Getting to know Margaret Cho’s backstory is like throwing open the door to Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. In conversation, she drops passing mentions of hanging with Courtney Love or getting tatted by Ed Hardy. There’s flashbacks to when the full-time comedian, actor, and author worked as a dominatrix or a bellydancing attire retailer or same-sex marriage officiant. But perhaps most informative was Cho’s childhood growing up in her parents’ gay bookstore, Paperback Traffic, in San Francisco.

Writers, hipsters, rebels, filmmakers—they all passed through, each imparting core memories on a young creative who would grow up to deal in the same kind of brash, politically uncompromising fare. When we speak, Cho is in the midst of a cross-country stand-up tour, where her Trump remarks have drawn hecklers. One threatened to pump her head full of bullets, then report her to Homeland Security. “I’m like, bitch, which is it?” Cho later fired back. 

Her easy navigation of these difficult moments comes by way of a life spent onstage, in the Hollywood meat grinder, or even coming forward with her experiences as a bisexual woman and addict at times when both were looked at as baffling personal demerits. Cho retells it all in her own memoir, 2002’s I’m the One That I Want, but here, she goes back even further to her first encounters with writers who shaped her voice and the tomes that continue to direct her reading habits. And trust us, as a reader, Cho is as voracious as she is in every other aspect.

So, you grew up in a bookstore.

That’s right, and I think that my reading habits stuck there. I’ve always read the same kind of books I read growing up as a kid—anything by John Waters or anybody that John Waters worked with. I actually just read Role Models again. And then his first book, Shock Value, I read when I was growing up in my parents’ bookstore. They had a John Waters section. We had different bound copies of his scripts because it was a gay bookstore. We had a lot of that kind of counterculture stuff. As a pretty young teenager, I would go see him speak. Up at the counter, the employees had gone to Polyester, so they had the scratch-and-sniff card you get at the theater. 

Did it feel then like the worlds of film and comedy were close and accessible?

For sure. People who work at bookstores always have the best lives, because they’re so keen on culture. They always knew what kind of music that I should be listening to. As a young teen, I was listening to Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle, very erudite choices. But then my reading never shifted. Anything that John Waters has done. Then also Cookie Mueller, who’s an incredible author, who is a star from his films as well. I’ve also gone into that universe of Eve Babitz, Joan Didion. I love the snapshot of the time period. That ’60s, ’70s Los Angeles is so appealing to me.

What was it like being in that space at that time? I imagine that having a gay bookstore back then was a wealth of knowledge for people that might not be in a normal bookstore, or the library even.

There was a rolling rack of gay romance novels that were all literal Harlequin romances, but they were for the male market. They would have these drawings of young men who are standing by a lake in cut-off shorts and tank tops and a puka shell necklace. We had a lot of magazines like Honcho and Blueboy. We even had some old-school bodybuilding magazines that were black and white, Charles Atlas guides for the male body. We had a lot of tattoo magazines because Ed Hardy—who is an incredible tattooer, he tattooed me—would come in and sell his books on consignment. He had all of these periodicals that had all of the latest tattoo designs and work he had done. There was a lot of stuff that was not just gay, but it was geared towards counterculture. 

I remember there being one very thick periodical magazine that was for trans women. It highlighted all of the mail-order places where you could get very large shoes, high-heel shoes and stuff like that. This is before the Internet, and before there was the comfort level of being openly trans in the marketplace. There was a publication that catered directly to people who were transitioning who wanted to be able to mail-order everything and feel comfortable in their new lives. 

Besides John Waters, were there authors coming through that you met and read?

Armistead Maupin. I’ve read everything he’s ever written, he came to do signings at the store. I believe when Quentin Crisp was still alive he would be doing events there. This was before my parents took it over. 

Are there authors in that lineage that you’re excited about now?

My actual favorite genre is either the celebrity authorized biography or the unauthorized biography, usually. I love it when a biography starts out authorized and becomes unauthorized. You know, like the writer has an issue with the subject and then it reveals too much. This happens a lot with David Ritz, who’s extraordinary. When I was on tour, I had a little friendship with him because I’m just such a fan. He did Respect, which is the best Aretha Franklin book. But he had done another book on Aretha Franklin that was authorized and it was so censored and she wouldn’t let him say anything about her real life. He kind of waited a little bit and then wrote the bombshell book called Respect, which was just laying everything out—all of her idiosyncrasies, but also all of her grandness, all of her greatness. She’s really the greatest singer of all time. 

I love Kitty Kelley. I love J. Randy Taraborrelli. I love all of these authors who make it their business to go into the lives of celebrities. And I like to read different authors’ interpretations of, say, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They get classier and trashier depending on which way you go. I also do that with Seattle grunge. The best book on Seattle grunge is Mark Lanegan’s book [Sing Backwards and Weep]. His books are just scintillating. And if you like that kind of music, it’s just so phenomenal to hear about all of the things that kind of let him down. 

I imagine that it’s a different experience now than when you were younger, reading celebrity memoirs, having worked in the entertainment industry. 

It’s interesting. I was just reading a book about Carolyn Bessette, focused on that whole relationship with JFK Jr. And you know she had put together an APLA show that was at the Hollywood Bowl. I’m reading it and I’m like, Oh my god, I was at that show. Tina Turner comes out at the end and I remember physically being in the audience for that and not even knowing that this was Carolyn Bessette. Kathleen Hanna’s book [Rebel Girl] talked about all of these things that I was there [for]. I was there at all these shows that she talks about. I was there at different award shows that they were there at. I placed myself very outside of the perimeter of these things happening. Same thing with Ione Skye’s book, Say Anything. I was really at the perimeter of all of these films that she’s talking about, experienced parties that she was at.

In the worlds of recovery, rock and roll, and entertainment in general, I really had a bit of a far-away seat, but I was still at the show. It’s super interesting to have that perspective and have these books come out now that are about a period of my life that I rarely examine. It inspired me. I’ve written a book that actually is really more just focused on my sobriety and my addiction. 

Which authors were you reading when putting together your own writing? Are there direct correlations that you see from some of these books?

I think Patti Smith for sure. Patti Smith has really, I think, reinvented herself as a memoirist and I love that. I love her style and I love her writing and I think she’s just brilliant. It’s really powerful. Eileen Myles is incredible. I just love the way they put words together. They’re a friend of mine and just an extraordinary person and the most gifted poet in the world. I was, again, super inspired by Kathleen Hanna. Her style of writing, it’s similar to her style of music. She has a kind of shorthand to get to your heart and your muscle. 

Are there bookstores that you frequent now?

I go to Skylight. I also like Lost Books. That’s a really special place because they have plants everywhere. I am on a lot of publishers’ lists. People send me everything and they know what I like. So I’ll get really good advance copies and then often I’ll donate them to Lost Books. And I find books there that you wouldn’t normally find. I think there’s somebody from the U.K. that also donates books, because I found biographies or autobiographies that I didn’t expect like Shaun Ryder, who has just an extraordinary autobiography. Also Nick Lowe’s book, who is a recording artist and a songwriter that I have worshiped for decades.

Is there a book that you keep circling back to when you’re looking for inspiration?

I just love to hear people go through the themes that I’m looking towards, whether it’s addiction, alcoholism, whether it’s career strife, whether it’s artistic frustration. David Ritz has an extraordinary book about Marvin Gaye, who was such an incredible artist, but the book is a really poetic view of self-sabotage and how a great artist can really be ruinous to their own spirit. I don’t want these stories to be forgotten, because we know these songs and we know a little bit of the legacy of these incredible artists. I don’t want any of it to be lost. That’s why these books are so important.

Are there books that you turn to in this political moment, that are charting what we’re going through?

There’s an amazing book by John Fugelsang called Separation of Church and Hate. His parents actually were clergy, like a nun and a priest who met and fell in love and then had a family, so he was raised within Christian ideology. He knows the Bible. He knows his stuff. He wrote an incredible book about the hypocrisy that goes on with the Christian Right. He’s so astute and he’s so funny because he’s also a stand-up comedian. That’s a humor book, but it’s also just so hard-hitting, the way that he’s juxtaposing the Bible to what’s happening over there.

Margaret Cho’s Required Reading

Respect by David Ritz, 2014
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

“Oh my god, if you love soul music and you love Aretha Franklin you have to because I had my mouth hanging open the whole time.”

Devil in a Coma by Mark Lanegan, 2025
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

“Anything by Mark Lanegan. He’s such an extraordinary artist and he’s passed away but his books live. You cannot believe what the man has been through. It’s so phenomenal. He has a book about getting long Covid, which is really, really difficult to read. I was a big fan of him when he was alive and I would go see him perform.”

Shock Value by John Waters, 1981
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

“Anything by John Waters. I’m on his Christmas card list so every year I’m so impressed. You might get a blow-up doll in the mail. You don’t know what’s going to happen. Every year it’s something extraordinary. This year it was almost like a pop-up book but it was him vomiting all over you for Christmas.”

Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz, 1974
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

“Anything by Eve Babitz. I know that near the end of her life she became MAGA—she had four MAGA hats found in her belongings when they came to clear out her living space, and it’s very sad. But Lili Anolik did a wonderful book just about her life. And then there’s a great book that came out, Didion and Babitz. The juxtaposition of these two incredible women from a time in Los Angeles. I would have loved to be there, but I love to read about it. But I think Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood is like the ultimate young woman in Hollywood going from Hollywood high to being Jim Morrison’s lover. She’s a perfect writer. I want to go visit her. She has a little crypt at Hollywood Forever and you can go see her grave. So I’m going to go check it out.”

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Adapting a book is a delicate balance. The best attempts stay true to the spirit of the story, while drawing out what makes them cinematic. Some are so faithful they feel just like what you envisioned in your head. Some are so iconoclastic they only resemble their source material if you squint. And some, once in a blue moon, manage to transcend their roots and become even bigger and bolder creative entries than the books they were based on. 

Below, we’ve rounded up 10 adaptations throughout cinema history that have outshined the texts that laid the way for them. But don’t take our word for it—press play.

Barry Lyndon, 1975

Stephen King notoriously disliked Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, which imposed a more bleak streak of human terror on the supernatural miasma of the Overlook Hotel. People have been debating which version is better ever since. Meanwhile, Kubrick’s 1975 adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon, stands out as his great work of adaptation. An early example of an unreliable narrator, the 1844 novel is a tale of a ne’er-do-well social climber who weasels his way through German high society. What was once considered one of Kubrick’s flops has been reclaimed in recent years. (Paul Thomas Anderson even shouted it out from the Oscar stage when he accepted the award for Best Picture.)

Total Recall, 1990

Philip K. Dick’s best known adapted book may be Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the source material for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, 1982, but both are so foundational to science fiction as a genre, it’s almost impossible to say which one is better. In Total Recall, based on Dick’s 1966 short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” director Paul Verhoeven takes what Dick put on the page and runs with it—all the way to another planet. Both films deal with the same core question: Are the protagonist’s memories real, or are they simply a fantasy implanted in his head by a corporation capitalizing on his dissatisfaction with ordinary life? While Dick’s short story provides a definitive answer, Verhoeven’s adaptation explodes the premise into an ever-deepening fantasia of spies, three-breasted women, and mutant liberation movements—all brought to life by some of the best practical effects ever put onscreen.

Trainspotting, 1996

Next time you and your friends have a copy of Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel lying around, take a few turns passing it around and trying your hands at the thick Scottish dialect on the page. You won’t regret it. Danny Boyle’s 1996 film took a series of rich, textured vignettes of grit and grime in Scotland’s heroin underground, and turned it into the story of a generation. Part of this is due to casting (hello, Ewan!) but even more so, it was capturing a radical change in British youth culture happening in real time. That shift is perhaps most apparent in Trainspotting’s soundtrack. As the characters fight or fail to face their futures, the music slowly morphs from the narcotic howling of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed to the unapologetically U.K. Britpop of Blur, Pulp, and Primal Scream to the final ecstatic freak-out of Underworld’s “Born Slippy.”

The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1999

Despite being only 250 pages, Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 psychological thriller about a shapeshifting con artist in Italy is a rich source text. Class anxiety, jealousy, coming of age, queer desire—it’s all there on the page, with different elements ready to be drawn out or suppressed, much like Tom Ripley’s own skillful impersonations. The book has been adapted several times—including a 1960 version starring Alain Delon and a 2024 Netflix miniseries starring Andrew Scott—but it’s the 1999 version starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow that does it best. The camera drinks in every gorgeous, languid moment in Positano. Of course Tom is enraptured by the beauty, wealth, and ease of Italy—and Dickie Greenleaf. Wouldn’t you be?

American Psycho, 2000

Is it a controversial opinion to say that Bret Easton Ellis’s writing style has not aged well? In many ways, his exaggerated satire of ’80s consumerism and vanity has become the lingua franca of 2026. How many get-ready-with-me videos have you seen that sound exactly like Patrick Bateman’s monologue about his morning routine? Ellis’s narrative is saturated in status symbols, brand names, artists, fashion designers, logos, beauty products, and all the material minutia that make up the life of the yuppie, which Mary Harron skillfully translates onscreen. But her 2000 film also pares back some of Ellis’s excesses: She converts a SWAT team shootout scene, written in the third person, into a paranoid spree in an eerily empty Financial District. The cartoonishly gratuitous rape, murder, and mayhem of the book is present, but pushed to the furthest edges of Harron’s screen, like an intrusive thought, waiting to strike.

Lord of the Rings, 2000-03

Yes, it may be the foundational high fantasy series written by a master of world-building inspired by Shakespeare, Beowulf, and the Bible itself. But at the end of the day, I care about Frodo, not this side character’s entire family tree. The undoubtedly eternal life of Middle Earth is a testament to J. R. R. Tolkien’s genius. That world is so influential it might as well be real. But you could not pay me to read The Silmarillion. Edit next time, John! The Lord of the Rings trilogy offers all the pleasure of high fantasy—the creatures, the costumes, the landscapes, the sword fights—without any of the homework. Plus, only the films have Viggo Mortensen looking so fine with his shoulder length hair.

Adaptation, 2002

Susan Orlean was such a good sport for agreeing to this. Based, theoretically, on The Orchid Thieves by the renowned New Yorker journalist, Adaptation really only relies on its source material for a third of its run time. The rest of the 2002 film, directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman, chronicles the writer’s block of an anxious, curmudgeonly, nebbish screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman (played, in a delightful dual role, by Nicolas Cage). Adaptation is probably the most graceful Kaufman’s metafictional handwringing gets. His fears about hackish formulas, embodied by his twin brother and real-life screenwriting guru Robert McKee, bounce playfully off the source text, which is as well-observed and idiosyncratically wry as any of Orlean’s books. The fact that this film sticks the landing is a miracle.

The Devil Wears Prada, 2006

Whoever came up with the term “chick lit” is going to a certain layer of hell where he’s forced to listen to Gilbert Gottfried reading Samuel Beckett for all eternity. Lauren Weisberger famously based this novel on her brief time working as Anna Wintour’s assistant at Vogue in the late-’90s. It was an earnest, if a bit melodramatic, picture of a young woman trying to make her way through an insane first job. The 2006 film, starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, did what fashion magazines do at their best: It created iconography. Miranda Priestly, soft spoken and withering, is the boss everyone hates but also can’t help idolizing. And are those the Chanel boots? Why yes they are, thank you for noticing. The film made a genuine case for fashion as something meaningful—florals in spring notwithstanding.

Twilight, 2008

Hear us out: director Catherine Hardwicke turned a lifeless love story tinged with Mormon purity culture into a camp classic featuring two of the biggest freaks ever to lead a teen romance. Not a single sentence in the book will come close to iconic lines such as, “Bella, where the hell you been, loca?” and, “Hold tight, spider monkey.” The Twilight movie captures the mania of the series in 121 minutes of desaturated glory. By the final films, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are phoning it in, but in the first movie they are Bella and Edward: two heinously awkward, overly dramatic weirdos who deserve each other. And, of course, there’s the soundtrack. “Supermassive Black Hole” blaring as the vampire family plays baseball? It’s the great American pastime.

The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013

As one of the great cinematic chroniclers of American industry, crime, and ambition, Martin Scorsese has adapted a whole host of true stories—from the lives of boxer Jake LaMotta and mob enforcers in Vegas to Howard Hughes himself. But to take a trashy memoir from a stockbroker engaged in pump and dump schemes and turn it into one of the great films of the 21st century? Only Marty could do that. The Wolf of Wall Street is big: Nearly every scene involves dozens of extras as the camera whirls through lavish Miami mansions and trading room floors confettied with P&L sheets and money. The 2013 movie is a larger-than-life portrait of the excesses of the finance industry made just two years after the height of Occupy Wall Street. Good thing none of that’s relevant anymore. Oh wait.

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At the beginning of The Violet Hour by James Cahill, a young man teeters on the edge of a London balcony before plunging to his death below. Learning how and why he fell takes readers into the lives of three players in the global blue-chip art market: Thomas Haller, a vaunted abstract painter with a tormented past; Lorna, his first dealer and champion, now estranged; and Leo, a billionaire art collector enraptured by Haller’s latest work. What begins as a mystery grows into an exploration of the passionate, generative, and, often, deeply compromised relationships that make up the art world. The novel, out now, probes the messy, intoxicating intersection where creativity, money, friendship, sexuality, and professional personas collide. 

Cahill is no tourist: The London-born, Los Angeles-based writer and critic has worked in the contemporary art business since he was 21, including a 12-year stint with Sadie Coles. The Violet Hour feeds the voracious current appetite for novels, film, and television about the lives of the extremely wealthy. But where stories like My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Industry provide biting satire swaddled in a Loro Piana sweater, The Violet Hour takes a much more empathetic look at the emotional and psychological core of relationships irrevocably altered by money. There’s a pleasing verisimilitude to Cahill’s portrayal of mind games at gallery dinners and the fervor of the Venice Biennale, but as he says, the novel’s heart is human drama, not status signifiers. 

CULTURED sat down with the author to discuss the myth of the great male genius, complicated relationships between mentors and mentees, and when the truth of the art world becomes stranger than fiction.

Was your family into art?

No, I came to it completely cold. And it was all really very opaque to me when I first started out. As a reader, I suppose some of that opacity needs to be there because, even if you’ve been in that world for a long time, it still often feels… I don’t know, like the seven circles of hell or something: there’s always another, more exclusive sector that you haven’t broken into.

This novel is about the high-end, blue-chip, international, moneyed part of the art world. There are many other parts besides that, and I’m very much aware of that. I did, with a couple of characters, want to portray a little bit of what it feels like and means to be on the fringe or even the outside of it, or somebody for whom success has been elusive.

One of the big tensions of the book is about the gulf between the act of creativity and the machinery of art sales, and how that gap really seems to just be getting larger. I’m curious about your own personal thoughts on that matter, especially considering how the story turns out.

Take my main character, Thomas Haller. He is somebody who, at the beginning of the story, has mysteriously walked away from the art scene, and no one quite understands why. Even though he’s at the height of his success in many ways, critically and commercially. What he’s had to become, in terms of his public image and his renown, feels so distant from what he originally wanted or intended for himself that he feels like he’s been ripped apart or actually been imprisoned by this public image that he has to conform to.

A lot of what we find out about him has to do with that gulf between who he was and what he’s become as a globally successful abstract painter. We were talking before about the elusiveness of success for some artists, but I was also interested in what success means and what it costs once you do attain it.

Did you have any inspirations for that character?

I guess I was thinking generally about this kind of archetype of the heroic male painter, which is in many ways now a redundant archetype that we’re all moving past, but I think there is still a hankering for it or a nostalgia for it in some quarters of the art world, including among artists. This kind of desire for a sort of, for greatness, a slightly old-fashioned concept of genius. 

In many ways, Thomas suffers from that desire. He clings to that image of himself, even as he also recoils from it. People hail him as the heir to Mark Rothko because of these big, turbulent, abstract coloristic paintings he makes. But actually, as the story progresses, you realize that his style of painting is really a veil for things that he can’t openly express or articulate about his life and his past. 

We discover that his paintings are not spontaneously emerging from him, but are actually abstracted from something more specifically representational. Towards the end, he has a triumphant return to creativity that has more to do with expressing things from his biography. Correct me if I’m wrong, but to me, it seems like the book takes a stance venerating art that is still personal as opposed to commercial. Does that feel accurate?

That feels right. Thomas, as a character, suffers from this gnawing nostalgia. He is obsessed with earlier versions of himself. He looks back a lot to that time in London in the mid-1990s when he and his friend, and later dealer, Lorna, were first friends. He looks back to that as an idyllic moment that he’s desperate to get back to and, of course, can’t get back to because of everything that’s since happened and what he’s since become. 

That question of whether he’s an abstract painter or not, at one level, could seem like a relatively technical thing, but in the context of the story, it ends up having profound significance because it has to do with what kind of man he is and who he has sold his soul to. Without giving too much away, you come to realize that when he was still fairly young, he became obsessed with this older guy, Claude, who molded him and turned him into the celebrated abstract painter that he is today, almost like a kind of Pygmalion. I think the tragedy of his situation is that ultimately he doesn’t break out of what he’s become. Other characters do, but he is incapable of that.

Were you reading anything at the time you were writing? Who were some of your literary influences?

When I’m writing, and even when I’m not writing, I try to read as prolifically as I can. Iris Murdoch, for example. I’m endlessly fascinated by the way in which she makes small-scale, fairly mundane, ordinary life appear dark and weird and perverse. Off the top of my head, writers like Justin Torres here in Los Angeles. His last book, Blackouts, was an astonishing work of fiction. Garth Greenwell is a writer I like very much as well. 

Alison Lurie, wrote an extraordinary book from the ’60s called The Nowhere City. It’s about a husband and wife who move to Los Angeles, and he absolutely loves it and she absolutely hates it. Over the course of the novel, those two perspectives reverse almost perfectly. I’m reading a lot about LA at the moment because of the nonfiction book I’ve been working on, which I could also tell you about.

You focus a great deal on the relationship between an artist and his dealer. What interested you about this relationship? Were the characters inspired by any figures that you encountered in your own life?

I guess it brings me to a larger point about the art world setting of the novel, which is that I don’t think you need to know or even care that much about the art world to get drawn into the story. This is really a story about human drama: loss and longing and betrayal and desire. That relationship between artists and dealers is just one way of dramatizing a very close, intense human relationship involving often an imbalance of power or a changing power dynamic at least. 

Lorna was Thomas’s first dealer from before he was famous, and the way their relationship gradually unravels, is a useful way of thinking about the way in which somebody’s success or two people’s respective success can irrevocably change their friendship and, in the end, tarnish and transform that friendship into some sort of professional mimicry of what it used to be.

Thomas’s relationship with Claude, which is also fundamentally a relationship with a dealer, has an altogether darker aspect because that is much more about the way in which sexual attraction can result in a form of control and obsession can result in this lifelong subjection to a person even after the romantic-sexual part of the relationship has long ended. The forms of control that people enact over one another are something that interests me greatly. You see that magnified in certain ways in the art world, but it’s also a universal human thing. 

I feel like a decade ago there was quite a bit of cultural conversation around boundaries and relationships between mentors and mentees, in academia a lot, but also in a lot of different professional settings. And it is still an unsettled conversation right now. At the time, people really wanted to articulate clear boundaries between right and wrong, and now we’re at a place where we understand that things do get very gray, but we’re still trying to contend with what that actually means for ourselves and our relationships.

It’s a question that’s never really going to go away as long as we’re human and as long as we’re compromised in the way that we as humans are. Often, as a society, we’re always optimistically thinking about how we can or will be better, but I do have a sense in the end of human nature and its limitations.

It’s fascinating and all too often dismaying to see how, as soon as somebody is vested with power, they decide to exercise and abuse that power, including at the level of a personal relationship. Not necessarily a dictator or something like that, just the way in which somebody in a relationship who understands they have the power will, at a subconscious level or perhaps consciously, abuse it and manipulate the other person.

These things are complicated. Take the relationship between Thomas and Claude. Thomas is not simply a passive victim. There’s a degree of complicity. He understands what’s happening, and it suits him to allow this situation to endure to some extent. That too is something that I think is intriguing. It’s very hard to generalize because these situations are very often very thorny and complicated. 

That also brings us to Leo. He’s this aged, billionaire collector, the kind of man who will get into an awful spat with his brother and walk into Christie’s to throw around a couple hundred thousand just to make himself feel better. But you also pay a great deal of care and attention to him: why collecting matters to him, what void it fills, and how he became the person that he is. Can you talk a little bit about writing that character?

Collectors are a strange species. I have ample firsthand experience of that. If you take a character like Leo, he could so easily seem like a caricature, and I do accept that he and other characters in the novel might initially seem at least a little bit satirical or cartoonish. But in the end, I think they are true to life. Sometimes as a novelist you actually have to reign in the excess or the weirdness a bit because, although it might actually occur in real life, somebody reading it on the page is just gonna say that could never have happened or that nobody would be that dreadful. Yet they really can be and often are.

With Leo, you are dealing with somebody who has been corrupted by extreme wealth and power in the way that it’s almost impossible not to be. He is selfish, grasping, egocentric, all of these things, but I wanted to show a depth of memory and experience that would, in the end, humanize him at some level. 

He has this voracious, almost obsessive desire to collect, which is born of many things. One of them is a desire for a form of immortality because he has no children. Another one would be as an elaborate form of consolation. It’s curious because you think of somebody like that as having everything, but of course, he’s haunted by loss and his immense loneliness. In some ways, collecting art is even a consolation for his own appalling personality, for having to live day-by-day, hour-by-hour with himself.

It made me think of Patrick Radden Keefe’s big New Yorker profile of Larry Gagosian.

An incredible portrait. It’s so easy in the art business, particularly with artists or gallerists, to see them in a certain light—and often they contribute to that because it serves them to be seen in a certain way. But nobody is just their image, right?

You hit on basically all the major art-world events: the Venice Biennale, gallery openings, the Met Gala. Was there a particular event that you were most looking forward to capturing on the page?

I did want to give something of a sense of the kind of wild, endless, frenetic carousel of events that the art year is made up of. The atmosphere at those things is often quite charged, and there’s this odd sense of lots of egos colliding and people observing each other in this surreptitious, passive aggressive way. 

I used to think to myself, What would it be like for something really freakish and embarrassing to happen now? That’s why actually early on in the story, you have a private view where Thomas is having this big comeback moment at his new gallery in London, and suddenly this man walks in off the street in a state of abject hysteria. It completely destroys the moment. I suppose that was me playing a sort of game wondering what it would look like for it suddenly to be shattered by a moment of unpleasant reality.

Portrayals of the contemporary art world in the media really vary. What do you think others get wrong? What were you trying to show in your novel that hasn’t been shown before?

We are in this cultural moment, for one reason or another, where the lives of the rich and privileged and often idle are a huge source of fascination. If you look at programs like The White Lotus, or Succession, or Industry, people are riveted by this stuff. In some ways we’re no different from what we were in the mid-1980s when everybody was in love with Brideshead Revisited, the Granada TV show.

Often, these portrayals don’t get it that accurate because they lean too much into the satire or the absurdity. The high-end, glittering, blue-chip art scene is hard to satirize because the absurdity is just there: the opaqueness, the mystery, the weirdness. You don’t need to exaggerate that. A realist presentation will do just fine.

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Love Story’s Costumes Could Have Tanked the Show. Then Rudy Mance Stepped In.

Is the 82nd Whitney Biennial Weird Enough to Match Our Chaotic National Mood? John Vincler Thinks So

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New to the Hamptons, en route to an off-season rental, a woman on the run—from her man, her social scene, her stagnated creative vision—stops by the grocery store for supplies. Eggs, liquor, the local paper. At the house, she turns the heat up. We’re on the blustery bay side of Long Island, at a bungalow surrounded by dogwood trees in the dead of winter. Leafing through the East Hampton Star, an obituary stops her short. Her friend Hannah Wilke, the daring and experimental visual artist, has died at 52. 

The woman narrating this story, a lightly fictionalized iteration of its author, Ann Rower, orbited Wilke for decades. The two went to high school together, attended the same debauched downtown art openings, strolled brusquely past each other as neighbors on Greene Street, and even shared a gynecologist. 

Our narrator is immediately thrust back in time, to one of Wilke’s performances, “where she, and audience chewer helpers, unwrapped and masticated bubblegum that she shaped into cunts and stuck all over her body.” At the time, Wilke told a journalist that she chose chewing gum as her medium because “it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman—chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece.” News of her friend’s death sends Rower’s narrator into a spiral: down into the sticky substrata of American femininity, the bowels of the art world, a cemetery in the woods, and the uncharted territory of her own erotic urges. 

She hops in the car, handwritten directions to Green River Cemetery clutched between her incisors. Green River is famously the final resting place for a menagerie of the art-world famous: Jackson Pollock, Frank O’Hara, Stuart Davis, and now, Wilke. Rower begins visiting regularly, sometimes bringing along her lover, an aspiring artist and the first woman she’s fallen for since adolescence. Together, they stumble upon the grave of painter Elaine de Kooning (wife of Willem de Kooning). A few visits later, Rower spies a petite rocky outcropping in the shadow of Jackson Pollock’s grave: Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife. Another woman painter painted into a corner by her marriage and her era.        

Suddenly, an obsessive line of inquiry cracks the flat rock face of Rower’s life: what if these “painters who were more famous for being the wives of famous painters” were not simply cocktail acquaintances, but secret lovers, locking lips in coatrooms, or at least friends and comrades, sharing watercolors? This wishful fixation forms the molten core of this novel—or is it a memoir, a group biography, a ghost story, a dream journal? Lee & Elaine, first published by Serpent’s Tail in 2002, will be brought back to bookstores next month in a new edition from Semiotext(e). 

Rower, the author of the 1990 essay collection If You’re A Girl and the 1995 novel Armed Response, predicts and parodies a raft of now-popular genres in Lee & Elaine. Her autofictional protagonist attempts to pen a joint biography of Krasner and de Kooning that also operates as a journey of self-discovery. When she fails to find evidence that Krasner and de Kooning were lovers (their associates insist they harbored nothing but animosity for each other), Rower is eventually  forced to write a love story between ghosts.

Krasner’s character could have been shading any number of the past decade’s ostensibly feminist group biographies—of “difficult” women, “gutsy” women, women writers, women mathematicians, women crossword puzzle designers—when she remarks, ruefully, of a group show entitled “Women and Abstract Expressionism,” that it’s quite a “stupid idea, lumping us all together. Just because we’re women.” 

In the end, the book becomes an accidental love letter—not to de Kooning or Krasner, but to Wilke, a lost peer; to a short-lived love affair; and to Rower’s own past and future lives. And Rower’s lover’s viscous lip gloss becomes a glue—a gummy substance stretching across generations, so women who might have hated each other can become friends, those who never met can trade secrets, and those who never knew how to phrase their compliments can simply smack their lips and smile. 

Ahead of her book’s republication next month, I visited Rower at her home on the Upper West Side to discuss midlife stories, artistic friendships, cemetery sex, giving gossip a good rap, coming out narratives, and more.

This novel is extremely prescient from a genre perspective. It predates the rise of group biographies, autofiction, and intrepid-narrator-obsessed-with-dead-person-they-identify-with books, while roving between all those forms. What has it been like to watch those styles become commonplace? 

That mixture—it’s always been my genre in a way, whatever it is, whatever genre ever was. I almost want to ask you what genre you’d call my work. That’s how I have always written, just straight from the heart. I’m interested in the way [autofiction] has become a popular mode now, but it makes sense to me because it’s a wonderful way to write, as well as a wonderful way to tell the truth. The best blurb I ever received was from Gary Indiana, a very good friend of mine. He called me not a “storyteller, though she is that. She’s a born truth-teller, too: a much rarer bird.”  

Friendships forged through art—whether collaboration or simple admiration—form the connective tissue for much of the community depicted in this book. The story is sparked by the narrator’s grief in the wake of the death of her friend, the artist Hannah Wilke. 

Hannah’s obituary launched this book. I went to high school with Hannah. Her name was Arlene Butter at the time, and she lived across the street from me in Soho forever. I always loved art involving nudity, and she was very brave in her work, I thought. The book begins when I got out to the house in Springs, and I opened the East Hampton Star, and there was her obituary. It was so shocking to learn of her death that way.

That accidental discovery—you said, in an interview with your friend and editor Chris Kraus, that you’ve “always cherished accidents. I think I believe in that if I believe in anything.” Your writing also feels motored by a belief in fate. Do you use these potentially fated accidents as punctuation marks in your work?

In a way, I don’t even think accident is the right word. What we consider accidental ends up feeling like part of a greater plan, eventually. The man I lived with for 20 years, Vito, the man the narrator is leaving in Lee & Elaine—we got back in touch just recently. I actually talked to him right before you came; I’ve sort of fallen back in love with him. [Laughs] He is a music composer, but he’s written these amazing stories. And he came to me with them because someone said to him, “You should really have a book. Do you know anyone that has any connections with Semiotext(e)?”

That’s amazing. While we’re talking about social webs: One of the narrator’s interview subjects accuses her of looking for gossip, not truth. What’s the difference, in your view? 

Truth—that’s what gossip is. The things that people tell each other in private—secrets, especially. That’s why they’re secrets, because they’re true. Gossip gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t.  

Speaking of secrets—this book is in some ways positioned as a coming-out journey for the narrator, and there’s a poignant moment when she wonders, recalling her mother discovering the love letters she’d secretly been exchanging with a girlfriend, “Did I want to be found out again? Or just found?”

In this book, I’m framing my coming out as something that happened in midlife. But while it was kept secret from my parents for a time, I had a girlfriend when I was 14. So in a way, I didn’t need to come out late, because I was already out. That late coming out, it’s a strange trope. The archetypal coming-out-late tale is a trend now. When they read this book, Eileen Myles said something hilarious about Lee and Elaine “getting hot for each other in that dirtiest of places: midlife.”  

That has multiple resonances, since in this novel their fictional ghosts are falling in love from beyond the grave, in the literal dirt of the cemetery where they’re both buried. The introduction to the new edition mentions the eroticism that you and Jessica Ferri, who wrote the introduction, ascribe to graveyards. 

Jessica also took the picture for the cover. It’s a picture of Lee and Elaine’s gravestones, side by side. It’s a beautiful cover, but it scares me a little bit. The book’s original cover was pale blue; it was a picture of a beach with two girls running across the sand toward the water. Someone put a subtitle on it—it said “The Wives’ Tale”—without ever asking me. I felt like that subtitle completely destroyed what I was trying to say. Luckily, no one ever even mentioned it. When Ferri and I met, she asked me about this line in the book, “Cemeteries always made me hot.” We started exploring what that was about, and I’m not really liking this as the answer right now [Laughs], but there’s something about the fact that graveyards don’t change too much. Everybody’s already dead. 

That’s intriguing, especially since the narrator is constantly daydreaming about these dead people changing in their graves—radically altering their lifestyles, shifting their affections, finally following what she hopes were their true passions. 

Someone once said, about the ending of this book, that it “shimmers.” What’s funny is, the ending of this book is not the ending that I originally wrote. The ending I wrote first, which was the literal truth, was a scene where Heather [Lewis, a novelist and Rower’s eventual partner until Lewis’s death in 2001] and I go to Green River Cemetery and fuck in the graveyard. We were completely prepared for the conditions—we knew that there would be dew, so we brought shower curtains, and we safety-pinned them to a blanket. So we had wonderful sex in the back of the cemetery and that’s how I wanted to end the book. But my editor wouldn’t let me.  I understand why she didn’t want me to, and it probably is better the way it is. What I did instead was, since I knew I couldn’t write about fucking in the cemetery, I went home, I had a hit of some extremely good pot that Vito was selling at the time, and wrote the scene that’s there now. It turned out to be about de Kooning’s ghost sort of floating around above me, and shimmering.

Wordplay is a consistent predilection throughout your writing. You have a knack for the astute yet startlingly concise pun. 

Capacious is a nice word for what humor can do. Jokes have always just felt like the most comfortable way to tell the truth for me. Like the beautiful Emily Dickinson line, Tell the truth, but tell it slant. I sort of get off on telling the truth, now that I think about it. It’s a similar thrill to sharing gossip, in a way. There’s a rush of exposing, revealing, and all that. A fancy word for it is revelation. 

Speaking of revelation, the narrator of this book at one point calls the project “a dream book,” and says it seems to be “writing itself,” rather than being written by her. 

I do feel that way with all my writing. Partly maybe because it fulfills the plan I mentioned before. Writing about Heather—that was such a big love, and so much felt like part of the plan. Though I didn’t end up writing about her directly in this book, I’m always writing about Heather. 

Heather surfaces a lot in the reissue of If You’re A Girl, which Semiotext(e) put out in 2024, and which you’ve also referred to as your “pink book.” Pink appears in this novel over and over again too—your lover’s pink lip gloss, the pink dogwood at the house in Springs. What does the color mean to your work?

I’ve always been drawn to pink. It’s a slang word for pussy and slang for truth. I think I’m drawn to pink and pinkness for that reason. Think about going pink, that expression—it’s a corny way of saying going nude, taking your clothes off. 

You often write in a mode you call transfiction, a fictionalized form of oral history based on interviews you conduct. Your fiction is generally rooted in a sense of artistic community. Was that approach a way of inserting collaboration into fiction-writing, which is too often a really solitary pursuit?

I always felt it was sort of fake, that I was making up a reality that didn’t really exist, using people’s real words in my work. On the other hand, I love being edited. I like someone messing around with my work. Some people don’t like it, and even feel violated in a way. I encourage it—but that’s not even a strong enough word. I try to make it happen. It feels like a way of connecting.

Sex is a central avenue to connection for your narrator, and you write erotic scenes that are really drenched in wit, attuned to the ultimately comic depravity of sex, but without abandoning the earnest grasping for another person that’s happening in those moments. 

I can only write about sex as humor. I wish that I could write about it in a more traditionally dirty way. Some of the writers I admire most write about sex wonderfully, sexily, in a way I can’t. Richard Hell, for one thing. He’s also an idol and a punk god, and I’ve always had a huge crush on him. I found this little piece that he wrote recently. He’s writing about trying to come while he’s kicking dope, and making all these weird noises. I mean, to even try to reproduce those noises—it’s wonderful.  

What do you think is underrated, overrated, or accurately rated these days?

I feel like it’s all good. 

Life in general? I have to say, I don’t hear that every day. 

Yes, in general. The older I get, the better it gets. Which is a strange thing to say, especially because there are certain things—physical things—that are not better. I am in a wheelchair and my memory isn’t as great. But the parts of life that I get to carry with me: it’s all good. Talk about life having a plan. I just found out that the Wooster Group is going to restage my old piece about Timothy Leary’s community and LSD. Seeing my work revived in new ways, with re-publications like this, with new introductions. I love Jessica’s introduction—she and I became fast friends, and I love it when people become friends through writing. My way of relating to people is through what they write. And it’s a very deep, lovely way to connect with someone. It happens a lot to me, partly because I don’t go out very much.

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It’s much easier to select a book from a bestseller list or one of the regular roundups assembled (for some reason) by former President Barack Obama. Newsletters are harder to cull. Some power players, like Rayne Fisher-Quann‘s Internet Princess, enjoy regular bouts of virality across social platforms. Others, like author Garth Greenwell’s To a Green Thought, enjoy quiet IYKYK status in literary circles.

At CULTURED, we’re nothing if not the outsider’s insider (or the insider’s even-more-insider?). To glean insight on where the literary elite have been logging their email addresses, we reached out to a host of our favorite writers to learn who to follow on Substack. The answers will soon have your inbox as packed with quality reading as ours.

Rebecca Makkai on A Word About…

It’s no surprise that Rebecca Makkai’s favorite newsletter offers a deep dive into the written form. The Substacker and author is best known for her bestselling novel, 2023’s I Have Some Questions for You, as well as the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, The Great Believers, 2018.

“Ben Dreyer, the former chief copy-editor for Random House, has written an amazing book (Dreyer’s English) on usage that’s like a modern, funny Strunk & White. His substack, A Word About…, gives us his thoughts on good writing, bad writing, annoying grammar, and even the ethics of pointing out a typo in a friend’s work. You don’t have to be a writer to enjoy it, but if you care (even against your will) about how words are used, this Substack is an educational, hilarious, and often cathartic read.”

Suleika Jaouad on Miranda July

Emmy-winning journalist, artist, Substacker, and writer Suleika Jaouad is on the heels of releasing her deep dive into journaling, The Book of Alchemy, with essays from Lena Dunham, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, and more. It follows her bestselling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, 2021.   

“The writer on Substack that currently has me in her grips is Miranda July. She’s a relative newcomer to the platform, and I’m a big fan of how she’s using it. She’s funny. She’s experimental. She’s free—and by that, I mean she seems like she’s totally herself, whether she’s writing about what she eats, or her experiments in fashion, or the epically long voice messages she and her friends leave each other. July’s presence on the platform feels like a kind of permission, even an invitation. It’s inspiring me to express my full self, rather than just the parts I think of as acceptable or expected of me. July is also cultivating really meaningful conversations with her readers, many of them about the themes she writes about in All Fours, like partnership and motherhood and selfhood. But how she’s doing it feels so organic and true, rather than some mercenary promotional tactic to sell books. I find everything about her newsletter delightful, and every time it hits my inbox, I’m eager to open it. I just want to take a little stroll with her—to be in company with her totally original, wild genius of a mind.”

Haley Mlotek on Cat Hair on the Cutting Board

Writer Haley Mlotek released her first book in 2025, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, but her preferred newsletter dips back into time spent she writing for magazines including The New Yorker, Vogue, and CULTURED. 

“I worked with Erika Houle at SSENSE, where we were both editors of the magazine, and she always knew just what to cook or eat whenever I was at a loss. Now she’s pursuing food as a full-time career as a writer and chef and her Substack, Cat Hair on the Cutting Board, is always the perfect menu: an update on what she’s been cooking lately and for what occasion with the most artfully inviting photographs to display her skill and talent, the recipes so that we can attempt it for ourselves, and my favorite part, a list of all the subject lines to emails she receives about food. ‘Do You Eat Clockwise, Top-Down, or Bite-By-Bite?’, ‘Roasting a Whole Chicken: An Emotional Rollercoaster,’ and ‘I Tried Mormon Blender Pancakes’ are just a few of the ones I recently liked best.”

Emma Pattee on The Snap Forward

Climate journalist and Substacker Emma Pattee pooled her expertise into longform writing with the release of her debut novel, 2025’s Tilt, about a pregnant woman seeking safety after an earthquake leaves Portland, Oregon in chaos.

“The Snap Forward. Alex Steffen is pulling no punches about the planetary crisis. An acclaimed futurist, Steffen has been thinking and writing about the implications of climate change for decades. If you want feel-good musings about ecological breakdown, this Substack isn’t for you. If you want clear, researched, innovative, ice-cold-water information about what the future might look like and how you can prepare for it, look no further. There’s no one I trust more when it comes to imagining and preparing for what’s coming.”

Jamie Hood on Internet Princess

Last year, Substacker and writer Jamie Hood followed her exploration of archetypes, How to Be a Good Girl: A Miscellany, 2020, with her memoir, Trauma Plot—a skewering of our collective investment in “trauma porn.”

“Rayne Fisher-Quann doesn’t really need my recommendation—her newsletter, Internet Princess, has well over 100,000 subscribers—but I nonetheless feel compelled to mention her work here. In an age when it’s commonplace to publicly mourn the Death of Feminist Criticism, Fisher-Quann reckons with #MeToo and Amber Heard, tradwives and heteropessimism, Anora and sex work on screen, and all manner of other quote-unquote-feminist topics from a rigorous, stylish, and powerfully embodied critical perspective. She’s among my favorite writers working and is a beacon for those of us feeling demoralized by this political moment and its current strain of anti-feminist backlash. Her essay on Heard was indispensable to my thinking about the deflations of #MeToo as I wrote my rape book, Trauma Plot. If you aren’t reading her, you surely should be.”

Once again, Rob Franklin on Internet Princess

Writer, professor, and Art for Black Lives Co-Founder Rob Franklin was met with acclaim for his debut novel, Great Black Hope, last year. But between writing sessions, he’s reading this list’s fan-favorite Substack.

“On her Substack Internet Princess, writer Rayne Fisher-Quann delves into contemporary culture in a voice—Internet-fluent, yet emotionally raw—that feels organic to the platform. Without the frantic directive of an editor to GET TO THE POINT, Fisher-Quann often takes the scenic route, stopping along the way to examine experiences from her textured life, Internet ephemera, and allusions to critical essays from both the canon and her contemporaries. In this way, she proves that the Internet age hasn’t rotted our brains and attention-spans but introduced us to a new kind of seeing: a thousand images at once, yet still able to be ordered. Recent favorites have included her piece on the language of self-care and solitude and her ode to the kind of writing A.I. is soon to replace. But the essay that stopped me in my tracks was ‘Anora’s American Dream,’ which probes how the street-smart titular character of the Oscar-sweeping film falls in love, not with the romantic lead but a hetero-optimistic fantasy. Like all truly brilliant writing, the piece not only expresses Fisher-Quann’s essential ideas and observations about art in our contemporary moment but helped me, the reader, understand my own.”

Rayne Fisher-Quann on Female Small Business Owner

After the last two entries, top Substack writer Rayne Fisher-Quann really needs no further introduction, but those looking for more from her will soon be able to get their hands on her first book, Complex Female Character, forthcoming from Knopf.  

“Really so hard to pick just one! I really love the work of the critic Grace Byron—finding out that she’s written about a book I’m reading or a piece of discourse I’m following is always a huge delight. My first thought is to say she always says what I’ve been waiting to hear, but really she always says far more than anything I could have conceived of ahead of time, and in far more compelling terms. Her taste is wonderful, and she really knows what she’s talking about. Just real, great CRITICISM with a solid political core!!!”

Ottessa Moshfegh on Canal Street Dreams

PEN/Hemingway Award winner Ottessa Moshfegh is the novelist behind My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Eileen, and Lapvona—each sporting instantly recognizable covers for those who frequent bookstores’ best in fiction sections. For those who frequent Substack, you’ll recognize her as It’s Ottessa, bitch.

“Eddie Huang’s Substack is a passionate assemblage of essays, interviews, stories, opinion pieces, what have you, all focused around Eddie’s adorably curious point of view. He somehow manages to be positive, enthusiastic, and yet completely brilliant, a soothsayer about culture, art, politics, FOOD, and he is real and wonderfully kind. Sometimes I think, We should be gatekeeping this platform, because everyone’s publication is like a zine or a letter to the world.

In other words, I like Eddie’s style and his maximalist approach to self-expression. He’s also wildly creative. It’s inspiring to see others on Substack grabbing what they want and getting their work done. It’s not like the addictive circular-minded self-referential Instagram or Twitter platform. If you want to participate, you’ve got to make something. So everyone on there—or a lot of them, anyway—are MAKERS. Not passive absorbent sponges. Substack isn’t trying to sell you anything except for access. I really believe in writers getting paid to write. For some reason people think it’s a gift that we can easily expend. It’s not. Eddie makes it look very generous and fun.”

Liz Moore on Frump Feelings

Bestseller Liz Moore is most recently the author of 2024’s thriller The God of the Woods. Recently, however, her previous novel—Long Bright River, a Barack Obama favorite—premiered as an Amanda Seyfried-led limited series.

“I recommend Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Substack Frump Feelings. In Emma’s words, it consists of ‘monthly dispatches on culture, books, and fat liberation.’ In my words, it’s a needed space for public-private reflection on the way we think about our own bodies and the bodies of others. (And fictional bodies too!)”

Matthew Gasda on Oldoldoldoldnew

Brooklyn Center for Theater Research Founder Matthew Gasda is the playwright behind pieces like Dimes Square and Zoomers that skewer the contemporary landscape of New York. In his free time, he catches up on another writer’s cultural musings.

“Philip Traylen is a sardonic and philosophical British writer who has the rare capacity to both say deep things and avoid saying shallow things. Oldoldoldoldnew has fiction, highly original aphorisms, and translations; I think with Substacks, you’re looking for something that you’d find appealing if you found it in an old bookstore, that has some kind of contemporary value and originality, but doesn’t feel like it’s just reacting to the Internet TODAY. A newsletter doesn’t have to be news, or newsy or chocked with hot takes. I want to read philosophers.” 

Mike Crumplar on Garden Scenery

Remember when Dimes Square was all the rage? Around that time, writer Mike Crumplar made his name with Substack’s Crumpstack, a newsletter about the tenuous scene’s evolving nightlife and, when the lights dimmed in the square, his literary musings on the culture at large. 

“David C. Porter’s Garden Scenery is for real heads. It’s mainly twice-monthly flash fiction with some poetry, criticism, and other newsletter ephemera thrown in. Porter’s fiction has a sort of eerie, understated absurdism that reminds me of Harold Pinter and ‘comedy of menace.’ It’s edgy in a sophisticated way that is sadly rare these days. And I think I trust his opinions on cinema more than those of anyone else online.”

Katie Kitamura on To a Green Thought

Guggenheim Fellow and National Book Award long-listed author Katie Kitamura released her latest novel, Audition, last year. It was a most-anticipated book from nearly every publication I can name off the top of my head about the roles we all play, in and out of the spotlight.

“Garth Greenwell’s To a Green Thought is full of his meticulous and passionate prose—reason enough to subscribe. A Substack of real substance, it contains beautifully argued works of criticism, including close readings of Greenwell’s favorite books and films and generous explorations on literary craft. There are also personal essays on such thorny and difficult subjects as money and writing, and the experience of being reviewed, written with bracing intelligence and disarming honesty; the entire publication is a gift.”

Clare de Boer on Silver Linings

Five-time James Beard nominated chef Clare de Boer is the owner of New York country tavern Stissing House and the author of Substack’s The Best Bit, sharing witty insights about appetites and recipes that temporarily satiate them.

“Pom Shillingford, my longtime collaborator at Stissing House, writes about her garden as beautifully as she tends it. Her Substack isn’t a how-to guide (though following along might give you a loose sense of what to plant when); it’s an ode to Mother Nature, and to the seasons—in life and in the garden.”

Miranda July on Dad Bod

Filmmaker, artist, and writer Miranda July rocketed into the literary mainstream with All Fours—a book that prompts even the most non-zeitgeisty of acquaintances to ask, “Have you read it?” Meanwhile, July is tucking into her inbox with a fellow multihyphenate.

“You’re laughing, you’re surprised, but most of all you’re not alone when you’re reading Dad Bod [by writer and painter Ali Liebegott]. Recent posts include AMC A-list membership as therapy and being an over enthusiastic blood donor because she likes being tended too. An old-school butch, they don’t make ’em like this anymore.”

Elizabeth Gilbert on Snaps

Elizabeth Gilbert is most well-known for her all-time bestseller Eat Pray Love, but she returned last year with a memoir about love and loss, All the Way to the River. She also regularly expounds on the topic in her Substack, Letters From Love.

“My favorite newsletter on Substack—the one that I think embodies the best of what this platform can do—is Snaps by Deirdre Lewis. Lewis is a writer and photographer who lives in Los Angeles, raises her kids and grandkids, and works in a law office protecting the rights of oppressed people. And as she is going about her daily life, she never stops observing, photographing, and processing her experience of the world. What she shares on Substack are these tiny jewels of moments (‘snaps’ of brilliantly executed prose and photos) that are like perfect little bits of jazz, overheard from a slight remove on a rainy night. It feels like writing and thinking from a different time—a slower, richer way of seeing. I am always touched and inspired by the artistry of her newsletter, and it’s accounts like this one that make me love Substack.”

Anika Jade Levy on Chartbook

Anika Jade Levy is the founder of downtown publication Forever Magazine, but stirred up even more buzz with the release of her debut novel, Flat Earth, late 2025. 

“Adam Tooze’s Chartbook is what I read when the news makes me feel stupid. He scrapes the Internet for diagrams from central banks, the ILO, and German bureaucratic agencies to assemble a story about how the world actually works. Sometimes it gives me enough confidence to say ‘bond yields’ out loud.”

“My favorite stack is Extracurricular by cultural critic Tembe Denton-Hurst. Tembe is able to synthesize our contemporary moment with intellect, curiosity, precision, wit, and humor. It’s rare in a time with so much noisy nonsense. I especially love her book dates where she takes a writer to their favorite bookshop and interviews them on their literary influences.”

Chris Kraus on Selling Out

Novelist and critic Chris Kraus returned to publishing last year with the release of The Four Spent the Day Together, a reimagining of true crime in an era obsessed with its sensationalism. 

“I’ve read Natasha Stagg’s Selling Out since she started it, always eager to know what she thinks about things. And it’s so formally well-composed and interesting: the way she weaves between accounts of, and hyperlinks to, people and parties and things in a lucid, expansive way. But at the same time, there’s almost always an idea at the heart of the thing, an issue she’s turning around to examine from every side, approaching, retreating. More recently I’ve discovered Harmony Holiday’s dazzling Black Music and Black Muses, a real gift: the most profound and poetic kind of music writing that extends to the state of world order and consciousness. She writes about Epstein and Nabokov, Basho, Bad Bunny, balance and chaos, exploitation, indifference, with seemingly effortless brilliance. And then there’s Michelle Tea’s Dear Diary, that arrives like a coveted letter from a most-trusted friend, telling you everything.”

Stephanie Wambugu on Good Thing Going

Writer and Joyland editor Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel, Lonely Crowds, 2025, sees her follow the friendship of two women from a New England catholic school to the early-’90s art world of New York.

“I suggest subscribing to Lena Dunham’s Good Thing Going. I really don’t care for Substack and tend to avoid looking at it until things land in my inbox. I prefer professionally edited writing in magazines. That said, I subscribe to a few friends’ and acquaintances’ Substacks and generally think that if someone is smart and personable then their Substack newsletter is bound to be enjoyable enough to pay a few dollars a month for. I don’t know Lena Dunham (rare non-friend subscription) but having watched her excellent TV show and read her writing through the years I feel that few people can pull of confessional, twee (in a surprisingly good way), and timely dispatches from contemporary life like she does!”

Zoe Dubno on Number Two Pencil, et al

Writer Zoe Dubno released her debut novel, Happiness and Love, last year, following one young woman through a dinner party with her vicious and estranged New York friends. 

“Chartbook by Adam Tooze is where I get a very smart person’s take on the news, political economy, and environment. Kitchen Projects for complex baking recipes with full rundowns on how the recipes work and on the history of the item (medieval meat pies, how to temper chocolate, why to use a certain type of yeast). Architect Abigail Sandler’s Substack, Price Upon Request, about interior design and antiques that I usually can’t afford but enjoy looking at things like a 2,000 dollar egg cup. Left wing journalist Madeline Peltz’s substack, Number Two Pencil, which covers the right wing media, especially the new ascendent influencer class which has cropped up to capture young people. Her recent post on the “Womanosphere” and their pro-ICE antifeminist MAHA agenda was full of truly disgusting people and reading her incisive commentary was really clarifying. She really plumbs the depths of fascist TikTok and shows where the conversation, bewilderingly, will go in the next few months. Picky Nikki is my new favorite fashion Substack. I think the woman who writes it is a stylist at SSense and she’s got great idiosyncratic taste and doesn’t just recommend like, buying an $800 pair of pants.”

Grace Byron on Gaby Del Velle

Outside of her own Substack, Female Small Business Owner, Grace Byron’s work can be found in her debut novel, Herculine. The 2025 horror tome follows a trans girl stalked through the streets of New York by a malevolent force. 

“Gaby Del Velle’s Substack has been an invaluable hub for reporting on Minnesota, immigration, and anti-ICE protests. She’s one of our most intrepid writers right now and effortlessly stylish at the same time while doing incredible work. I’d also recommend helmet girl, Small Wire, LOOSEY, and the late review. All great blogs with keen cultural insight.”

“Hey, want to be in my movie?!” a man with curly hair, thick glasses, and a fluorescent coat yelled, half chasing me down West 26th Street as I exited Visual AIDS’s annual “Postcards from the Edge” show in 2023.

I’d heard many stories that began with that very question and ended poorly, so I said maybe and took his card. That’s how I learned that the man was Wayne Koestenbaum, a leading figure in New York’s queer and literary scenes since the ’80s, synonymous with confessional prose, dissonant poetry, and genre-straddling criticism. His best-known book remains 1993’s The Queen’s Throat, which chronicles the timelessly homosexual obsession with opera.

This March, Koestenbaum re-enters the fictional fray with his first novel in almost two decades. And what a novel it is. My Lover, the Rabbi centers on an unnamed narrator’s psychosexual affair with an aging rabbi. Its 464 pages, like their author’s visual art practice, pull no punches in their depiction of sexual obsession. I knew I had to talk to Koestenbaum before the rest of the world dives in, so I called him up to talk intellectual filth, bad gays, and writing to embarrass. (Oh, and we made the movie, by the way.)

A key element of the book is the conflation of desire and repulsion. It feels like the protagonist hates the Rabbi, yet he’s so sexually infatuated with him.

My earliest gleams of homosexual feeling were necessarily twinned with disgust. It was the 1960s and 1970s, and there was no language or idealizations for what I was feeling. Gayness was a kind of filth location. That’s not unique to me, [but] many people don’t build an erotic home around the filth portion of eroticism. I did—and maybe that’s because I’m such a deeply internal person. The deeper you go into your own consciousness, the filthier it gets. 

The Rabbi goes unnamed, but the fact that he is a rabbi comes up at least once a chapter. Does it feel accurate to say that the narrator could be seen as a self-hating Jew in addition to experiencing internalized homophobia? 

Inevitably, yes. But my hope with this book is to experience those vibes rather than take them as received wisdom. We all know about the self-hating Jew and internalized homophobia, but the actual experience of those things may be rich with desire and erotic potentiality. Built into the narrator’s love for the Rabbi is the knowledge that the Rabbi always has and always will refuse him. His overwhelming desire for the Rabbi will never be met: It’s an asymptote.

And the narrator doesn’t even believe the Rabbi is a good rabbi. 

But the “rabbi-ness” is crucial. A rabbi, like the Pope, is an earthly representative of the divine—an unfathomable pinnacle. So the Rabbi is somehow permanently above the narrator. It’s as if the Rabbi is saying, “You will never attain my tabernacle.” And the tabernacle in this case is his body.

Somewhat early in the book, the Rabbi goes to Warsaw where he is engaging with the Holocaust by doing vaguely “reparative” work. How does this proximity to the Holocaust impact the story?

The Holocaust is central, though subterranean, to the book. Its aftermath is like the water table underneath the book’s sense of melancholy and of permanent damage already having been done. The issues of speech and silence, guilt and alienation, perpetual mourning, and interpersonal unfathomability—these are all inheritances of the Holocaust. That sense of turgid, mutual unapproachability is part of the wreckage of the Holocaust.

The book isn’t exactly an “easy read.” Parts of it are ugly and kind of gross, and it feels like we’re trapped in this obsessive and winding mind. How do you think about legibility and opacity when you write?

I’ve always tried to write within the register of intellectual filth. Even in terms of fiction, my role models are Samuel Delany, Jean Genet, Hervé Guibert, Pierre Guyotat, and Dennis Cooper. I learned from them that you need to pay attention to the things that give you the creeps and that really turn you on—and maybe even at the exact same moment. I’m constantly telling my students that if you don’t wake up in the middle of the night terrified and embarrassed about what you’ve written, then you’re probably not doing the right thing. And obsessiveness is my style but in this book, I feel like for the first time I’ve really described what my mind and my nervous system and my libidinal system feel like from inside.

This book also has so much sex—with people who aren’t 21 and don’t have washboard abs. There’s this quote I’m obsessed with about “a body allowing itself to not go to seed but relax in its own unfenced fruitfulness of contour.” It’s about the gay male body that isn’t necessarily poorly taken care of, but isn’t at the gym every day. 

I grew up in the clone era, and I did think clones were hot, but I thought they were hot because of their mustaches, not their muscles. The mustache as a signifier turned me on as much as the mustache itself… I’ve never been a good gay in terms of the way I look. I’ve never felt that I perfectly occupy a desired position like “nerd twink.” I’ve always felt very ill at ease in places like Fire Island, at least when I went in the ’80s. I basically often don’t feel like I belong. And as a writer of course I’m going to write about that experience of not belonging to gayness. You don’t ask that a rabbi or a poet look like an Abercrombie & Fitch model. I enjoyed celebrating non-normative bodies as desirable in this book.

Do you care about how the audience receives the book?

My life as a writer has mostly been avoiding the reality that somebody might one day read my book. This novel in particular happened in the deepest privacy. When I started writing it, I was sitting on a pink couch in my house in Germantown. It was a Friday night, and the first line of the book came to me. I am aware that it will fall somewhere, but I guess I don’t want to prognosticate lest anything I fear comes true. 

And why a novel after 20 years away from the form? 

I’ve always idealized the novel, without it necessarily being my first choice as a reader. A novel, at its best, is Gesamtkunstwerk that captures the flow of time and an entire body of real experience. When I’m writing my other books, I always pretend that they’re novels; I never wanted my non-fiction to be pedestrian. When I write anything, I have in mind this torrid tunnel of language, and I felt so inspired by this topic when I wrote the first sentence of My Lover, the Rabbi that I thought, I want to continue with this impulse until the end of time. I wrote it in this intense immersion, like staring at the sun.

My last question is about The Queen’s Throat, your mammoth book from 1993. Why do you think it has such an enduring legacy?

The writing of that book was a very powerful experience, very much like writing My Lover, the Rabbi, in that I had given myself permission to write about the thing I really cared about in the way I cared about it. When I wrote The Queen’s Throat, I positioned myself as somebody who can’t sing and who is unqualified for opera, even socioeconomically or chronologically unqualified for opera. My position writing the book was as this queer interloper.

In My Lover, the Rabbi, my relation to maleness and to the attainable erotic idol is also distanced and forbidden. There are huge obstacles between the narrator and the Rabbi, and between my desire and its fulfillment. In both books, the narrator is presenting himself as forever distant from the object of desire. That’s why you need to pile up so many heated words: to build up a monument that will be the bridge to that object.

More of our favorite stories from CULTURED

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Stylist Jason Bolden Spotlights 3 Young Black Designers You’ll Soon Be Seeing a Lot More Of

Masturbation on the Moors: Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ Is a Bodice-Ripper for the Internet Age

The 14 Horniest Places in New York, According to Jordan Firstman, Francesca Scorsese, and More

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Shawn Hatosy is having a career moment equivalent to pulling the lever on a slot machine only to watch as the characters start to line up, lights flare, and bells ring. At 50, he’s worked consistently in Hollywood for three decades. But it was landing the part of Jack Abbot—a grizzled night-shift emergency doctor and war veteran—on The Pitt that earned him his first Emmy last year and sent fans trawling through his filmography. Jackpot. 

Last year, when his crime drama Animal Kingdom fortuitously dropped on Netflix in the midst of Pitt-mania, Hatosy watched along with fans on TikTok as it climbed into the top 10. “Checking in on my new oomfs,” he quipped to his 700,000 viewers, while filming himself on the way to the Gotham Awards. “I’m really happy that shows like Animal Kingdom and Southland, which were such a big part of my life, are finding new audiences. I’m proud of those shows,” he tells me. On Twitter, he’s declared himself the “unc peepaw people’s princess” and regularly enjoys the virality of new and old posts alike, saying things like Miss Piggy “seems DTF.” 

Hatosy’s outsize popularity on The Pitt—a show where he is technically a guest star despite gleefully partaking in every press appearance—seems in part due to the stable of sympathetic, slightly unstable, salt-and-pepper characters he’s embodied over the years and partly due to his entirely unpredictable online presence. These days, he’s looking ahead to his character’s return to The Pitt, his directorial debut on the show (episode nine), his first boldface theatrical release (Ready or Not 2), and a new limited series, Cry Wolf, in which he stars alongside Olivia Colman and Brie Larson. 

Ahead of all that, we sat down with the actor for a trip through the ’70s tomes, classic films, and avant-garde directors that helped shape his one-of-a-kind output. 

I’m excited to talk to you about your offline reading habits, because I feel like you’re a very online person. Does that feel fair? 

I’ve been around long enough to have been through the early days of MySpace, to then Facebook, to what we’re dealing with now. I would say, probably I am. I’m tuned into what’s happening on social media, but it’s so messy these days. I see it with my kids too, like, is this the best thing? I’m starting to have these bigger, existential questions about social media.

I’ve seen some of your TikToks. I feel like you’ve got slang happening that I wouldn’t even know how to use.

Is that right? I think that’s just from Twitter, people making fun of me and just then me taking it and running with it.

So what kind of reader are you? Would you say you’re reading a lot?

Not like I used to. Isn’t that sad? It took me a minute to understand how much I liked novels, and not just novels. Marlon Brando had an autobiography that I loved—just finding people’s experiences and being able to reflect on how I want to experience this business or life as an artist. I was a terrible student. The only areas that I did okay in were literature and English, but as you can see, I can barely form a sentence. Then as I finished high school and moved to New York, I started going back and reading the books I should have read in school.

Were these the classics?

I do like the classics. One of my first books that I delved into—I’m not saying this is a classic—was The Stand. I might have been going from middle school to high school, and it was my first experience taking a book and becoming completely addicted to it. There are so many settings in The Stand, and there’s these physical details that still I think about. There’s this plague happening and the hacking cough and they have to travel through the Lincoln Tunnel, and the smells. The way [Stephen King] writes it was so beautifully specific. I thought I could never read a book that size, nothing would ever hold my attention, but it’s perfectly written.

In terms of the classics, The Great Gatsby I’ve read a couple times because it’s one of those comfort books. Even though I know how tragic the ending is, there’s something about that book—when you tune back in, you find yourself empathizing with a different character. First, it’s Nick. And then all of a sudden, it’s Gatsby, hoping that all this work and effort will really change my world, but it has these tragic consequences.

Oh, In Cold Blood. [Truman Capote] spent so much time with every character that arrives in this terrible tragedy. He gets so close with Perry, who’s one of the murderers. We’re not engaged in this story because we’re learning who did it. As an actor, it’s such a beautiful thing because you get the role of a villain a lot and it’s really easy to play that up, but it’s really hard to make them human. In Cold Blood was one of those books that showed me how to do that.

Are you one of those people, with something like The Great Gatsby, who reads the book and then goes to watch the film and judges it incredibly harshly?

Very much so. I watched the Leo [DiCaprio] and Tobey [Maguire] version, which I actually didn’t judge horribly. Another is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s probably my favorite book, but I saw the movie first, and I love that it’s also one of my favorite movies, and they’re so freaking different. The book is from the point of view of Chief Bromden [while the film follows Jack Nicholson’s character, Randle McMurphy]. That’s a movie that I can rewatch anytime it’s on. I would almost like to see a version of the movie that followed him as the narrator.

It feels like it’s been long enough to do another version, as opposed to some things where there’s a new adaptation every year. Where do you find your next book? Are you going for the biggest novel of the year?

I haven’t read a new book in so long, so don’t make fun of me. 

You know what, sometimes I go out to people for this column and they say, “Sorry, he’s never read.” So you’ve at least read books.

Yeah, I don’t read new books. There’s a book written in the ’70s called Going After Cacciato. The author’s name is Tim O’Brien. It’s about a unit in Vietnam, and one of their privates goes AWOL and his name is Cacciato. The war has been terrible, they’re holed up in this place, and it’s rained for months. The main character, Paul Berlin, says, “[Cacciato] said he’s gonna walk to Paris,” and the Lieutenant’s like, “He’s not allowed to. We’re gonna go get him.” So it becomes like a road movie. I highly recommend it. All right, now you tell me one that I should read that’s new.

Unfortunately, the last book that I read and am going around recommending is called Unabridged, and it’s 300 pages about the history of the dictionary. I feel kind of crazy recommending that to people, but it’s amazing. 

I’m gonna check it out.

Is there a book that you’re hoping will get made into a film, whether it’s this ’70s novel or something else?

I would love for that movie to get made. Actually, that’s how I discovered it. Somebody sent it to me as a script. Then I went and found the book and fell in love with it. That one’s had a couple of development phases. Are you gonna be able to make an article out of this, or are you scared?

No, I feel like it’s going really well. Do you not feel like it’s going well?

No, I do, but it’s about reading new books, isn’t it? And I don’t. But I definitely have read books.

I’m learning everyone’s dirty laundry by finding out who in Hollywood has never read a book. What is the best or worst book recommendation you’ve ever gotten? Hopefully it’s not this dictionary thing that I just said.

Unabridged, worst book I ever read. If it’s not a good book, I won’t read it. I just don’t have enough time. So, I’m not gonna shit on anybody right now. I mean, nobody recommends books to me. So sad.

They don’t know about your secret history with reading all of the classics.

It’s so important that they make lists of the ones that you’re supposed to read, because then you feel like, I have to read, you know, Grapes of Wrath. 

Is there a contemporary director you’d like to see write an autobiography? 

I used to love Quentin Tarantino so much until he said stupid things about actors. I do love Paul Thomas Anderson. He can do no wrong in my book. Am I just, like, so easy to read?

That you love Paul Thomas Anderson? I don’t know if I would have guessed that.

There’s another book called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It’s about how the auteur in the ’70s became this really great movement. They made a movie called Easy Rider that was directed by Dennis Hopper and it was made for no money, like under $1 million, and it went on to make a shitload of money. So there was this flurry of movies greenlit and they were all influenced by the French New Wave and these little cameras. They could go on location and do cool things. It led to a lot of great work from Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese. It details every movie in that period that I love up until movies like Jaws came out and all of a sudden you had the blockbuster. The business moves in cycles.

Shawn Hatosy’s Required Reading

Stephen King, The Stand, 1978  (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“Gosh, I don’t wanna say my favorite book because it’s so stupid and cliched. Well, I really do think The Stand is one of my favorite books. Is that okay?”

Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato, 1978 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“Going After Cacciato. That’s the one that got away.”

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“Did I get a classic yet? Let’s go To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye, 1992 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“Last but not least, let’s make it a book about procedure. Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye, is about a wonderful editor and how he works. It really shows how he has created his own language in editing.”

Hollywood, with its promise of sunlight and unfathomable sums, is forever auditioning for the role of financial fertile crescent in the lives of cash-strapped literary types.

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne famously funded their writerly pursuits with commercial screenwriting. In his memoir, Dunne recounts Didion’s indictment of the American public’s taste in movies—and her own willingness to pander to it for the right price. F. Scott Fitzgerald, during his down-on-his-luck days, signed a contract with MGM Studios (he lasted 18 months); John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, and William Faulkner all penned screenplays. In today’s troubled publishing industry, selling the IP of one’s novelistic work has become one of the only ways for an author to scrape together a survivable income. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s own financial troubles have made such IP, and the ostensibly built-in audiences that come with it, ever more covetable.

Cinema’s mimetic impulse seems to have reached its fever pitch: prequels, sequels, and spinoffs dominate the silver screen. Harry Potter is headed back to Hollywood once again, only this time Hogwarts is housed at HBO. Wuthering Heights, which has resolutely endured over 20 film and television adaptations, is one of this year’s biggest releases, courtesy of Emerald Fennell, whose last project was an amusing (if utterly lacking in eccentricity) Ripley rip-off. Production companies are cropping up to commission fiction intended for adaptation, more agencies than ever specialize in the greasy book-to-film pipeline, and adaptation deals are increasingly inked before books hit shelves. Yet while Hollywood’s investment in IP has never been higher, the collision of overlapping cinematic universes with streaming services’ recommendation algorithms means that the most profitable IP is often also the most rote, or the easiest to slot into algorithm-friendly silos on Netflix and BookTok.

This profusion of tags and labels can blind us to the surprising contradictions stashed away in some of the most seemingly straightforward stories. But it can also, as novelist Katie Kitamura told me, be a “clarifying lens” that helps us to identify gaps in the canon, inciting us to write into them and patch up our tapestry of narratives—or better yet, pull at the loose threads and unravel it entirely, so we can braid the detritus into something genuinely unusual.

Kitamura’s fifth novel, Audition, is part of a raft of forthcoming adaptations that refuse facile categorization—books that play fast and loose with form and skip nimbly into uncharted psychological territory. Along with Kitamura, whose project will be directed by Lulu Wang and star Lucy Liu and Charles Melton, this cadre includes Coco Mellors, Virginia Feito, Julia May Jonas, and Samantha Leach—whose narratives warp tropes even as they wield them to their own ends. Antiheroines, age-gap relationships, Victorian gothic revivals, and the poor-little-rich-girl gone awry are all plausible if desperately insufficient descriptors—not to mention potential tags—for these stories, and all are resolutely deconstructed as each one unfurls.

Not all of these projects are adapted by the authors themselves, but each has a formidable creative team attached—Feito’s satirical horror story about a governess gone wild has Zachary Wigon directing and Maika Monroe as lead, Lena Dunham turns her astute eye for girlhood’s transcendent risks and bonds to Leach’s journalistic memoir about the troubled teen industry, and Rachel Weisz brings May Jonas’s repressed and obsessed middle-aged protagonist to life.

I spoke to Feito, Mellors, May Jonas, Leach, and Kitamura about the potential and the pitfalls of Hollywood’s IP machine, and what it might look like to loosen some of the screws, getting it whirring in strange and stirring new ways.

Julia May Jonas, Vladimir

The playwright and novelist has adapted her debut novel, Vladimir—about a professor who nurtures an erotic obsession with her colleague—into a series for Netflix starring Rachel Weisz, John Slattery, and Leo Woodall. Her work includes the five-play cycle All Long True American Stories, a series of inventive narratives inspired by the work of five canonical male playwrights, and Evelyn, centering on a celebrity incarcerated in a mental institution.

How did this adaptation project come about? How does your screenwriting practice diverge from your approach to novels?

It was never my intention to stick closely to the book. Efforts to do that will often go astray. Vladimir is not Harry Potter; there’s not a legion of fans demanding to see the Goblet of Fire as it was described to them.

Speaking of Harry Potter—there’s a certain cinematic universe-ification occurring in Hollywood. What is it like to translate such an eccentric project for a machine that runs on IP?

Until practically the last day of shooting, it didn’t really register that we had gotten away with making this very literary book into a series for Netflix. It’s a bummer in general that original stories can’t really exist without some kind of pre-existing IP. It’s sad that writers write short stories so that they can sell a screenplay off them. That all feels rather grim. I would never write a book with the hope of adapting it—I have a problem with that from an artistic viewpoint.

This book has been called a campus novel, and the show is pitched as a thriller. How did thinking through those genres factor into your writing process?

Genres are for marketing and therefore readers, but I don’t feel like they’re for writers. If a writer tries to squeeze themselves into a genre, it often doesn’t feel authentic. The show has elements of erotic thrillers, but it’s also a comedy. Again, I’m so surprised I got to make it.

“Genres are for marketing and therefore readers, but I don’t feel like they’re for writers.” —Julia May Jonas

Your main character is incredibly nuanced and well-drawn—how did she change as you collaborated with an actress attempting to render her on screen?

Anyone you work with will come with an interpretation—the hope is that it surprises you. Rachel Weisz definitely surprised me. We were aligned on who the character was, and then Rachel did things that were completely surprising, even magical. You want someone who looks at your words and does something more. That’s what great actors do.

Was there anything in the critical discourse around your book that you felt misunderstood the project? Do you fear a repeat scenario with the show?

Some people saw my main character as a Phyllis Schlafly type. I think of her as a good liberal grappling with how her identity is challenged in shifting times. Some people found her much more atrocious or appalling than I intended her to be. Even when she does this terrible—or at the very least, questionable—thing, you’re kind of rooting for her to finally take what she wants.

What is missing from contemporary literature? What are you sick of seeing?

I’ll read anything if I feel like the voice is authentic and considered. I remember reading All Fours and thinking, Finally, someone who’s trying to entertain, who’s putting their fullness and uniqueness out there in a way that, sentence by sentence, is delighting me. I would like a break from reading about nuns for a while. We’re all fascinated with the idea of living a “pure” existence, and that leads us to fixate on people who don’t have sex.

That feels related to your writing on the ways our culture trains us to police our appetites—and the way critics condemned your character’s appetites even when she hadn’t even acted on them.

Yes, and we often cannot police our own appetites. We have tried for all of history.

Katie Kitamura, Audition

Audition is an experiment in interpretation: A middle-aged actress is confronted by a stranger with a startling secret about her past that threatens her present. The book is the critic, novelist, and NYU creative writing professor’s final entry in a trilogy exploring translation, identity, and performance.

You’re not writing this adaptation yourself; Lulu Wang is writing it with playwright Martyna Majok. What is it like to cede control over a novel—really a universe—that you spent years building?

A carbon copy is absolutely not the right way of doing an adaptation. I’m hoping they’ll make big changes. I said, “Think of this as a relay race, and I’m handing you the baton.”

Your novel investigates the menagerie of roles we take on in our daily lives. What is it like to watch that existential question physically performed?

With most of my books, my reference points are other works of fiction. With Audition, it was films: David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock. Lulu Wang is directing—she has an incredible intuition for pushing against the culture’s expectations of an actor. Think about casting Awkwafina in The Farewell—she changed the public’s sense of what she could do. She cast Lucy Liu as the lead, who has such an iconic quality to her. I’m excited to see how her cultural resonance transmutes onto the screen and into the story.

You’ve written about translation and interpretation—does adaptation function as a mode of translation?

It does. I’m not interested in complete authorial control at all, particularly not with Audition, which is a book that’s very open to the reader’s interpretation. To give free rein to artists I respect feels very true to the spirit of the book.

“The trick to writing a novel is finding a world, premise, character, and voice that you want to live with for several years.” —Katie Kitamura

These days, are more novelists writing with adaptations in mind?

It would be naïve to say that’s not happening. Novels are incredibly porous; they’re open to the influences of mass culture.

If you could see a screenplay from any novelist, living or dead, who would it be?

I heard something heartbreaking recently: In the final years of his life, Denis Johnson was doing rewrites for HBO. I would love to know what that looked like, to have a bit more Johnson to read.

Books and films by women are often immediately labeled feminist, regardless of whether the art is intended politically. Do you hear your work described that way?

The trick to writing a novel is finding a world, premise, character, and voice that you want to live with for several years. I’ve become more interested in my writing since I started writing about female experience; it’s striking that so much is still underexplored there.

In my novel, the character is 49. Even though the words “menopause” and “perimenopause” do not appear a lot of people have asked me if I consider it a menopause novel in the genre of Miranda July’s All Fours. The notion that you could still, in 2024, pioneer a new genre is fascinating. Meanwhile, the male midlife crisis novel has moved from canon to trope. So the category feels potentially restricting, but also very clarifying. It shows you where the gaps are.

Samantha Leach, The Elissas

The cultural critic, reporter, and editor at Bustle has spent much of her career in entertainment journalism. Her debut book, The Elissas, is both a memoir and a journalistic account of an American tragedy that investigates the troubled teen industry through the stories of three young women who met at one of its institutions and all ended up dead within a decade. It is being adapted by Lena Dunham for Netflix.

You wrote a nonfiction book, but it’s being adapted as a fictional show. Tell me about that pivot.

It’s a personal book with a lot of heavy themes. When I was writing the book, people in their lives—friends, family members, former teachers—were extremely generous in speaking to me. I was eager for it to reach new audiences, but I didn’t want to put anybody through that again.

But even a fiction version could have been done in classic true-crime style, or intrepid-journalist-on-a-mission style. How did you land on your more complex storytelling approach?

There’s a real boom in adaptations about women looking back on fraught times in their lives. The longer we worked on it, the more Lena started pushing against that. If it were a really faithful adaptation, I would have had more anxieties about how we were depicting these women. I interviewed Patrick Radden Keefe after he adapted Say Nothing—he said he was essentially fact-checking the script. If this had been a more traditional adaptation, I would have felt compelled to do that.

Is the intensified pace of option deals changing how people think about the life cycles of their books? Do Hollywood’s ideas around genre influence the literary world’s?

The days of hyper-preciousness are gone. There are so few ways for writers to make money now. The fantasy used to be to get a book published, but the massive onslaught of adaptations has probably moved the goalposts. One of the first things people ask when a book comes out is: “Is it getting optioned?” I’m sure when there was more money in traditional publishing, it was: “Where are you going on book tour?” But in terms of packaging, whether it’s “true crime” or “girl remembering her trauma,” subgenres can help us find form. [Lisa Taddeo’s] Three Women really opened a portal for how this book could be arranged.

“The fantasy used to be to get a book published, but the massive onslaught of adaptations has probably moved the goalposts.” —Samantha Leach

Your writing highlights the tension between individuality and collectivity in adolescent friendships, which can inspire both solidarity and self-harm. Are you worried about that balance translating on screen?

I expected to have a lot of fears around that, but I’m spoiled because it’s Lena. There is no one whose writing has been more influential to me in terms of craft and, quite literally, how I see the world. When she texts me about the adaptation, my first thought is always, Wow, that’s a great idea, and my second thought is, I’m texting with Lena Dunham, and she’s calling me baby angel.

The troubled teen industry has almost become a trend in TV—there was Paris Hilton’s documentary, then Mae Martin’s show, and a shoutout in All’s Fair. Is that attention yielding activism?

It’s been really helpful. Before Paris came forward, nobody knew what the troubled teen industry even was. Now, so many violent institutions have closed.

What are you sick of seeing lately, in bookstores and on screens?

Divorce books. Miranda July really did that, and now I’m a bit tired of it. I categorically don’t want an adaptation of All Fours, despite having loved the book. I always say, “Some things are tweets, some things are articles.” When it comes to adaptations in general, I think some things are books, some things are movies. Not everything lends itself to the screen. If you’re going to adapt, be willing to make a different thing entirely. I bet Miranda July will make an amazing movie out of All Fours and I’ll eat my words.

Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein

A Brit turned New Yorker, Mellors pens polyphonic odes to the city she’s chosen to call home. The author’s bestselling novels, Blue Sisters and Cleopatra and Frankenstein, are both being adapted for the screen—the first is in talks, the second by the novelist herself.

Both of your novels are being adapted. Did you always envision these stories on screen?

Cleopatra and Frankenstein was rejected by so many publishers that it was a miracle that it even became a novel. Thinking about an adaptation would have been like thinking about grad school before finishing high school. So when it went out to be optioned, I was prepared to face a lot of nos. But there was actually such an appetite to adapt that book. I remember saying to myself, Fuck, should I have been a screenwriter?

Multiple reviews call your prose “cinematic.” Were your references during the writing process filmic?

For better or for worse, I learned more about plot from television than I did from reading. When I’m reading, I’m trying to learn how to write a better sentence; I only read books I think are very strong on the language front.

The first review I got for Cleopatra and Frankenstein was negative—I was accused of writing a book engineered for television. I remember thinking, right, I worked on this book for free every evening and weekend for five years. Then I sold it for remarkably little money. Then I waited two years for it to be published. It was a seven-year con to get a TV deal.

“For better or for worse, I learned more about plot from television than I did from reading.” —Coco Mellors

Has the adaptation process felt different with your second novel?

I’m not going to write this one. I was so involved in the process with Cleopatra and Frankenstein, but with Blue Sisters, my feeling was, if I’m going to put my time and energy somewhere, I want it to be something I know is happening and that I have a lot of creative control over—another novel. Taylor Jenkins Reid once said that her books are her children, and having them adapted is like being a grandparent: You get to show up for the fun stuff without the daily rigmarole of raising the child. I have a literal child and the book I’m currently writing, so I want to pop in for a cheeky meeting now and then and let them take care of the rest.

Can you tell me the conceit of your new novel?

It’s about motherhood and the years before becoming a mother. That period of ambivalence—of longing for and fearing something when you don’t know what that thing is. I felt like that period hasn’t been given its due.

People complain about the increasing market demands that books and films be part of a niche microgenre. Do those paradigms actually impact writers, or just happen on the publicity end?

For me, there’s a separation between writer and author that is quite stark. As the writer, I don’t think about the outside world. When the book comes out, I’m an author. When my agent and I were thinking of how to pitch Blue Sisters to editors, I said, “It’s Little Women meets The Royal Tenenbaums.” I never think that way when I’m writing, but I understand the utility. It’s temporal: Once I’m in author mode, I want to make sure the right reader can find it.

I come from a fashion and marketing background, so I don’t dislike the publicity gamesmanship; I find it quite satisfying. I understand that book covers need to look good on social media or carried like a little clutch.

Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho

The Spanish novelist’s work centers on women unraveling. Her debut, Mrs. March, followed an Upper East Side housewife through a series of paranoid spirals, and her second novel, Victorian Psycho, is a governess-gone-wild tale, both a work of gothic horror and a spry satire of the genre. She adapted the book, set for release with Bleecker Street this year.

In a world of Marvel Cinematic Universes, does adapting a literary novel feel like attempting to throw a wrench into the IP machine?

I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to IP the hell out of the work, so to speak, but I would like, just once, to write a movie on my own and see if it’s an absolute fucking disaster.

How does the process compare to your fiction practice?

It’s like learning another language. I’m used to writing books by myself in a room. This sounds obvious, but every single line you write, you will later see performed on screen. The visual metaphors, the way the actors are positioned, what you’re conveying about the power dynamics between characters, all of that is communicated in a completely different way. With books, I feel free to break rules, but with scripts, I get the sense that I’m supposed to have studied this shit.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to IP the hell out of the work, so to speak, but I would like, just once, to write a movie on my own and see if it’s an absolute fucking disaster.” —Virginia Feito

Both forms are being broken down into marketing silos lately—tags like “dark academia” and “weird girl fiction.” Is that changing how people write?

I come from advertising, so to an extent, I’m like, Whatever we need to do to read the market. Sometimes it’s weird—and sometimes funny—where a book is positioned in a bookstore. I feel prouder in certain cases than others. I think the BookTok stuff is kind of sweet—we’re specifying and sub-specifying until we dig so deep we reach the center of the Earth. If you’re making good shit, I don’t care what you want to call it.

Horror is a trope-heavy genre—are you aiming to subvert or embrace those? Or both?

This film has been branded as horror—fair enough. But I wonder if there’s a bit more to it than that. There’s other weird stuff, too. You couldn’t do Victorian Psycho without all the… psychosis, but it also wouldn’t be Victorian Psycho without the humor. I love horror movies that do all the tropes, and I love horror movies that are described as “elevated,” which is now its own genre. I don’t know what’s original anymore; we’re all copying someone else, which is the only way to make art.

What do you think the literary landscape is missing right now? What is it oversaturated with?

Too much body horror—cinematically and literarily, especially after The Substance. Undersaturated: international writing. Translation is on the up, but it’s historically under-celebrated.

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The perfect tome can change one’s understanding of an artistic movement, deepen appreciation for a specific medium, or force a reexamination of representation at-large. To guide a novice on the hunt for age-old wisdom, we asked 10 collectors for the book that changed how they think about the pieces that surround them.

For some, the shift was subtle—a new way of describing presence or intention (that’s Ways of Seeing for Matthew Harris). For others, it was foundational, reframing how they see value, legacy, and even their own role as collectors (that’s Seven Days in the Art World for Paola Creixell). In a world that often prioritizes what’s hanging on the wall, these selections remind us that what’s on the bookshelf can be just as transformative. Now, you’re only a library trip—or a bookstore visit—away from discovering a fresh outlook on the art world’s complexities.

Brandon John Harrington

“It’s a book about theater, but Peter Brook’s The Empty Space redefined my approach to visual art. His concept of ‘holy theatre’— a performance stripped of artifice to create a genuine, palpable connection—taught me to hunt for that same ‘liveness’ in static objects. I began looking past just technique or subject matter to find works that possess a powerful presence. Brook gave me a new vocabulary for the art I was searching for: objects that can command a room and create an intimate, undeniable encounter with the viewer.”

Francis J. Greenburger

“Off the Wall by Calvin Tomkins. It was an early introduction to the 1960s art scene, and helped me shape my views in the 1980s.”

George Galbreath

“Several books from my time at Howard University still shape how we think about art and collecting, particularly within the African American community. One such book is African-American Art by Sharon E. Patton. However, the most influential has been The Galbreath Collection: A Decade of Collecting Atlanta. Creating that book was an act of love, and it gave us the perspective to recognize ourselves as stewards as well as collectors.”

Everett Long

“The exhibition book from the Met’s ‘The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism‘ show was the first exhibition guide that I read from cover to cover. After that, I changed the way I think about art, because I changed the way I learn about art. I started going deeper. When I saw the show for the second time I enjoyed it exponentially more. Now, I always have an exhibition book that I’m reading and eventually finish from cover to cover. Right now, I’m almost done with Rashid Johnson’s A Poem For Deep Thinkers.”

Robert Balentine

“I’m reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci, and finding myself fascinated by the way da Vinci blended mathematics and art—the Fibonacci sequence, the golden mean—to create beauty rooted in structure. As someone who has spent a career in investing, that marriage of numbers and creativity really resonates with me.”

Matthew Harris

“John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. It shifted my perspective on how context, power, and presentation shape the way we value and interpret art. It’s a book that stays with you and quietly rewires your gaze.”

Paola Creixell

“Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton significantly changed the way I think about art—not just as a creative practice, but as a complex, interconnected ecosystem. The book offers a behind-the-scenes look at the global art world by chronicling seven distinct settings: an auction, a crit, an art fair, a magazine editorial meeting, a studio visit, a biennale, and the awarding of a major art prize. This book demystified the system for me and made clear that art isn’t just about creation and aesthetics—it’s also about networks, reputation, economics, and cultural capital.”

Pamela Joyner

“Brooke Astor’s autobiography Footprints. It is a road map for how to build a life that involves transformational philanthropy.”

Belma Gaudio

“I really enjoyed reading Linda Nochlin’s essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,’ where she dismantles the myth that greatness in art is purely about individual genius, and instead explains the institutional, social, and educational barriers that kept women from having the same opportunities as men. It’s not that women lacked talent or ambition, but it’s the systems and institutions that excluded them. It shifted how I look at both contemporary and historical art. It made me pay attention to whose work was overlooked, is missing from museum walls, whose voices are being heard, and who is pushing against those barriers today. Our collection, as a result, has become very heavily skewed toward female artists—but not because I was trying to hit a quota; it just so happens that a lot of the work we loved over the last years has been painted by women.”

Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka

Harris: “Any of the books by Andy Goldsworthy. His ability to make lines, fences, perimeters, and art based on using only found artifacts within a location is unprecedented. I was so inspired by his creativity and still hold his aesthetic to a standard like no other.”

Burtka: “I recently finished the Peter Beard biography, and the way he collected and collaged was so incredible. He wasn’t really known and no one believed that he was an artist at all, then he ended up becoming one of the biggest photographers of our time with collage. What he did with animal blood, skins, teeth, and his own hair was pretty incredible.”

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If the Winter Olympic torchbearers are any indication, 2026 is the year of male yearning—specifically queer male yearning. Smutty, shirtless men are all over our screens and our bookshelves from Heated Rivalry to season four of Bridgerton and the kinky gay biker film Pillion. It’s been a long time coming. In 2023, Circana BookScan, which tracks book sales across the country, found that LGBT fiction purchases were at an all-time high, over 6.1 million books moved within the year, and there was a 173 percent surge since pre-pandemic levels. Whether they’re facing off on the ice or clinging to each other on motorcycles, the pattern is clear: We can’t get enough stories about wanting—especially when that wanting is delayed, misread, and, well, sexy.

With MLM romance taking over, it feels appropriate to turn to the writers who paved the way—and to André Aciman, whose work has long defined the modern queer romance canon. The author of Call Me by Your Name and last year’s Room on the Sea understands hesitation and desire—and their power—both personally and in literature. Who better to get queer love story book recommendations from than Aciman himself? The writer and professor of comparative literature at CUNY’s graduate center shares the classic novels he keeps coming back to, his favorite teacher/student romance, and why Wuthering Heights will always be famous.

What book should someone read if they want to get to know you?

First of all, it is doubtful that they want to get to know me, but whatever. Let us say that there are many books that I have read. This is all I’ve done in my life, really—either read books or attempted to write them. And most of my life was spent trying to read them. I like novels that have to deal with hesitation. Not the characters who go and move and do things, but those who reflect and sometimes are impeded from doing anything because they’re reflecting too much.

That has been my credo—or, if you want, my inhibition. I am, by nature, a very shy, inhibited human being. So that makes me who I am. The author of a book like Call Me by Your Name is, in fact, a very inhibited, deferential, timid, hesitant human being who is reluctant to engage with anything because he’s going to change his mind the next day. And that has been my forte. That is my signature on everything.

If I had to pick one author who influenced me a great deal—and who represents many facets of my personality—it would be Marcel Proust. Everybody knows this because I’ve been talking about him ad infinitum, and enough is enough. I teach a course on him. Essentially everything he does is wrong, or he’s bungling, or he’s facing difficulties he never foresaw. And he loves his mommy—which is not exactly a strong point. I loved my mommy, but not as much as he did. But: hesitation, deference, a desire to put obstacles because you’re afraid of what action does—that is me. That is definitely me. And that’s why I created a character like Elio, because he is exactly like me. A character like Oliver is the exact opposite of who I am.

Do you think that tension between opposites is at the heart of romance for you?

Put it this way: the relationships I’ve had in my life, I don’t remember them. Those that I never had and wished I had—those are still with me 40, 50 years later. They continue to nag me because I haven’t done something I should have done decades ago, and I was never able to—or I was afraid to—whatever the reason. In essence, I am a person who goes after people. But those I have never been bold enough to go after remain forever on my list of things that I should have done. So I am both: the person who does things, and the person who hesitates and fears and deliberates far too much.

What’s a book you turn to when you’re looking for inspiration—both in your writing and in life?

I am a re-reader. There are books I’ve re-read many times. One is Wuthering Heights. Another is Crime and Punishment, which influenced me significantly. I thought human beings were one way: either you accomplish things and aim for things, or you bungle and do nothing. Then Dostoevsky proved to me—thank God I discovered him early; I was 14—that you are both: shy, spiteful, cruel, envious, and also extremely kind and deferential. At the same time, you hate people because you don’t want to like them. This confluence of contradictions—I said, “Oh my God, that’s me. I don’t have to be one way or the other. I can be everything.”

It’s interesting you bring up Wuthering Heights since it’s been adapted into a film—people are re-engaging with the text. I think right now there’s broader interest in romance, historic and contemporary. 

With Wuthering Heights, every few years it seems there’s a new movie. Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and Henry James: These are novels that keep coming back. These are stories that don’t disappear. I don’t approve of all the movies—some are trashy and misinterpret—but that’s fine. The fact is that we want them.

Was there a particularly formative book for your ideas about desire and sensuality?

Yes. I’ll give you an example of one that nobody reads because it disappeared: It’s called Olivia. I wrote a preface for it because I couldn’t stand that Penguin—who published it initially—made it disappear, so they reissued it. Olivia is a novel about the love between a woman and a girl. It’s extremely powerful. Of course, it aroused me in many ways—but it couldn’t arouse me because it wasn’t exactly sexual. Still, it got into me, and I never let it go. In fact, a lot of Call Me by Your Name is attributable to Olivia. The author was Dorothy Bussy—she wrote it under a pen name at first—but it’s a small, short novel that should have been very famous and never was.

What was it about that book that resonated with you?

It’s the fact that this girl wants to sleep with her teacher, and the teacher says, “This is wrong. I know what you want. I want it too. But we cannot do that.” That kind of language means it’s put on hold forever. And I love that. I used it—copied it, pilfered it—in Call Me by Your Name because I love the fact that somebody tells you, “This is wrong. We both want it, but we cannot.” The fact that it gets said—and understood—and cannot go through is an amazing moment in life.

That’s something it shares with Wuthering Heights: transgression. With a lot of queer literature, it’s often about repressed desire and yearning. When it comes to queer literature, what do you see as the through lines? What qualities unite that canon?

It’s not limited to queer literature. Most of us are inhibited. We can be free: We take all kinds of drugs and drinks, whatever—and that frees us for a while. But in essence, we are repressed human beings. 

With gay literature, it tends to have two ways to go: one, somebody gets killed—which is awful. Or two, they decide to live together and become domestic. I like to say: I don’t like to write about people who, on Sunday afternoons, do the laundry and fold the sheets. I don’t want to go there. I would much rather stay with “let’s have sex.” I’m much more interested in: What did he mean when he said this? Did I mistake it? There’s always innuendo, and I love innuendo. That’s my forte.

What can reading—romantic literature, specifically—do for us when we’re working out these feelings?

It does two things. It teaches you what other people have done—and you might want to do it. It outlines possibilities. And it also allows you to investigate what it is that you want, what you understand, what you thought you understood. Many of the people who loved Call Me by Your Name did not love it because it reflected exactly what they experienced. They loved it because it reflected what they wanted—what they hoped they might encounter in life.

You live it, you borrow their lust and their love, and at the same time it’s safe. It’s nice to feel that something given to you on paper or on screen is something you want in your own life. Are you going to find it in real life? That’s another question.

Are there any underrated novelists you wish more people read?

There are many great novels. For example, a book like Oblomov [by Ivan Goncharov]. Nobody reads it unless you’re a Russian major, or you’re wide-ranging and want to explore. It’s about a character who is timid and lazy, and it goes on for hundreds of pages. He’s constantly wrong about everything, yet you feel sorry for him. I’ve read it three times, and three times I’ve cried. It’s the saddest book I’ve ever read. You tell yourself, “This time I’m not going to cry.” But you still cry.

And many British actors who retire—they tend to write very well. Dirk Bogarde, for example, wrote beautiful novels. Alec Guinness—beautiful writing. And Alan Hollinghurst is a fantastic writer.

Who deserves a biography or a novel about them that doesn’t have one?

A figure like Louis Armstrong. He led a complicated, rich life. You’re amazed at the number of things he could say—the scattered thoughts you think couldn’t go into a book, but they do. People assume he’s limited to trumpet-playing. He’s not. That’s what I look for. 

To round out these interviews, we usually ask for four or five book recommendations—anything that reflects you, your sensibilities, and your taste.

I went and did a list of all the books I’ve read in the past three years. One: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who wrote The Leopard, is probably the greatest writer of Italian literature in the 20th century. There’s no question. I love his work. I also love Elsa Morante. I’m not a big fan of Elena Ferrante.

Can I ask why?

It’s not profound enough. I read two novels and the first volume of the tetralogy—that was enough. I get the idea. It’s not for me. A book I had never read because it seemed too big: Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. It is a fantastic work of art. A piece of genius. And another in the same company: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Another book I discovered is Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Somebody forced me to read it. I spent a whole month reading it. I said to myself: “Thank God I lived long enough to have read this book.” 

But, my favorite book of all is The Peloponnesian War. It shows you how stupid mankind can be—and how people die in war when they shouldn’t. You’re taught a lesson. And another book I love: Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. When I’m biking—which I do in Central Park all the time—I listen to books. It’s fantastic.

Andre Aciman’s Required Reading

1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, 1847 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
3. Olivia by Dorothy Bussy, 1949 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
4. Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov, 1859 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
5. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
6. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, 1982 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
7. History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, late 5th century BC (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
8. The Power Broker by Robert Caro, 1974 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

After seven years, Gus Van Sant has returned to feature filmmaking. The prompt that got him back behind the camera: We’re going to your hometown in Kentucky to shoot a hold up. We leave next week. 

Dead Man’s Wire sees Bill Skarsgård and Dacre Montgomery reenact a 1977 case in which Tony Kiritsis took mortgage broker Richard O. Hall hostage on account of his alleged exploitation of the working man—chiefly, Kiritsis himself. The project, released in theaters earlier this month, falls into Van Sant’s long lineage of broke boys, local crime, and working class antiheroes. His source material for these stories ranges from Shakespeare plays to the Columbine school shooting. 

He’s a creative known for both frequenting and fostering a downtown scene that, in the ’80s, included regular dinners with William S. Burroughs; in the ’90s, music videos with Allen Ginsberg; and over the years, collaborations with three Phoenixes, two Skarsgårds, and too many street castings to count. 

When he calls from Los Angeles, characteristically donning a plaid button down and reclining with the confidence of an interviewee who knows he’s been making these calls longer than I’ve been alive, the director takes me through these myriad inspirations and crossed paths, and recommends a few texts that set his own winding career on its course.

You were sent the script for Dead Man’s Wire. Was that the first that you learned about Tony’s story?

I didn’t know about the story. The biggest thing about [the project] was that Cassian Elwes, the producer, needed a director right away and actors because he had secured an incentive from Louisville, Kentucky. I was born in Louisville and my family is from Kentucky, and we had to do it right away. That was interesting, that we needed to literally leave the next week. Then I read the script and it was an amazing script.

So you just grab Bill, head to set. How did he come into the project if it was all moving pretty fast? 

He was a person that I thought of because I had seen a number of his films and thought that he would be really good for this role. And I thought, as a counterpoint, that Dacre Montgomery would be good. Cassian, his reaction was that it was gonna be harder if we use those guys—they were well known, but they weren’t super well known. But he also saw the value in their talents, so he allowed me to have them.

It’s a funny thing to say about Bill Skarsgård. Particularly young people, love him for all of these just strange, oddball characters that he’s played.

Exactly what I thought. And I had directed his dad [Stellan Skarsgård] in Good Will Hunting, so I felt I knew the family a little bit.

On set, were you like, “Your dad used to do this just the same way”? 

He wanted to know whether his dad invited me over for dinner, which he didn’t. I’m not sure why. He was surprised that he didn’t. He’s like, “You’re kidding, cause Dad cooks for everybody all the time.” But we didn’t talk necessarily about process. I did, when I first was talking to him, say that Stellan would really go for almost any idea. If you had an idea of something that he could do in a scene, he would always try it. He would never shy away. All the other actors on that movie, or in general on all the movies, there’s usually a hesitation. Would that work? Would that make me look bad? It wasn’t in his mind.

Either now or when you were younger, do you find yourself gravitating towards books about filmmaking, referencing what other directors or other filmmakers have done? Or do you like to pull from outside sources, read about other kinds of creatives?

When I started out, or before I was even making long-form films, I was reading Hitchcock/Truffaut, in which Hitchcock and Truffaut talk about every film that Hitchcock had made, so there’s like 40 films in it. There’s a great book about the making of a John Huston film called Picture. I would pretty much read whatever I could find when I was in my 20s and 30s, and eventually, I started to rely more on what I was seeing rather than things that have been made in the past. The style of filmmaking had been upended by MTV. Oliver Stone grabbed onto the MTV video style, mixing 8mm with 35 and handheld with tripod stuff and just throwing everything into a blender. From there, just stuff that’s happening online, all the different TV shows or something like TikTok. The filmmakers don’t know any rules, so they’re just creating new forms. Those are the types of things that I find interesting now because it’s working its way into the quote unquote film culture, and it’s things that seem worthy of use.

I wanted to ask you about your work with William S. Burroughs and what that collaboration meant to you. Could you see yourself getting into work like that with a contemporary author?

Well, he played a character in Drugstore Cowboy, and I did a video called Thanksgiving Prayer. I did one with Ginsberg called Ballad of the Skeletons, and aside from those things, I just knew them socially. Burroughs lived in Kansas and I drove across the country a lot, so I would stop in Kansas. It was a good place to stop and then usually have dinner or hang out a little bit. I found out much later, almost the last time I saw him, that I reminded him of a friend of his in the ’30s. I realized I had this whole other existence for him that I didn’t know about. I know what he means, like sometimes you meet somebody that reminds you very much of somebody else that you knew really well. My original thing was doing a short film, The Discipline of D.E., which was from a short story that he had done. Other than that, I always toyed with the idea of doing something for Naked Lunch and maybe someday I could.

Did you see the Queer adaptation from Luca Guadagnino? 

That was interesting. I don’t think it’s in the film, but [Burroughs] did say something about that particular book, which was basically about the accidental shooting of his wife when they were playing this William Tell. She would put something on her head and he would shoot it off of her head, and he missed. He had claimed that the day before that happened, they were living in Mexico and he was in the town that they were living in, and with no warning, he just burst into tears for no reason. So he said, “If that ever happens to you, watch out,” because the next thing that happened was he shot his wife. He had this whole thing about being forewarned in a way.

I feel like that would freak me out for the rest of my life if I ever spontaneously burst into tears. How does your reading practice fit into your life now? Do you gravitate towards fiction, nonfiction?

I’m usually reading biographies. Right now I’m reading one about Edward Gorey. Looking at my bookcase right now, there’s one of Derek Jarman. I can see Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. There’s a John Waters book called Director’s Cut. Tennessee Williams, I’m reading a lot of his short stories and plays. Should I get my books out?

Yes, please! Do you have a book list on your laptop?

They’re just the actual books, my iBooks. One that I liked a lot was Stan and Gus about Stanford White and the sculptor that he worked with named Gus. They made a lot of things, turn of the century things, together. William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade, is a good movie book. 

One question we like to ask is if there’s one book someone should read if they want to get to know you.

Well, there’s a book by Katya Tylevich. She wrote a book about me. So you probably need that.

You know, a lot of people can’t say that. 

Gus Van Sant’s Required Reading

Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey, 1964
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

“That’s a very sprawling novel about a Northwest logging family. A kind of old-fashioned Thomas Wolfe kind of book. It’s about America, it’s about family, family difficulties, unions. It’s a great book that I have around that I sometimes just like to read sections of it.”

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, 1959
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

“It’s a good one. Also one of those types of books.”

Ulysses by James Joyce, 1922
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

“I might go back to that.”

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