| | | | | Are you still interested in this newsletter? Since you haven't read in a while, we'll pause sending it to you. Let us know if you still would like to keep receiving it. | | | | | | Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute/Harvard University Press; background photo shows the war-ravaged Iversky Monastery in Donetsk, Ukraine, in 2022. (The Washington Post) | | Unhappy anniversary. Now that he’s kneecapped medical research, affirmed the importance of bribery and handed over Americans’ financial data to a South African billionaire with a fondness for fascists, Donald Trump is ready to bring his legendary sagacity to European geopolitics. The timing is perfect. Three years ago today, Russia recognized the faux Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Three days after that violent charade, Putin invaded Ukraine under the guise of protecting his fellow patriots. Earlier this month, official U.S. Party Animal Pete Hegseth prematurely handed over chunks of Ukraine to Russia. But he was quickly forced to walk back those comments. The only person allowed to woo Vladimir with a bouquet of Ukrainian cities is his besotted beau, Donald Trump. Perhaps no one understands what a ghastly farce this war is better than Ukrainian writer Olena Stiazhkina. She was a professor at Donetsk National University in 2014 when Russians, dressed up as protesters, began rioting in eastern Ukraine. “All this was so absurd, artificial, and clichéd that, at first, it wasn’t even scary,” Stiazhkina writes. “But then ‘all this’ started taking hostages, started raping and killing. Life left the city gradually, drop by drop.” Being a writer and a historian, she began to record what she was seeing and experiencing in her native city. “At some point, I realized I was writing the history of a slow descent into hell,” she says. “What’s it like when Russians come to ‘save Russian speakers,’ and then kill them?” Her answer to that grotesque question is “Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary,” which covers about six months in 2014. Most days Stiazhkina offers us eyewitness reports; often she provides wry political analysis; and frequently she’s a Ukrainian reincarnation of Kurt Vonnegut. Her tone shifts as quickly as a mob’s mood — from defiant to fatalistic, sarcastic, stunned and silly. Anne O. Fisher’s brilliant translation not only makes those hairpin turns, but her English sentences feel laced with Slavic cool. Despite the brutal beatings and random shootings all around, Stiazhkina never loses her sardonic sense of humor about living in the fantastical “Donetsk People’s Republic”: “The new government entity exists only in the Russian media and the minds of its creators,” she says. For Americans now falling down a similar hole of disinformation, her book serves as a road map into our own Alice-in-Wonderland future. After all, just three days ago, Trump went full Mad Hatter and accused Ukraine of starting the war. One of the best and most harrowing moments in the diary takes place in April when Stiazhkina is arrested along with her favorite bookseller, who’s such a talkative over-sharer that it’s impossible to buy a mystery novel from her without first hearing who the killer is. The two women are chained in a makeshift holding-tank waiting for the guards to decide if they should be executed. After an hour, the captain walks in. “It was the face of my student Vasnetsov,” Stiazhkina writes. He had not been a particularly good student, but her willingness to keep him in school had kept him out of the mines — and alive. “‘Whoops,’ said Vasnetsov, blushing furiously. ‘There’s been a small mistake.’” He unchains the women and lets them go home, but Stiazhkina won’t back down. On the street, she warns her former pupil: “You still have an incomplete.” Another of my favorite sections — about a mother and her drunken son — sports the tragicomic ring of an I.B. Singer story. Such perfectly crafted anecdotes lean heavily on Stiazhkina’s skill as a fiction writer: her flawless timing, her ear for suspense, her ability to catch details that quickly place us in the scene. “There’s still a lot that’s comical,” she admits, before describing Russian propaganda designed to depict an internal uprising against defeated American soldiers — who are always Black men, by the way, “because how can you tell if some random dead white guy is American or not?” As the bombings and killings swirl, Stiazhkina’s elderly father breaks down, haunted by childhood memories of World War II. “What are these bandits here for?” he cries. “Who asked them to come? My home... My home.” Such moments of naked pathos are braided through this angry, witty diary. “War isn’t how it’s described in books,” Stiazhkina writes in this rare book that describes what war is like in all its vicious absurdity. “It’s impossible to believe it’s really happening, to completely believe it, all the way down to your core. ‘It’s not happening to us. It’s not happening to me. All of this isn’t happening to me....’ As long as you’re alive, it’s impossible to believe it.” Stiazhkina is in Kyiv now — still alive and still writing. Believe it. ❖ Books to screens: - “A Thousand Blows,” a historical crime show from the creator of “Peaky Blinders,” debuts today on Hulu. The series is inspired, in part, by the real-life experiences of Black men who became boxers in late 19th-century London. Boxing historian Sarah Elizabeth Cox served as a consultant on the show, and you can read more about that on her fascinating blog. The TV series also tells the story of a real-life gang of female criminals, which you can learn about in Brian McDonald’s 2015 nonfiction book, “Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants: The Female Gang That Terrorised London.”
- “The Monkey,” starring Theo James, opens today in theaters (trailer). It’s not enough that James appears in everything; in this film, he plays two parts: twin brothers who find a haunted toy monkey that causes all kinds of deadly monkey business. The comic horror movie is based on a short story by Stephen King distributed as a pamphlet in the porn magazine Gallery in 1980.
- The third season of “Reacher” started streaming yesterday on Prime Video (trailer). Alan Ritchson stars as Jack Reacher, the bulked-up crime-fighter from Lee Child’s popular series of novels. (Lee Child leaves Jack Reacher to his brother, Andrew.)
|  | | (Anthologies courtesy of Knopf; New Yorker cover © 2025 Condé Nast; background photo of the Woolworth Building and Park Row in New York by Irving Underhill, 1925, courtesy of the Library of Congress) | | “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” So declared Harold Ross in his prospectus for a “fifteen-cent comic paper.” (For the record, the Book Club newsletter has no beef with elderly women from Iowa.) This month, the New Yorker celebrates its centennial (details). Over the past 100 years, the venerable magazine has struck a miraculous balance between respecting its founding traditions and moving far beyond them. In the current issue — the 5,057th — editor David Remnick describes how the New Yorker evolved from “gaiety, wit and satire” to publish some of the country’s most important works of nonfiction, including Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region in My Mind” and John Hersey’s “Hiroshima.” The magazine’s influence on fiction and poetry has been, if anything, even more substantial. Whether you’re a longtime subscriber or someone who’s never picked up the magazine, you can now peruse that extraordinary canon in two stately new volumes around 1,000 pages each. In her introduction to “A Century of Fiction,” editor Deborah Treisman laments the impossible task of choosing 78 stories from more than 13,000 published over the last 100 years. She says the process of reading these pieces “is like watching a time-lapse film in which what a story is, or intends to be, changes slightly with each frame.” Many of the classics you want are here, such as J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Saul Bellow’s “A Father-to-Be” and Eudora Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From.” Later writers include George Saunders, Jennifer Egan, Zadie Smith and Bryan Washington. Coincidentally, “A Century of Poetry” arrives just as our new Ministry of Truth has outlawed the word “diversity,” and editor Kevin Young is loaded for bear. His introduction offers a critique of the way racism distorts the literary canon. “With a few exceptions, The New Yorker didn’t publish any poet who wasn’t white for nearly the first seventy-five years of its history,” Young writes. “Such omissions or metaphoric redlining are not only not accidental but look more and more like a systemic failing of the imagination.” Despite that constraint, the anthology that Young has assembled still offers a valuable survey of poets including Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, W.H. Auden, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Sylvia Plath, Ogden Nash, Rita Dove, William Carlos Williams, Ada Limón — along with many others you’ll be delighted to discover. Related: The New York Public Library is about to open an exhibit called “A Century of The New Yorker.” Among the dozens of items on display will be the typewriters used by Lillian Ross and William Shawn; Rea Irvin’s artwork for the first issue of the New Yorker; a draft of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” with revisions by Shawn; and Dorothy Parker’s list of “Unattractive Authors Whose Work I Admire.” This exhibit, which is sure to be the talk of the town, opens tomorrow and will run for a year (details). ❖ |  | | (Union Square Kids; Pushkin Press) | | I’ve fallen head over heels for Septimus. He’s the fretful hero of Maryrose Wood’s snuggly new novel, “Bad Badger: A Love Story.” Wood may be writing for readers ages 7-10, but this is a book you’ll want to savor with a cup of tea before the kids get home from school. When we meet Septimus, he’s living alone in a cottage by the sea. He should be content with his favorite omelette pan, his kayak and his fine platter of complex-smelling cheeses, but instead he’s self-conscious about his very unbadgerish life. There’s just no getting around it: “Septimus was bad at being a badger.” Somedays, he wonders, “What if I’m not a badger at all?” On a happier note, he has a new friend. Most Wednesdays, a seagull lands on his windowsill. Gully, as Septimus calls her, rarely says anything except “Caw,” but that doesn’t stop Septimus from carrying on lively conversations. “All badgers like to dig,” Wood notes, “but few had the deep curiosity about their fellow creatures that Septimus did.” Still, does a friendship between two such different animals have a future? And what can Septimus do when Gully ghosts him? (The scene involving an ornery snail who works — very slowly — as a private investigator is deliciously funny.) “Perhaps,” Wood writes, “there was always a sense of mystery about the ones we care for, no matter how fond we are, or how well we imagine we know them.” Giulia Ghigini’s deadpan illustrations are as soft as seagull down. And the quaint manners and gentle humor of “Bad Badger” suggest the author has spent time in the Hundred Acre Wood, but Septimus’s adventures are all his own. This is a lovely novel — full of warmth, flecked with anxiety quelled with patience and insight. At a time when so many new children’s books strike the creepy rictus of a self-empowerment preacher, “Bad Badger” offers wisdom the only way it should ever be offered: subtly and through the heartfelt experiences of a furry animal. My grandnephew, Leo, is only 13 days old, but I’m already impatient to read this to him. Meanwhile, adults should keep an eye out for “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma,” by Dutch writer Toon Tellegen. On April 1, Pushkin Press will release this international bestseller in an English translation by David Colmer. “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma” alludes to a parable in Arthur Schopenhauer’s “Parerga and Paralipomena” about a group of porcupines that must struggle to stay warm without pricking each other. In the same way, Schopenhauer suggests, human beings must negotiate the tension between intimacy and repulsion. At the opening of Tellegen’s little book, a lonely hedgehog would desperately like visitors, except it would take so much work to bake a cake, and it’s so awkward to think of things to say, and the guest will just find fault with his house, and probably nobody wants to visit him anyhow, and by page 23, I knew I’d found my hedgehog doppelgänger. In one of my favorite scenes — they’re all very short — the hedgehog and a visiting badger sit silently at the kitchen table: “The badger told him that he had a list of things to talk about at home, but he’d forgotten to bring it and couldn’t remember what was on it. ‘I think it’s in a drawer,’ he said. ‘When I get home I’ll have a look. But then it will be too late.’” “‘Yes,’ said the hedgehog.” This droll little book is cheaper than therapy and more fun than Schopenhauer. (But I probably need all three.) ❖ |  | | Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, is possibly the Fair Youth in Shakespeare’s sonnets. (Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library). | | What’s past is prologue. Imagine living at a time when political power was centralized in one erratic leader surrounded by a personality cult helping him trash established norms and maintain a fog of propaganda. I’m talking, of course, about Henry VIII. Today, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington opens a timely new exhibit called “How to Be a Power Player: Tudor Edition.” The lace ruffs have relaxed a bit over the last four centuries, but the climate of starchy sycophancy sounds familiar. The Folger exhibit welcomes viewers to consider the lives of courtiers “working for a boss who could shower you with riches or chop off your head” — the Tudor version of cancel culture. Curator Heather Wolfe tells me she was inspired by seeing how-to books and Harvard Business Review titles in airports. “My gosh,” she thought, “we have these same exact things in our collection, except from the 16th century.” Books during Shakespeare’s time explained how to dress for success, speak properly, fold napkins, even joust — a dangerous sport that served, Wolfe says, as a performance of love, prowess and wealth. Soon she was drawing together books, paintings and letters to demonstrate the way ambitious people learned to comport themselves at court. It’s all meant, she says, to show how someone “could potentially rise to that level of being able to whisper in the Queen’s ear or draft her speeches or her diplomatic correspondence or her proclamations, which are like executive orders in the White House.” A scroll almost 12 feet long records exactly who gave what to Queen Elizabeth one New Year’s Eve. Impress the monarch with fine books, bejeweled toothpicks or tasty candies, and you might be invited to go hunting with her — the equivalent of playing golf with the president. The paintings on display demonstrate the role of 16th-century social media. Noble people like the 3rd Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” hoped their eye-catching images would be copied and go viral to “expand their brand.” Miniatures were handed out the way people today send intimate texts. “We’re uniquely positioned to tell this story,” Wolfe says of the Folger. “Plus, we’re on Capitol Hill, right by the Senate and House office buildings.” Polonius’s advice still holds in Washington: “The apparel oft proclaims the man.” The Folger exhibit is free and open to the public through July (details). ❖ |  | | Last spring, Tony Keith Jr. published a terrific memoir for teens called “How the Boogeyman Became a Poet.” Next week, he’ll release his debut book of poems, a collection for high-schoolers called “Knucklehead.” As a gay Black man, Keith speaks directly to young people torn between fear and exuberance. He can be vulnerable and audacious in the same stanza. “I’m just a superhero with a cape made of metaphors,” he writes, “trying to use my words to simply save you.” “Knucklehead” also includes a brash poem called “I Think Some White Folks Be Crushing on Me,” which skewers the cloying praise of White readers. “I hope,” he says, “you don’t think that your flattery / will somehow tame my capacity / to be one of the dangerous ones.” I Love Him Like Sounds Found in Dark basements. the kind of thud you’re scared to face,
a raucous cackle always giving chase that makes you run
and so you run because it feels brave you run because you’re afraid...
afraid you’ll be pulled back down into a dark familiar space:
some place where monsters have faces and names and no shame notice that urban legend never ends with the real battle with the monster: It.
heavy and ugly, breathing on your heels, waiting to see your fear,
waiting for you to fall back down there... no one ever talks about the fight.
no one ever talks about facing demons with bare fist,
no weapons, just knuckles and wrist.
no one talks about the battle.
no one tells you that your skin is not thick enough to withstand the blows or that your heart beats harder than your blood can actually flow,
and it makes you feel silly and weak and you can’t see... see, no one talks about trying to swing in the darkness.
no flesh tagged, just black monster camouflaged.
It, aiming for your rib cage, and you, just trying to protect your heart.
no one ever talks about it that way.
and yet, somehow, we always manage to make it up the steps,
reach the top, relieved, believed we’ve dodged death
because instead of weaving right,
we Bob and Steve left and we manage to miss it. and I almost missed my man
because I ignored the sounds in basements at risk of losing my own life.
and suicide ain’t for cowards, Knucklehead,
you gotta be brave enough for this fight.
I’m talking bootstraps and booby traps and Grandma’s prayers.
you gotta learn to stand at the foot of those stairs
and stare that monster in its eyes
and dare it to move and say, “love, I’m not afraid of you.” Excerpted from “Knucklehead: Poems.” Copyright © 2025 by Anthony R. Keith Jr. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. | | | |
