed this documentary — a wide-ranging discussion of his life and ideas — with British-American journalist Charles Glass on the tail end of his fight.

Village East’s Noirvember Series (Opening Date: 11.5) — This month, Village East presents Noirvember, a series dedicated to celebrating four personal film noir favorites. Playing each Wednesday, the line-up consists of Double Indemnity (1944), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Chinatown (1974), and Touch of Evil (1958). You can see showtimes and book tickets here!

The Academy Museum: The Fashion of Clueless (2025) Book Signing with Mona May (Date: 11.6) — Clueless (1995) 30th anniversary festivities continue at The Academy Museum on 11.6 with a signing of costume designer Mona May’s new book, The Fashion of Clueless (2025).

Per the site: “In this richly illustrated volume written with fashion journalist Monica Corcoran Harel, May takes readers behind the seams of her most instantly recognizable designs. Published by Insight Editions to celebrate the film’s three-decade legacy, The Fashion of Clueless features exclusive behind-the-scenes photos, costume sketches, and new interviews with key cast and creatives, including Alicia Silverstone and director and writer Amy Heckerling.”

The event starts at 5:00 PM PT. Tickets cost $50 and include the book. You can reserve here!

Metrograph: Moonstruck (1987) (Dates: 11.14-11.16) — The thing about me is I’m always going to flag a screening of Moonstruck (1987). As I write in the February 2024 newsletter:

This movie has everything. Cher. The Met Opera. Brooklyn Heights in the 80s. Italian food. Young Nic Cage in a wifebeater AND a tux.

Moonstruck tells the story of Loretta Castorini (played by Cher), a 37-year-old widow who, at the start of the film, seems to have found love at last despite her track record of bad luck. While caring for his dying mother in Sicily, Loretta’s fiancé, Johnny Cammareri (played by Danny Aiello), asks her to invite his estranged brother, Ronny (played by Nicolas Cage), to their wedding. Loretta goes to appeal to Ronny at his Brooklyn Heights bakery, and the lines between love and hate begin to blur.

New Beverly Cinema: Goodfellas (1990) (Dates: 11.28-11.30) — The other thing about me is I’m always going to flag a screening of Goodfellas (1990). As I write in the October 2023 newsletter:

If you know, you know Goodfellas (1990) is one of my favorite films of all time. I’ve rewatched it with embarrassing frequency; read Nicholas Pileggi’s nonfiction book about Henry Hill, Wiseguy (1985); and even have a t-shirt of a shot from the film showing Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, and Robert DeNiro looking at a bag of cocaine that I wore wedding dress shopping with my friend…If you’re not familiar, Goodfellas basically operates as The Godfather’s fun little brother. Told through the lens of real-life mobster-turned-witness-protection-participant Henry Hill, the Martin Scorsese classic captures the height of organized crime in New York from the 1950s through the 1980s. The film expertly integrates songs including The Crystals’s “And Then He Kissed Me,” Derek and the Dominos’s “Layla,” and George Harrison’s “What Is Life” to accentuate the glamour, violence, and paranoia of Henry’s world, making it the vibiest of vibes.

Michael Werner Gallery: Postures: Jean Rhys in the Modern World (Timing: Ongoing in November) — A quick recommendation for folks across the pond! Hilton Als — the prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and cultural critic behind Joan Didion: What She Means (2022-2023) at The Hammer Museum — has curated an exhibition dedicated to Dominican-born British writer Jean Rhys at Michael Werner Gallery in Mayfair. (As you might recall, I recommended Rhys’s novel, Good Morning, Midnight (1939), a Modernist classic, in the August newsletter.)

The exhibition traces Rhys’ early origins and adult life, mapping the cross-cultural influences that shaped her work. Per the gallery site: “Conceived as a collective portrait of Jean Rhys, including paintings, drawings, and books, Postures explores not only the destabilizing force of difference, but the ways in which Empire affected the Creole world Rhys was born into, and never forgot. As a significant presence in post-colonial writing, Rhys offered, in sui generis prose, a view into lives and cultures that had hitherto been marginalized, or ignored, by European male writers. So doing, Rhys…inspired writers Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, and Caryl Phillips — all of whom are represented in Postures — to write about their own relationship to the places in the Caribbean where they were born and partly raised.”

It closes on 11.22, with gallery hours running from 10:00 to 6:00 PM Tuesday through Sunday. You also can listen to Als talk about Rhys on The Great Women Artists, a podcast from art historian and curator Katy Hessel, here.

Miscellaneous Musings

Bret Easton Ellis for Stone Island — Italian luxury fashion house Stone Island debuted its FW 25-26 collection with a diverse array of faces, from Italian actor Alessandro Borghi to Ukrainian boxer Oleksandr Usyk to British musician Chy Cartier. Each global figure gets a crisp portrait, their image accompanied by a column of questions curated by Swiss critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, designed to reveal their respective life outlooks. October ushered in a new feature centering none other than Bret Easton Ellis, a move Shawn Cremer of Scremes Report rightly likened to Joan Didion for Celine. You can check out the social post here and one of the interview cuts here.

Second Marlowe Granados Novel Loading! — Happy Hour (2020) author Marlowe Granados announced her second novel last month! Check out the Publishers Marketplace blurb in the above screenshot. Petty Intrigues (2027) will hit bookstore shelves in spring of 2027.

The Booker Prize 2025 — On 11.10, The Booker Prize Foundation will announce its 2025 winner, the author its judges deem the best long-form fiction writer of the year, at a ceremony in London.

The six finalists — selected by a panel consisting of Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Kiley Reid, Chris Power, and Sarah Jessica Parker, and chaired by 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle — include Flashlight by Susan Choi (2025), The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (2025), Audition by Katie Kitamura (2025), The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (2025), The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (2024), and Flesh by David Szalay (2025). Doyle points to two commonalities across the novels: strong grasp of language and a unique “examination of the individual trying to live with — to love, to seek attention from, to cope with, to understand, to keep at bay, to tolerate, to escape from — other people.”

These honorees stem from a pool of 153 submissions from authors across nationalities whose English-language books published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 1, 2024 and September 30, 2025. The shortlisted novelists receive £2,500 and a special, bound edition of their book, while the winner earns £50,000. Ahead of the final announcement, you can check out Shawn Cremer’s behind-the-scenes look into September’s shortlist ceremony over at Scremes Report.

Babes, Wake Up, Fresh Film Forum Merch Just Dropped — Film Forum dropped new merch, an updated iteration of the theater’s iconic baseball cap from 1991. As GQ writes, “The caps were an immediate hit — and even got a celebrity endorsement from David Byrne, the iconic musician and longtime Film Forum patron, who modeled the cap for the company’s 1991 holiday merch mailer.” The current staff uncovered those photos of Byrne back in 2021 and, now, updated the original hat for purchase in present day. You can preorder here!

New Upper West Side Theater Gets a Name! — Back in May, I discussed the reimagination of the Metro Theater, the long-shuttered Upper West Side space that will reopen soon as an arthouse cinema. In October, its new name got announced as Uptown Film Center, a nod to the theater’s forthcoming status as the only indie north of Lincoln Center. Stay tuned for screenings in 2027!

Supplemental Reading

As always, don’t forget to use archive.ph if you can’t access these pieces or any of the ones throughout my Substack!

• Los Angeles Review of Books: City of Sycophants: An Interview with Zoe Dubno on Her Debut Novel, Happiness and Love

• Frieze: Hilton Als’s Tender Portrait of Jean Rhys

• Air Mail: The Beatnik and the Mobster: How Did an Unpublished Jack Kerouac Story End up in the Possession of Gambino Crime Boss Paul Castellano?

• Vogue: The Best Dressed Stars at the 2025 Academy Museum Gala

• Interview Magazine: Diane Keaton Takes Questions from 25 Famous Friends and Fans

Social Media Round-Up

A section aggregating tweets, TikToks, Notes, etc. that made me laugh, smile, etc. in the past month!

First things first, Nate Stein’s elaborate early aughts movie spoofs are cracking me up on Instagram.

Beyond that:

Cocktail of the Month

Sip on something sparkly while you dish up Thanksgiving dinner with the…

Spiced Pear and Bourbon Sparkler —

Up to a week in advance, prepare the spiced pear simple syrup. To make it, blend three ripe pears together with a quarter cup of water. Then, add that mixture into a pot with a two-inch nub of peeled and sliced ginger, two cinnamon sticks, and one and a quarter teaspoons of ground cloves. Cover the pot and let it simmer over low heat for ten minutes. Then, take off the heat and add in a quarter cup of brown sugar, stirring until it gets incorporated into the mixture. Let it cool before bottling and refrigerating.

Now, to make the drink itself, pour one and a half ounces each of bourbon and spiced pear simple syrup into a cocktail shaker, combined with a half ounce of lemon juice and ice. Shake, then strain into a chilled coupe glass. Top with two ounces of Prosecco, and enjoy!

That’s all for now!

xo,
Najet

But, first, some housekeeping!

ICYMI: Content Corner is now on Instagram! Check it out here.

Then, New York-based subscribers can catch two films from the September Movie Review on the big screen today and tomorrow. Today (10.1), Metrograph screens Gosford Park (2001) at 3:00 PM, and, tomorrow (10.2), Film Forum presents Lolita (1962) at 12:30 PM on the final day of its 100 Years of Peter Sellers series.

Now, let’s get into it:

October Book Selections

This month, we’re slipping into some sinister reads, as we are wont to do in October.

Suggestions for the month ahead include:

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith (1950) — The basis for one of my favorite Hitchcock films, Ripley author Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel features one of literary fiction’s most finessed plots. She fleshes it out with careful attention to style, a sense of dread seeping through each sentence (“The more organic air, weighted with nightfall, struck him like a smothering pillow.”). As I write in the November 2024 Book Review:

Strangers on a Train (1950) opens on a train tracking toward Texas, where, as the title implies, two strangers, architect Guy Haines and psychotic nepo baby Charles Anthony Bruno, cross paths. As the pair dines at Bruno’s behest, Guy gradually opens up about his desire to divorce his unfaithful wife, Miriam, and marry his current love, Anne Faulkner. In turn, Bruno lays out his idea for the perfect murder: an exchange of acts that would have Bruno end Miriam, Guy kill Bruno’s father. Guy decries the idea immediately (“Guy looked at him in disgust. Bruno seemed to be growing indefinite at the edges, as if by some process of deliquescence. He seemed only a voice and a spirit now, the spirit of evil.”). Bruno, however, persists — with fatal consequences…Highsmith adopts a close third person, dipping into the viewpoints of Bruno and Guy in alternation…Death drips from each description, replicating for the reader the kind of atmospheric pressure that comes to consume Guy.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1962) — Shirley Jackson shot to infamy when her short story, “The Lottery,” one you undoubtedly read in ninth grade English, published in The New Yorker. She established a strong reputation as a horror and mystery writer, with The Haunting of Hill House (1959) emerging as her most culturally enduring novel. Jackson’s final book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), focuses on a family in isolation.

This midcentury mystery novel adopts the first-person perspective of Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, an eighteen-year-old girl picking up the pieces of a prior loss alongside her agoraphobic older sister, Constance, and wheelchair-bound uncle, Julian. Where The Haunting of Hill House deals in traditional horror, We Have Always Lived in the Castle presents a home haunted by past circumstance. Jackson experiments with notions of narrator reliability to sculpt a slippery tale, the full scope of the story out of sight until the novel’s final pages.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991) — Nothing says spooky season quite like a murderous finance bro! American Psycho (1991) famously gets quite violent, making certain passages more difficult to digest, but it also functions as a top-tier satire of 1980s New York. Rampant materialism marks each page; for instance, the recurrence of Les Miserables posters and Playbills littered across the city, an intentionally empty nod to the then-cultural status signifier du jour, marks one of my favorite details. Through the disturbed psyche of Patrick Bateman, Bret Easton Ellis excises the rot that can belie glamour — and what happens when ennui becomes psychosis.

Here in the Dark by Alexis Soloski (2023) — A treat of a contemporary thriller, Here in the Dark (2023) “centers on junior theater critic Vivian Parry, a woman in her early 30s with a My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)-esque proclivity for self destruction. She keeps everyone around her at arm’s length — save for her best friend, Justine — and spends her spare time drinking, popping pills, and generally waiting for the time between performances to pass. Her routine existence experiences a jolt when, per the front flap, ‘angling for a promotion, she reluctantly agrees to an interview on her style and methods, a conversation that reveals secrets she had long buried. Then her interviewer disappears and Vivian learns — from his devastated fiancé — that she was the last person to have seen him alive.’ As she seeks answers, Vivian finds herself thrust deeper and deeper into the unnerving underbelly of the downtown theater scene,” as I describe in the February 2024 Book Review.

Author Alexis Soloski, a former theater critic for The Village Voice herself, immerses the reader in Vivian’s first-person perspective. For instance, Vivian reflects: “He [her boss] alternates my columns with those of the other junior critic, Caleb Jones. Caleb has a newly minted dramaturgy MFA, a retina-scarring smile, and the aesthetic discernment of a wedge salad. Me, I have taste for days. And a brisk, prickly, style. Roger will see sense. Eventually.” Here, precise observation — “a retina scarring smile,” “the aesthetic discernment of a wedge salad” — pairs with punctuated prose. Through short, sliced sentences, Soloski cultivates a hard-boiled stream of consciousness, projecting the archetype of the midcentury detective novel through the madcap prism of contemporary experimental performance.

Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane (2024) — Through Highway Thirteen (2024), Australian author Fiona McFarlane examines the ethical considerations intrinsic to true crime consumption. As I write in the September 2024 Book Review:

McFarlane opens her new short story collection with an epigraph from William Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595): “Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows.” Highway Thirteen then continues with a glimpse into twelve such shadows of grief, distinctive stories spanning from 1950 through 2028, from Bristol to Austin to Sydney. Each narrative strand connects to a string of serial killings in 1990s Australia, loosely based on Ivan Milat’s 1989 reign of terror. Forms vary, from first to third person, from traditional prose to mock podcast script. As Kirkus Reviews describes: “The criminal investigation never becomes the central plot; the killer himself, here called Paul Biga, remains offstage while his victims appear only in fleeting mentions or glimpses.”

Upcoming Content to Consume

Village East’s Hitchcocktober Series (Opening Date: 10.1) — Village East’s Hitcocktober series returns! Playing every Wednesday, this year’s line-up includes The Birds (1963), Rope (1948), Marnie (1964), Dial M for Murder (1951), and, of course, the annual Halloween week screening of Psycho (1960).

I have yet to see Marnie, but, if I had to choose among the others, my power ranking would go: Dial M for Murder > Psycho > The Birds > Rope. All bangers though! You can book tickets here.

Metrograph’s The Rule of Murch Series (Opening Date: 10.3) — Metrograph celebrates sound designer Walter Murch with a new series! Murch worked alongside Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas at Coppola’s often struggling studio, American Zoetrope, during the height of New Hollywood.

Murch’s abandonment of artificiality, epitomized in the opening sequence of The Conversation (1974), cultivates the illusion of verisimilitude, a vision that continues to influence contemporary directors like Jonathan Glazer [The Zone of Interest (2023)]. As I write in my review: “Coppola’s neo-noir thriller opens over a bustling Union Square in San Francisco. Jazz hums and bleeds into garbled audio. The image becomes clearer. Filmed documentary-style, a couple (played by Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest) weaves in and out of the frame, between mimes, musicians, hedges. Bits of their conversation — the conversation — crash over, fade behind, the sounds of the square. Their state of surveillance becomes apparent.” Through this then-novel approach to sound, Murch underscores the notion of viewer as voyeur.

Metrograph’s line-up includes Coppola classics like The Godfather (1972), The Conversation, and The Godfather: Part II (1974), as well as other favorite films including Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). You can check out the current slate, which Metrograph usually updates periodically with new films and showtimes, here.

Film Forum: The Librarians (2025) (Opening Date: 10.3) — Debuting at Film Forum on Friday (10.3), this new documentary from Kim A. Snyder — the filmmaker behind the Oscar-nominated documentary Death by Numbers (2024), which follows a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting — underscores the importance of resisting book banning.

Presented in partnership with Banned Books Week and executive produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, The Librarians (2025) explores the contemporary challenges faced by American librarians. It includes stories of censorship from Texas to Florida to New Jersey, emerging as a “paean to librarians, and the parents and students who flank them, on the frontlines,” as Film Forum describes.

Marisa Meltzer on It Girl (2025) [Dates: 10.7 (New York), 10.12 (LA)] — This month, Marisa Meltzer — the journalist behind Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss's Glossier (2023) — debuts a new book focused on the life of Jane Birkin.

It Girl (2025) marks the first comprehensive biography of the British-born actress, singer, and style icon, delving into everything “from her early years in 1960s London to her rise as a beloved celebrity in France, detailing personal challenges, her relationships with creative powerhouses, and the duality of her public and private selves,” per McNally Jackson.

New York-based subscribers can join Meltzer alongside chef and writer Alison Roman at McNally Jackson Seaport on 10.17. Reserve a spot — and a book — here! Meanwhile, Angelenos can RSVP for free here to see Meltzer speak at Zibby’s Book Shop in Santa Monica on 10.12.

New Beverly Cinema: Rosemary’s Baby (1968) (Dates: 10.7-10.9) — One of my favorite films, a perfect spooky season watch about bodily autonomy and the illusion of the perfect Upper West Side prewar apartment, screens for three nights next week at The New Bev!

As I write in the October 2023 newsletter: “Roman Polanski’s magnum opus from 1968 follows Rosemary Woodhouse (played by Mia Farrow) and her struggling actor husband Guy (played by John Cassavetes) as they move into the Bramford, a fictional version of the Dakota. The building has a haunted reputation riddled with stories of witchcraft and murder, as well as nosy neighbors in the form of older couple Roman and Minnie Castavet (played by Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon at her very best). When she becomes pregnant shortly after their move, Rosemary’s physical condition starts to deteriorate, drawing her mental coherence into question. Every aspect of this film — from Farrow’s harrowing performance to its “stiflingly chic interiors” — work together to draw the audience into the quiet terror of its world.”

Brandon Taylor on Minor Black Figures (2025) [Dates: 10.13 (LA), 10.21 (New York)] — Brandon Taylor — the Booker Prize finalist behind Real Life (2020), Filthy Animals (2021), and The Late Americans (2023) whose craft pieces I am Always Talking About — has a new novel debuting!

Set over a New York City summer, Minor Black Figures (2025) focuses on Wyeth, a young Black painter trapped in a period of creative and romantic struggle. Per The Center for Fiction, “as Wyeth searches for inspiration, he confronts the fraught relationship between Black and white art and wrestles with the complex ways the Black body is perceived and represented. Alongside these tensions, he also faces compromises demanded of artmaking and the simple act of living.”

LA-based subscribers can see Brandon discuss the novel at Skylight Books on 10.13, while New Yorkers can catch him in conversation with writer and podcaster Matthew Sitman at The Center for Fiction on 10.21. You can RSVP for the Skylight Books talk for free here and The Center for Fiction’s event not for free here.

McNally Jackson Seaport: Stephanie LaCava launches Nymph (2025), in conversation with Marlowe Granados (Date: 10.14) — Join Stephanie LaCava for a discussion of her new novel, Nymph (2025), alongside a Content Corner fave: Happy Hour (2020) author Marlowe Granados.

A subversive thriller exploring violence through a singular love story, Nymph follows Bathory — a model, sex worker, and assassin just shy of thirty who, much like Margot in I Fear My Pain Interests You (2022), navigates an isolating and unusual family dynamic. Per McNally Jackson: “As a student in New York, her life changes on accepting a job at a dilapidated card shop in Manhattan…a front for an agency that allows her to put her inherited skills to use.”

You can reserve a spot with or without a book here!

Los Feliz Cinema: Poltergeist (1982) (Date: 10.14) — This month, American Cinematheque, which has brought Angelenos screenings of new and repertory films since 1985, plans to play Poltergeist (1982) at Los Feliz Cinema as part of its Halloween series!

I discussed the film as part of my 1982 deep dive back in July, writing: “The early 80s horror classic focuses on the Freelings, a family who has recently moved into Cuesta Verde, a suburban development built by the employer of its patriarch, Steve (played by Craig T. Nelson). While Steve scales his real-estate career, his wife, stay-at-home mom Diane (played by JoBeth Williams), takes care of their children: sixteen-year-old Dana (played by Dominique Dunne in her final film role), eight-year-old Robbie (played by Oliver Robins), and five-year-old Carol Anne (played by Heather O’Rourke). Within a few days, odd occurrences start plaguing their new home. Silverware bends into oblivion; furniture moves unprompted. But the strange and silly soon takes a sinister turn — with Carol Anne at the center of the action.”

The Center for Fiction: Urmila Seshagiri and Anne Fernald on the Experimental Fiction of Virginia Woolf (Date: 10.16) — Big year for Virginia Woolf stans! In tandem with the centenary of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a new-to-readers collection from the author, The Life of Violet (2025), hits bookstores this month. The posthumous publication brings together a trio of interconnected stories by the British author, “fantastical and farcical anti-fairy tales about a giantess who builds a magical ‘cottage of one’s own,’ battles a silver-scaled sea monster, and defies governesses and gravity alike,” per The Center for Fiction.

Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri — who came across the final, revised typescript of the stories from 1907 in 2022 — will lead the discussion alongside Fordham University professor Anne Fernald.

The New Yorker Festival (Dates: 10.24-10.26) — The New Yorker Festival returns with three days of packed programming! The magazine’s signature event includes discussions around art, culture, politics, and more — all the elements that have filled the magazine’s pages for the past century.

Personal favorite picks from this year’s schedule include Ian Frazier and Jamaica Kincaid in conversation with Susan Morrison, George Saunders and Zadie Smith with Deborah Treisman, and Demi Moore with Jia Tolentino. You can check out the full line-up here!

The Academy Museum: The Way We Were (1973) (Date: 10.26) — To me, this film feels like fall not in its literal setting, but in how it dissects the seasons of life, the pain that comes with change. The Way We Were (1973) — yes, the movie Carrie Bradshaw references ad nauseam in the Sex and the City (1998-2004) season two finale — follows a pair of star-crossed lovers on separate paths, set to an iconic score from Oscar-winning composer Marvin Hamlisch.

Robert Redford, who passed away last month (I weirdly got the news alert about his death while writing this blurb for you all, seconds after screenshotting the above image), stars as Hubbell Gardiner, a carefree WASP whose 2025 Hinge profile would read “Not Political,” while Barbra Streisand steps into the role of Marxist Jew Katie Morosky. They first meet in college in 1937, and their lives continue to intersect across both coasts in the ensuing years, her activism perpetually at odds with his apathy.

Village East: Little Shop of Horrors (1986) (Date: 10.27) — I had the pleasure of seeing Frank Oz introduce a screening of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) at The Paris a few years ago, during which the Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) director cited Welles as one of the primary influences on his work. That’s been one to chew on. Anyway! As part of the same Q&A, Oz discussed the unique challenges of adapting Little Shop of Horrors to the big screen — namely, the need to rewrite and reshoot the original ending after a poor reaction from test audiences. After hearing about Oz’s process, then seeing the stage musical off-Broadway this summer, I was excited to find the film on Village East’s fall slate.

ICYMI: the horror comedy focuses on a madcap cast of characters working at a flower shop in the center of a city. When a plant with a particular diet becomes the store’s star attraction, things start to spiral out of control. As Roger Ebert writes in his 1986 review: “This is not only a musical and a comedy, as we expected, but also a revue of sorts: Comic actors such as Bill Murray, John Candy and James Belushi have walk-ons, and Steve Martin almost steals the show as a sadistic, motorcycle-riding dentist. Yet at the heart of the movie is a basic sweetness, an innocence that extends even to the centerpiece of the story.”

New York Philharmonic: Psycho (1960) in Concert (Date: 10.31) — My Halloween pick for New Yorkers! Catch a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) with Bernard Hermann’s haunting score performed by a live orchestra, courtesy of the New York Philharmonic.

Cinespia: Scream (1996) (Date: 10.31) — My Halloween pick for Angelenos! For the first time in over a decade, Cinespia will take a break from its fall screenings at The Orpheum and return to Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Halloween night with a Content Corner favorite — Scream (1996)! ICYMI: last October, I watched every movie in the franchise. Discussing the first film, I write:

Scream (1996) has long remained The Only Slasher I Like…Penned by Kevin Williamson, the mastermind behind iconic teen dramas Dawson’s Creek (1998-2004) and The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017), Scream enlivened a genre then on its last severed leg. Horror reached a zenith in the 1980s after John Carpenter created a cult classic in Halloween (1978). On its heels, films from Friday the 13th (1980) to Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) established a primary place in the cultural zeitgeist before starting to grow tired; too many successive sequels, paired with constant reiterations of the same tropes, rendered the genre predictable — until Scream…It broke new ground by taking a self-aware approach to its genre, leaning into mystery as much as murder, and emphasizing character over kills.

Snag tickets here!

The Paris Theater’s New Wave: 60s Godard on 35mm Series (Timing: Ongoing in October) — This month, The Paris Theater continues its series dedicated to the filmography of Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of French New Wave film. October screenings include A Woman is a Woman (1961), a new favorite I reviewed back in February; Vivre sa vie (1962); Band of Outsiders (1964); Pierrot le fou (1965); and Weekend (1967). You can check out showtimes here!

Miscellaneous Musings

Rouje x The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) — A crossover I didn’t know I needed! Rouje, the Parisian clothing brand founded by French it girl Jeanne Damas and my long-time favorite spot to shop, launched its new line of fall coats with a tribute to Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).

As I write in the December 2024 Movie Review, the Palme d’Or winner “centers on a pair of young lovers residing in the rural French town of Cherbourg. 17-year-old Geneviève (played by Catherine Deneuve) works alongside her mother, Madame Émery (played by Anne Vernon), at their struggling umbrella boutique, while Guy (played by Nino Castelnuovo), an auto mechanic, cares for his sickly aunt and godmother, Élise (played by Mireille Perrey). Geneviève and Guy spend their evenings exploring the town, fantasizing about a life together, a marriage, despite her mother’s protestations. But before they can exchange vows, Guy gets drafted to Algeria, leading to a separation that draws into question the longevity of first love.”

Candy-colored costumes and bright sets distinguish The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, cloaking the melancholy that molds its meaning. Damas distills this same dichotomy in her brand’s tribute to the film.

New French Literature in Translation — Last month, I attended Literary Fall at Albertine, a launch event celebrating the art and future of translation from French to English. It kicked off with McNally Jackson founder Sarah McNally, Europa Editions publisher Michael Reynolds, and American author Nicole Krauss examining the contemporary state of translation in a conversation moderated by writer and editor Adam Dalva. Then, ahead of closing marks from Library Science’s Alyssa Reeder, representatives from New Directions, NYRB, Archipelago, and Europa teased upcoming releases.

Titles that caught my eye include Sandrine Collette’s Madelaine Before the Dawn (2026), described as ideal for fans of Claire Keegan, and Valérie Perrin’s Tata (2024), a “whydunit” in which a woman named Agnès must identify the body of her aunt who died three years earlier. Both from Europa, Madelaine Before the Dawn will hit U.S. bookstores in March, with Tata following in May.

The Fall I Caved and Watched The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022-2025) — If you’ve been here a minute, you know I love a teen drama, but also don’t really watch a lot of TV because I get too addicted. Last month, like Marlowe Granados and legions of other millennial women, I succumbed to the online swirl and watched The Summer I Turned Pretty (2022-2025). Cheesy, but cut from the cloth of late 90s and early aughts shows that raised me, and, like everyone else, I’m in love with Chris Briney now! Anyway, if you’re suffering from withdrawals after the series finale, I highly recommend watching its heavily referenced Hollywood Golden Age genesis, Sabrina (1954).

TCM’s The Plot Thickens (Again) — I stay hooked on Turner Classic Movies’s The Plot Thickens! This month, I listened to the podcast’s second season, which focuses on Brian De Palma’s ill-fated 1990 adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). Instead of TCM host Ben Mankiewicz narrating, journalist Julie Salamon, who shadowed the cast and crew on set during production, takes the reins.

I hadn’t read the book or seen the movie when I started this season (though I did ultimately read The Bonfire of the Vanities last month, as you’ll hear about in the September Book Review). Regardless of your familiarity level with the source material, I would recommend listening. The narrative gave me a strong primer on the novel without too many spoilers, while also providing me with a more holistic look into De Palma as an individual and artist alike.

Supplemental Reading

As always, don’t forget to use archive.ph if you can’t access these pieces or any of the ones throughout my Substack!

• i-D: The Summer I Turned Self-Aware: Marlowe Granados on The Summer I Turned Pretty

• Rolling Stone: Robert Redford Was the Definition of a Movie Star

• McNally Editions: Panic and Prophecy: Michael Clune on White Out (2013) and Pan (2025)

• Air Mail: Daphne Merkin on Mrs. Dalloway at 100

• Town & Country: Everything We Know About Netflix’s The Age of Innocence

• Air Mail: Spark of Genius: On British Novelist Muriel Spark

• Town & Country: The Last Days of Disco — The Return of the ‘80s

Social Media Round-Up

A section aggregating tweets, TikToks, Notes, etc. that made me laugh, smile, etc. in the past month:

Cocktail of the Month

Get ready for your Halloween party with the…

Ginger Apple Moscow Mule —

You can make this one for yourself or pre-prepare it as a batch cocktail before having people over to celebrate the season!

To make a single drink, combine two ounces of vodka, the juice from half of a lime, 1/3 cup of apple cider, a tablespoon of apple butter, and one and a half teaspoons of fresh grated ginger in a cocktail shaker over ice. Shake until combined, then strain into an ice-filled cocktail glass.

Top with ginger beer, then garnish with apple slices, pomegranate arils, and cinnamon sticks, and enjoy!

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for the September Book Review.

xo,
Najet

Let’s get into it:

September Book Selections

Back-to-school vibes! We’re learning and soaking in the season! This month, I’ve picked two pairs of books that take on greater meaning when read alongside one another.

With that context in mind, suggestions for September include:

White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin by Michael Clune (2013) — This drug memoir from Michael Clune, the kind of nonfiction that reads like a novel, cultivates an immersive sensory experience. The narrative collapses all notions of linear time, conflating past, present, and future into a singular continuum. As I write in the October 2024 Book Review: “One of the most memorable sequences traces Clune’s childhood search for a real-life Candy Land, a pursuit lyrically wrenched into the memory of his first time using…Some images, some sequences, sharpen to a point of clarity, while others stay in a state of perpetual refraction.” This stylistic approach mimics the muddled sense of memory that comes with drug use and, in doing so, seeds a vicarious sense of empathy in the reader.

Pan by Michael Clune (2025) — After you finish White Out (2013), delve into Michael Clune’s new novel to see how his distinctive style translates to fiction. The story focuses on Nick, a 15-year-old boy plagued by panic attacks who becomes convinced that Greek god Pan lives in his brain. Narrated by an older iteration of Nick in the first person, it takes place over the course of 1990, opening in spring before stretching through summer, then closing in fall (“And as I sat in Ty’s passenger seat remembering the dream, I felt that now the warm apex of autumn, phantom lids had come down over my eyes.”).

As I write in the August Book Review: “Clune captures the feeling of consciousness made immediate by Modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf…In…White Out…Clune reflects the rupture of memory that accompanies addiction through his prose. In Pan (2025), his fixation with the porous quality of consciousness emerges in the realm of anxiety. The notion of addiction as a “memory disease” recurs throughout White Out, while, in Pan, Nick and his friends fixate on what it means to have a “Sound Mind.” Across both books, small details like the quality of certain sounds and lights become uncanny through magnification. For instance, looking at his friend, Ty, Nick narrates: ‘The whites of his eyes seemed swallowed up by swelling color. His eyes looked like…like doors, I thought, the panic rising a little more now. Like stones. Like real stones.’ These sensory observations culminate to create a warped sense of the surrounding world, magnified fiction as true as fact.”

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes (1947) — Nothing says September in California quite like this noir novel from Dorothy B. Hughes (and its suggested pairing, but more on that in a minute). As I write in the May Book Review:

A perfect literary thriller, In a Lonely Place (1947) inhabits the headspace of World War II veteran Dix Steele from the remove of a third-person perspective. It captures the atmospheric chill of Southern California, the sense of danger lurking beneath the bougainvillea (“He was slightly chilled; there was a definite hint of autumn, if only in the mildness of California autumn, in the air tonight.”). The novel opens on the California Incline, with Dix surrounded by fog. He follows a woman down the slope of the hill, toward the beach, bewitched by her resemblance to someone he once knew. The aperture of Dix’s world then broadens to reveal the texture and scope of his Los Angeles.

A New Jersey native, Dix struggles to adjust to his new reality (“He didn’t get a chance to build a dream.”). His social world stays constricted, confined to his old war buddy-turned-detective, Brub Nicolai, and Brub’s wife, Sylvia. A series of strangulations, one woman per month, haunts Brub and casts a fear over the whole of the city…Hughes subverts the traditional tropes of the detective novel, a historically male-dominated genre. As crime writer Megan Abbott points out in her afterword to the NYRB edition, Sylvia occupies the genre’s “good girl” archetype, while Dix’s neighbor, Laurel Gray, emerges as the femme fatale. But their behavior cracks the confines of those categories as the narrative throttles toward its conclusion, a reversal fueled by Hughes’s female authorial gaze.

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis (2023) — My favorite novel ever, ever, which I feel inclined to re-read every Labor Day weekend, even with its 608-page count. I’ll echo Shawn Cremer of Scremes Report, who, in his July newsletter, writes: “The Shards (2023) is longer than most of Ellis’s other books, and I really prefer it. The length allows that simmer to roil far longer, bringing about that delicious skin-crawling feeling.” In a Lonely Place (1947) makes a perfect pairing with The Shards, as both novels get propelled forward by narrators whose sanity teeters just out of sight.

Told in first person by a 57-year-old Bret, this thriller-meets-coming-of-age story recounts a fictional-ish version of the author’s senior year at Buckley, one of LA’s long-standing private schools. The nostalgia-laced narrative begins over Labor Day weekend when a new kid, Robert Mallory, arrives on the scene. His introduction coincides with a swell in serial killings by The Trawler, an unknown force that soon begins stalking a still-closeted teenage Bret and his friends. As the story moves through the fall of 1981, it interweaves together afternoons at Westwood Village and The Sherman Oaks Galleria, lunches at Trumps and The Polo Lounge, and evenings winding down Mulholland to distill the memory of a long-gone Los Angeles.

For the full effect, don’t forget to turn on the accompanying Spotify playlist while you read!

Upcoming Content to Consume

First things first, I’m ~thrilled~ to announce that Content Corner is now on Instagram! Follow @read.contentcorner for reminders of newsletter highlights in real time, as well as a more comprehensive cadence of recommendations throughout the month.

Second, as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) reaches its 50th anniversary, September marks a big month for film in New York. Film Forum and IFC are celebrating big milestones — 35 years on Houston Street for Film Forum, two decades on Bleecker for IFC. To commemorate the occasion, Film Forum will replicate its opening weekend programming from 1990 starting on 9.5, while IFC started a series that screens a slate of 20 films, one for each year of the theater’s existence. Plus, the 63rd annual New York Film Festival opens at Lincoln Center on 9.26! You can check out the main slate here.

Finally, for subscribers ~everywhere~, The Criterion Channel has announced its September line-up. Two collections unsurprisingly stand out to me: Directed by Robert Altman and ‘70s Noir. Across both, favorites include The Long Goodbye (1973) (once again — we all agree that Elliot Gould is hot in this movie, right?), Chinatown (1974), Nashville (1975), and Winter Kills (1979), while my to-watch list includes Sisters (1973), California Split (1974), 3 Women (1977), and Gosford Park (2001).

Now, here are my top IRL picks for September:

Village East: The Shining (1980) (Date: 9.1) — New York-based subscribers stuck in the city over Labor Day weekend can start off September with a screening of the Stanley Kubrick classic tonight!

As I write in the October 2023 Movie Review: “The Shining follows depressed novelist Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson), as well as his wife, Wendy (played by Shelley Duvall), and son, psychic Pisces-coded king Danny (Danny Lloyd), as they take up residence in The Overlook Hotel. Situated in the Colorado wilderness, The Overlook requires a winter caretaker, and Jack volunteers for the job in hopes the isolation will afford him the opportunity to make progress on his novel. But under the influence of the hotel and its residents, Jack’s sanity famously starts to slip.”

Shelley Duvall gives an incredible performance that faced unfair criticism, as I see it, from Kubrick over the course of filming, with her final product yielding little to no mention in initial reviews. The Shining strikes me as primarily about domestic horror, with Duvall as the sponge who absorbs the full scope of her husband’s terror — and grounds the film through each emotional beat.

New Beverly Cinema: Lost in Translation (2003) (Dates: 9.2-9.4) — This week, LA-based subscribers can catch Sofia Coppola’s early aughts cult classic about an unlikely pair of Americans drawn together in Tokyo.

As I write in the August 2023 Movie Review, Lost in Translation (2003) “follows fading American actor Bob Harris (played by Bill Murray) as he travels to Tokyo to shoot a whisky commercial. He soon crosses paths with new Yale graduate and newlywed Charlotte (played by Scarlett Johansson). Having followed her celebrity photographer husband (played by Giovanni Ribisi) on his work trip, Charlotte finds herself more or less abandoned at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, spending her spare time listening to cassettes on how to find your purpose while her husband fawns over a Hollywood actress (played by Anna Faris). Bob and Charlotte come together at and beyond the hotel bar, finding a sense of safety in each other as they navigate a foreign city and an otherwise empty period in their lives.”

The film functions as a master class in mood, the purest encapsulation of romantic friendship. The New Bev will screen it for three nights in a double feature alongside Tokyo Pop (1988). You can check out details and book here!

Metrograph’s Ravishing Romy Series (Opening Date: 9.6) — This month, Metrograph will mount a series dedicated to iconic Austrian-born actress Romy Schneider.

In a piece for the Metrograph site, writer Colleen Kelsey observes: “Schneider suffered from perfection. She was simply too good. And too beautiful. The misperceptions between appearances and the genius of the woman behind them is too common a story. The eroticism Schneider suffused in many of her roles was often a prelude, or a companion, to perfectly calibrated detonations of emotion. How she owned the camera so completely, in such an unassuming fashion, remains a mystery of her technique. In films like La Piscine (1969) and The Things of Life (1970), she is remembered for being, to [Karl] Lagerfeld’s objection, ‘chic,’ an ideal incarnation of the liberated bourgeois. Her death at age 43 made her a cult object of tragedy. All she wanted was credibility.”

Now, Metrograph celebrates her legacy with a slate that includes The Trial (1962), La Piscine, The Things of Life, Ludwig (1972), That Most Important Thing: Love (1975), and more. You can check out the current line-up and available showtimes here!

Village East: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) in 35mm (Date: 9.8) — Catch the Elia Kazan adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s magnum opus at Village East! The film stars the same cast from its original Broadway run, with the notable replacement of Jessica Tandy with Vivien Leigh. It centers on fading Southern Belle Blanche DuBois (played by Leigh), who travels to New Orleans to visit her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski (played by Marlon Brando), and sister, Stella (Kim Hunter), unleashing an exploration of the dangers that come with unbridled attraction.

As Roger Ebert writes in a 1993 piece: “Marlon Brando didn’t win the Academy Award in 1951…But you could make a good case that no performance had more influence on modern film acting styles than Brando’s work as Stanley Kowalski, Tennessee Williams’ rough, smelly, sexually charged hero. Before this role, there was usually a certain restraint in American movie performances. Actors would portray violent emotions, but you could always sense to some degree a certain modesty that prevented them from displaying their feelings in raw nakedness. Brando held nothing back, and within a few years his was the style that dominated Hollywood movie acting. This movie led directly to work by Brando’s heirs such as Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Jack Nicholson, and Sean Penn.”

The New School: Reading and Conversation: Adam Ross (Date: 9.9) — If you’ve been here a while, you know Playworld (2025) has emerged as one of my favorite 2025 reads. The new novel from Sewanee Review editor Adam Ross follows a year in the life of 14-year-old Griffin Hurt, a child actor growing up on the Upper West Side. As I describe in the July newsletter:

Written from the perspective of Griffin as an adult, it opens with an arresting prologue that reads: “In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.” The narrative then loops backward to chronicle “a lifetime of damage and blind endurance crammed into one extremely long, harrowing year,” as Helen Schulman puts it in her Air Mail review…Without spoiling specifics, Playworld comes to a close on a late September afternoon with a bike ride across 72nd Street that encapsulates the waning freedom of an Upper West Side summer through the lens of a teenager. Griffin narrates: “I was nearing home…I stood on my petals to go faster. My spokes sang their propellered whirr. I felt light, as if my bones had filled with air. I passed the Dakota, ripping alongside its black iron rail, allowing myself to glide before I gently banked. I saw the Wise Man and Two Dragons, the Wise Man and Two Dragons. And then I turned toward the river and headed west.”

Ross will discuss Playworld, a perfect September read, at The New School with part-time lecturer Sidik Fofana at 6:00 PM on 9.9. You can register to attend for free here!

Books Are Magic: Lauren Morrow on Little Movements (2025) with Rob Franklin (Date: 9.9) — A few new fiction releases slated for this fall have caught my eye, primarily based on the authors moderating publicity discussions. I’m highlighting two such examples in this month’s newsletter, starting with Lauren Morrow’s Little Movements (2025).

A St. Louis native, Morrow studied dance and creative writing at Connecticut College before earning her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, with past pieces appearing in Ploughshares and The South Carolina Review. Her debut novel centers on 33-year-old Layla Smart, who leaves behind her husband, friends, and live in Brooklyn for a nine-month long residency in rural Vermont, culminating to create an exploration of Black artistry in one of the whitest parts of America. Kirkus Reviews praises it as “a thoughtful, engrossing first novel,” while Great Black Hope (2025) author Rob Franklin lauds how Morrow’s “words pulsing on the page…[as] every movement — like a moment, or a friendship, or a city — becomes as expensive and perilous as young love.”

You can catch Morrow in conversation with Franklin at Books Are Magic. The event begins at 7:00 PM on 9.9, with RSVP options available here.

The Academy Museum: Mildred Pierce (1945) in 35mm (Opening Date: 9.14) — The ideal way to spend a Sunday for LA-based subscribers! Before taking a spin through the new Jaws (1975) exhibition and maybe sticking around for a 6:30 PM screening of the film in 4K (more on that in a minute), see Mildred Pierce (1945) at 2:00 PM in the museum’s David Geffen Theater.

The Joan Crawford classic, which notoriously won the actress her only Oscar, centers on a single mother struggling to care for her two daughters in Glendale. For a vibe check, please watch TCM host Ben Mankiewicz’s Gen Z-slang filled intro to the film from earlier this year, then book your tickets here.

The Academy Museum: Jaws (1975): The Exhibition (Opening Date: 9.14) — This month, The Academy Museum will mount its first-ever exhibition dedicated to a single film: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), which, as I mentioned in the August newsletter, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

The retrospective includes “over 200 original objects — including concept illustrations by production designer Joe Alves, a costume worn by Roy Scheider as Brody, original shark design schematics by design engineer Frank Wurmser, and a screen-used prop dorsal fin — plus behind-the-scenes revelations and interactive moments,” as described online.

While it opens to the public on 9.14, Academy Museum members can gain early access on 9.12 and 9.13. You can check out full details here! You can also catch a screening of the film in 4K on opening day starting at $5, with tickets reservable here. If you can’t wait until then, The Vista is screening Jaws today through 9.4.

The Center for Fiction: Angela Flournoy on The Wilderness (2025) with Brit Bennett and Raven Leilani (Date: 9.16) — National Book Award finalist Angela Flourney will join Brit Bennett and Raven Leilani, the writers behind The Vanishing Half (2020) and Luster (2020), respectively, to discuss her second novel at The Center for Fiction.

Per the site, The Wilderness (2025) “follows five Black women in their twenties — Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia — as they wrestle with profound questions reverberating through their lives: How do we reconcile the search for purpose and direction with the shifting stakes of maturity? How should friendship be prioritized in the face of these transformations? Set against the backdrops of New York and Los Angeles from the late 2000s through the 2020s, the novel navigates the uncertain metamorphosis of contemporary adulthood.”

The talk begins at 7:00 PM on 9.16, with a book signing scheduled for afterward. You can RSVP to attend virtually or in person here!

McNally Jackson Seaport: Year of the Infinite Jest (1996) Monthly Read-Along Bash (Date: 9.18) — Back-to-school vibes! McNally Jackson has created the perfect forum to make your way through David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus. Head to the bookstore’s Seaport location this month for drinks and a discussion of the first 95 pages, with follow-up events to come over the course of the next ten months.

The Center for Fiction: 2025 Day of Translation (Date: 9.18) — September means National Translation Month, a moment to celebrate the crucial role translators play in making literature accessible around the globe. On 9.18, The Center for the Art of Translation will present its annual Day of Translation at The Center for Fiction. The event includes a full day of programming designed to connect “readers of literary translation, literary translators at every stage of their careers, and anyone interested in the movement of ideas among languages, cultures, people, and places,” per the site.

The event will culminate with an unfortunately sold out conversation between authors Katie Kitamura and Jhumpa Lahiri. Translation theory shapes Kitamura’s novels, from A Separation (2017) to Intimacies (2021); this talk can give you a stronger sense of how related themes appear in her work. A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Lahiri has an impressive record of translating work, including her own, between Italian and English; to get a sense of her thoughts on the subject, I recommend reading this piece in The New Yorker.

Albertine: Literary Fall Launch Event (Date: 9.19) — Join Villa Albertine for an event celebrating contemporary French literature!

Per the site: “Hear from experts and leaders in the French and American book industries as they share their favorite novels and insights. Join lively conversations with authors, publishers, booksellers, curators, and influencers as we explore the evolving concept of French literature and what American readers may look for in French novels today. The program features leading figures from the American literary scene, including Sarah McNally, founder and CEO of McNally Jackson, as well as publishers Michael Reynolds (Europa Editions), Barbara Epler (New Directions), Edwin Frank (NYRB), and Dan Simon (Seven Stories), Jillian Kravatz and Emma Raddatz (Archipelago), alongside other distinguished guests. Alyssa Reeder, co-founder of the popular book club Library Science, will deliver closing remarks.”

The program runs from 2:00 to 5:00 PM and closes out with a cocktail reception. You can RSVP for free here!

Greenlight Bookstore: Brooklyn Indie Party (9.19) — As part of the Brooklyn Book Festival (more on that in a minute) and in partnership with the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP), Fort Greene favorite Greenlight will host a party celebrating 22 of the independent presses that continue to enrich the contemporary literary community for the 15th year.

As the site explains, “partygoers are invited to have a drink, mingle with Brooklyn authors and publishers, discover new works, enjoy some excellently curated music, and enter for a chance to win a gift bag of featured books and magazines, to kick off the Brooklyn Book Festival weekend!” You can register for free here.

Brooklyn Book Festival: Festival Day & Literary Marketplace (Date: 9.21) — The Brooklyn Book Festival returns this fall with over a week’s worth of programming! The bulk of the action happens on 9.21, with more than two hundred local and international authors coming together for a day of discussion and book signings in Downtown Brooklyn. Favorite writers attending include Aria Aber, Marie-Helene Bertino, Katie Kitamura, and Catherine Lacey, to name a few.

McNally Jackson: Voices for Gaza (Date: 9.21) — This month, McNally Jackson will host an evening of readings and conversation centered on the power of storytelling in times of crisis, with proceeds going toward raising funds for the children of Gaza through INARA. Writers participating include Mosab Abu Toha (whose piece in The New Yorker, “The View from My Window in Gaza,” I discussed back in November of 2023), Viet Thanh Nguyen, Hala Alyan, Hannah Lillith Assadi, and Seema Jilani. Tickets go for $50, with the event taking place at The Town Hall on 43rd Street.

Miscellaneous Musings

Sister’s Uptown Faces Closure — Manhattan’s only Black-owned independent bookstore, Sister’s Uptown, has fallen on hard times as owner Janifer Wilson faces the challenge of making up a six-month rent backlog. Wilson first opened the shop in 2000 and since has expanded it into a cultural center and community space, hosting book clubs, workshops, readings, and more. Follow Sister’s on Instagram here and keep an eye out for opportunities to support by showing up for future fundraising parties!

New Patti Smith Book Cover Dropped — Patti Smith revealed the cover of her upcoming book, Bread of Angels (2025), on Substack. In a voiceover, she describes the photo as a conceptual collaboration between herself and Robert Mapplethorpe. Taken by Mapplethorpe as one of just a few shots, the image seeks to distill “the most beautiful aspects of surrender” for the inside flap of her final studio album, Wave (1979).

The new memoir drops on 11.4, a date of profound importance to Patti; as she explains: “The publishing date was chosen by my publisher, not realizing its significance…Robert’s birthday, and the passing day of my beloved husband Fred Sonic Smith.”

TCM’s The Plot Thickens — I’ve been very into Turner Classic Movies’s The Plot Thickens, a podcast that delves into iconic figures and films in Hollywood history. So far, I’ve finished the first season, which details the life of Peter Bogdanovich, the legendary director behind The Last Picture Show (1971), What’s Up, Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon (1973). The following seasons, which I’m planning to get to this month, focus on icons including Pam Grier, John Ford, and Lucille Ball, as well as the making of Cleopatra (1963) and Bonfire of the Vanities (1990).

The Paris Review’s “Personals” — Speaking of podcasts, The Paris Review has announced the launch of a new one! “Personals” features writers — including Ottessa Moshfegh, Mihret Sibhat, Joseph Earl Thomas, Lisa Carver, and J.D. Daniels — reading their first-person essays. The first episode drops on 9.8!

Supplemental Reading

As always, don’t forget to use archive.ph if you can’t access these pieces or any of the ones throughout my Substack!

• Air Mail: Swimming Pools in Films and TV Shows: A Viewing Guide

• IndieWire: Nancy Olson Looks Back at Sunset Boulevard and Billy Wilder, 75 Years After Her Oscar-Nominated Performance

• The New Yorker: The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin

• Vulture: In Conversation: Peter Bogdanovich

• IndieWire: The 100 Best Movies of the 1970s

• London Evening Standard: Quentin Tarantino to bring his first play to the West End