The Millions

The most exciting thing to encounter in the world of publishing is a writer who doesn’t sound like anyone else. I first read Gabriel Smith at the Drift, where our then fiction editor spied his story, “The Complete,” in the slush, so it’s been a thrill to help bring out his debut novel, Brat, in my other role as an editor at Penguin Press.

I was halfway through writing the first draft of a novel about artificial intelligence when I heard that Christie’s planned to auction a portrait produced by AI. This was before DALL-E, before GPT3, before Gemini, Grok, and the latest chatbots. At the time, the idea of an algorithm producing art was plausible, but ridiculous. In theory, it was possible to auction off the bizarre renderings of generative adversarial networks, but who would want to pay for it?

In their candid, comprehensive book Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, legendary actress Dame Judi Dench and actor and director Brendan O’Hea discuss Dench’s experiences performing iconic Shakespearean roles, including Cleopatra, Titania, and Lady Macbeth. I talked with Dench and O’Hea about actor-audience reciprocity, the communal experience of theater, and the importance of instinct.

Naya Bihana (A New Dawn), a mural on Balmy Alley, painted by Martin Travers in 2002. (Photo: Michele Falzone)

We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with a writer who writes about literary monsters

Always he appeared immaculate, always elegant—when Duke Ellington took the stage at Carnegie Hall in January of 1943 for the premier of his Black, Brown and Beige

“One thing all truths have in common: they are only visible from certain distances.” Angela, the protagonist of Jennifer duBois ’s novel The Last Language, arrives at this conclusion from prison. It’s one of the many instances in the book that forces readers to ask themselves if she can be trusted—or if her relationship with Sam, her 28-year-old nonverbal patient, is predicated not on what she claims to be “love” but abuse.

Summer has arrived, and with it, a glut of great books. Here you’ll find more than 80 books that we’re excited about this season. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to devour based on their authors, subjects, or blurbs. We hope you find your next summer read among them.

Yasmin Zaher ’s debut novel, The Coin, is a worthy addition to the rich canon of novels about women losing their minds in New York City. The Coin tells the story of a wealthy Palestinian woman living in Brooklyn who slowly unravels while (questionably) teaching middle school boys, obsessing over her own hygiene, and getting caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags. I talked with Zaher, who is based in Paris, about moralization, journalism, and Hermès.

I was riding the train home to Maine when I finished Kristen R. Ghodsee ’s latest book,