Sheila Heti—whose new story “Earthly Delights,” about the mysteries of lust, appears in this week’s issue—wrote one of my favorite books ever: “Motherhood.” The narrator is in her thirties, watching her fortieth birthday tick closer and trying to decide if she wants to get pregnant. “Whether I want kids is a secret I keep from myself,” she thinks. “It is the greatest secret I keep from myself.” In her search for answers, things get philosophical, mystical, emotional. The book was the first by Heti that I read, and my admiration for it—shared by many people—kicked off a deep dive into her body of work, which also includes the wonderful “How Should a Person Be?” I recently asked her about her own reading habits and recommendations.
The passage of time in that novel, and the passage of moods through the protagonist’s mind and body, mixed with my passage from one continent to another, and across time zones, feeling dizzy with sleeplessness and jet lag, were perfectly suited to each other. It was one of the best reading experiences I’ve had.
Our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Find your next great read »
On Our Radar
Our thoughts on a few of the Booker Prize longlist picks:
- Lynn Steger Strong reviewed “The Palm House” by Gwendoline Riley.
-
Hannah Gold reviewed “The Vivisectors” by Missouri Williams.
-
Jia Tolentino profiled Marlon James, who wrote “The Disappearers.”
-
Ariel Levy profiled Elizabeth Strout, who wrote “The Things We Never Say.”
Out this week:
- Valeria Luiselli’s highly anticipated “Beginning Middle End,” a book about a mother-daughter trip to Sicily, excerpted in The New Yorker, published yesterday.
-
In “Few and Far Between,” Jan Carson imagines what might have happened if a politician’s 1958 plan to drain the largest lake in Ireland, to create a seventh county, had actually happened.
-
Annie Jacobsen’s “Biological War: A Scenario” examines what might happen if an accidental lab leak released a genetically modified plague on the population. Read Gideon-Lewis Kraus’s review, reflecting on what it means to forecast a dystopian future.
Everybody’s talking about:
- “The Five-Star Weekend”—a streaming series starring Jennifer Garner and enjoying a huge viewership on Peacock—is adapted from a novel written by Elin Hilderbrand.
- If you’re enjoying Colson Whitehead’s new novel, “Cool Machine,” you might also be interested in hearing him read his short story “The Match,” an excerpt, published in the magazine in 2019, of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Nickel Boys.” (Or, going further back in time, check out John Updike’s review of Whitehead’s 2001 novel, “John Henry Days.”)
P.S. Douglas Stuart, whose book “John of John” also made the Booker longlist, gave us his own list: great novels about gay life.
