It started with a story Elizabeth Strout caught in passing in a garden. Someone’s father had been out on the water off the coast of Massachusetts and saw a man’s head bobbing above the surface. They pulled him out, took him to shore, “and that was all I heard,” she explains. “I could not get that image out of my head. I kept thinking, What was he doing in the water?” Her latest book, The Things We Never Say, offers an answer.  

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name Is Lucy Barton follows high school history teacher Artie Dam through a small New England town and out into the Massachusetts Bay as long-hidden secrets threaten to upend his quiet life. Ahead of the novel’s release this May, Strout, now 70, shared why each of her explorations of loneliness and longing reads more liberated than the last. 

To start, what’s your writing process like?

For years, I learned to write in scenes because I didn’t have that much time. If I only had two hours every other day, I finally learned, I can’t just go chronologically through because I will write wooden stuff. I would get a sketch or a scene with what I used to call a “heartbeat.” If it had a “heartbeat,” it stayed. If it didn’t, it would go on the floor. I rewrite all the time. I have no problem getting rid of stuff—it makes me happy to get rid of it. A good day for me is to realize what I wrote yesterday is bad. Like, I’m so glad I figured that out.  

When you say you only had a couple hours to write, was that while you were working other jobs? 

Yes, I was teaching at Manhattan Community College for 13 years. I loved it, actually. It gave me a perspective to be able to write from the teacher’s point of view. Most of the students had gone through the public school systems of New York. They told me horror stories about teachers that would just get up and leave the room. They had really struggled and were often the first person in their family to get beyond high school. I have no idea if I made an impression on them or not. I hope I did.  

I was teaching literature and I would be so excited about whatever I was teaching. I do remember a few years after one class, I bumped into one of my students on the subway platform and she goes, “Professor Liz, look what I just bought.” She had bought a collection of Raymond Carver’s short stories. I thought, Thank you.

You open the book with a Carl Jung quote: “Loneliness does not come from having no people but one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” Do you have literature you go to when you’re thinking about themes like loneliness and isolation?

I don’t usually do that at the beginning of a book, but I had been reading a biography of Carl Jung, and I find him interesting. I found it and I thought, This is what I will say at the beginning of the book.

I used to read absolutely everything that rolled off the press. A number of years ago, I started to go back to the classics and reread them and take such comfort in them—the Russians and people like that. I do like biographies if they’re well written. It’s nice to read something very different than what you’re writing. John Cheever’s journals, which had been very important to me when I was younger, I started to reread those recently. Tolstoy and Turgenev and Pushkin, I just find comfort in them, [as well as] George Eliot. For years I kept rereading Virginia Woolf, and then I realized, I don’t think I need to reread that again. That last one was just like the extra cookie that you go, I wish I hadn’t had that. I just overdid it.

You have a few things here that you keep coming back to in your own work, whether it’s this New England setting, the idea of how much you know the people around you, how much they’re able to penetrate who you are. How do you see those ideas developing over the course of your work?

When I’m writing, I’m very character driven and I’m always trying to get inside the character’s head as much as I can, to present it to the reader. I’m always thinking of the reader and the character at the same time. What does the reader need to be able to understand what it is I’m trying to say about the character? I’ve begun to realize over the years, I do seem to have a thematic [thing] going on. One of the reasons I’m character-driven is because I just find people so fascinating. What I’m really interested in, I’ve finally been able to articulate in the last few years. Our inner lives bump up against the outer world, and by outer world I mean any other person. What is our relationship with our inner selves and the outside world? This one really pushes it to an extreme.

Is it strange to go back and read or look at old work and have that realization about what you were doing? 

I don’t usually reread my work, but a couple of years ago, I was sitting and I could see Amy and Isabelle over in the corner, and I thought, Do I dare? I picked it up and I thought, Okay, it stands up. I don’t need to be embarrassed. I don’t really reread my work that much, but it seems to be imprinted in me. I practically could have recited Amy and Isabelle by heart, even though I wrote it so many years ago.

But yes, I have begun to understand that what my role as a writer is, is to get from the character’s head into your head and to try and just break down the barriers for a moment so that hopefully the reader doesn’t feel so alone. They can recognize themselves or recognize their neighbor for even just a few moments, just have a more transcendent view of life, just briefly.

I did wonder when reading this book if you thought about how it was going to sit with the reader, or the kind of experience you wanted a reader to have of this very, in some parts, dark internal experience that Artie is going through. 

I don’t ever want to write a book that distresses people, but I want to write a book that’s honest, as honest as I can make it. Artie, he’s just a 57-year-old high school teacher who’s sort of schlubby.

There is that experience of reading something dark and finding it kind of comforting, to have that externalized.

I have gotten some feedback like that from readers, which is helpful because I don’t think I’m a depressing writer. When I’m on the road with a book, to have readers say that they actually take great comfort from my work, I’m so glad to hear that. It’s not that I’m writing to comfort them, but I’m hoping that the connection itself will somehow bring some sort of comfort.

Just walking up the stairs this morning, I was thinking about Tolstoy and one of his pieces. He writes sad stuff, yet I always feel comforted by him. Also the writer William Trevor. He was an Irish writer, he passed away a few years ago, probably more than a few now, but I guess time goes fast at my age. He would write stories that were so sad, yet I loved them. It was like being surrounded by a blanket and a cup of hot chocolate to read these incredibly sad stories, and I realized it’s because of his perception of them. He wasn’t trying to depress you, he was just trying to say, “Here’s the story of a man in Western Ireland who had to go back and take care of his mother and was never able to leave the town.” Well, that’s true, there are people like that. He was just lovely like that, just absolutely lovely.

In this book, you’re talking about the pandemic, the election, there’s a political undertone. Do you feel at this stage in your career that there’s new things you’re able to tackle, or ways that you’re able to push yourself as a writer? What do you feel like you’re working on at this stage?

I’m just continuing to try and write as honestly as I can for an ideal reader, and the older I get, the more experiences I get. One of the benefits of being older is that you don’t, in the right way, care as much. There’s a freedom. I can push myself in different directions. I can’t tell you specifically what those directions are, but I just have the sense that, I can do this.

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One of the most recognizable sounds on the Internet these days is Caleb Hearon’s laugh. Boisterous, plentiful, pure: the comedian laughs heartily with guests on his podcast, So True; with his audience throughout his debut HBO comedy special, last year’s Model Comedian; and most regularly, at himself. It’s so distinct a sound that, when I conducted an at-home Zoom interview with Hearon for this column, my roommates took the opportunity to point out how its recognizable, melodic quality had seeped through all the walls.

The Missouri native, 31, came up by way of Chicago’s comedy scene and, as is now the standard, a few well-timed social posts. These days, you’re most likely to recognize the sound I speak of from So True, which he launched in 2022. It’s a TikTok clip generating machine that brings audiences face-to-face with Hearon’s seemingly endless trove of hilarious personal anecdotes and total lack of self-seriousness. (Among the hits are Hearon responding to an online troll, “I’ll kill you to death with a gun,” as well as a piss-your-pants inducing story about trying to leech popularity off a boy in school. “Cooper, why do you smell like ballsack, sleep pants kid?”)

For the last five or so years, he’s also been circling a transition into film and TV, starting with a writing job on a Big Mouth spinoff and bit parts in series like Mr. & Mrs. Smith. It’s all paying off this year, as Hearon takes on more high-profile parts in projects like the much-anticipated Devil Wears Prada 2 and now-viral, Gaten Matarazzo-led Pizza Movie. Ahead of the release of the former on May 1, we sat down with the comedian for a look at what life is like when the screens are all shut down, be they silver or pocket-sized. It turns out, his irreverent point of view is fed by a steady diet of pretty heavy duty reading. 

Caleb, where do I find you?

I’m at my apartment. I just cooked a pretty perfect steak, so I’m not gonna brag.

Oh, amazing, and at 1 p.m. That’s a real accomplishment.

I know, in the middle of the day, can you believe it? 

I’m excited to talk to you about your reading habits, especially because you are a digital native. I don’t know if you feel like everyone around you is reading or if that’s kind of a lost art amongst Internet comedian circles.

It’s funny because the comedians that I know that have big followings on the Internet, most of them started in the real world, on stage or at theaters. Most of them are way more cultured than they get credit for. They’re reading a lot of books, they’re going to the theater, they’re really out there doing stuff. 

But also, in the last two years, I’ve had a lot of friends that are like, “I haven’t read a book since I was in high school,” that have started to be like, “I’m reading again.” I think it’s part of the larger disillusionment with the Internet and digital stuff. I know so many readers that I wonder if I’m reading enough. Micah, the woman who works at the bookstore that I go into a lot, who I adore, at Greenlight in Brooklyn, she’s trying to push me more into fiction all the time cause I’m such a nonfiction guy. 

I have heard this about you. Is it a lifelong dislike of fiction? Is it a recent phenomenon? How did this happen?

“Dislike,” you’re gonna get me in trouble. No dislike. I just really love nonfiction. When I’m reading, I want to be learning something. It’s not that we don’t have plenty to learn from fiction—we certainly do. I just read a nonfiction book and I feel like I’m learning right now. I just love school and miss school. 

You remember the Scholastic Book Fair when we were kids? My mom sent me in third grade with a blank check, and she was like, “You’re not allowed to spend more than $20 but I want you to write it for the specific amount that your stuff comes out to.” We were so poor and I spent like $150 at the Scholastic Book Fair. Did you ever see those kids’ books that were about a Supreme Court justice or something? I got a bunch of shit like that cause I was like, She can’t get mad at me if it’s educational. Then I came home and she was like, “Get in the car, we’re going back to the school and returning most of this.”

I remember the book fair being the most exciting time of my life. They had things that I had never seen before.

It was posters, pencils, erasers. The children yearn for capitalism. We wanna spend, we wanna be buyers, bad.

So now you’re doing DIY schooling via nonfiction. You’re putting together your own syllabi. Is it books about the industry that you’re in, random topics? 

Certainly not. If you ever see me reading a book about the entertainment industry, feel free to go ahead and shoot me. There’s nothing I can imagine that sounds worse. I’m reading a lot of nonfiction essays, a lot of political books. I’m still trying to work through the dawn of everything. It’s so dense and people much smarter than me have been like, “It’s not that dense.” You’re just smarter than me. I don’t know what to tell you. It feels heavy to me. 

Do you get most of your political learning from books? Are you also reading the news? Are you watching the news, as a lot of people do today, on some social media platform? 

I don’t really watch the news on social media. I just read When the Clock Broke, which was all about the ’90s. That’s a political education in a sense—it’s a picture of how we got here. I’m not reading any current politician’s memoirs or anything like that. I’m a member of the tenant union in Kansas City and they send out a bullhorn blast every once in a while that’ll have readings at the bottom. Other than that, it’s mostly just stuff that people send to me. Friends will send me articles like, “Oh my God, this is so fucked. Look at this,” and then I do, and then we’re both sad. Like, Okay, I guess we did something.

I feel so accomplished for just having read the news these days. It already feels like I’m doing a lot more than the general population.

I fantasize about reading a newspaper in the mornings. There’s some weird thing about my brain that I’m like, You know what I’m gonna do soon? I’m gonna start reading the newspaper every morning. Maybe I will, but it’s kind of like when you go out and buy new running shoes and you’re like, Next week I’m getting into running, and then the running never comes.

Just flick it open. You’ve got the steak.

That’s what I’m saying. You’re sitting here having your morning coffee, flipping through a newspaper. There’s something about it. I hit 30 and I was like, I think I need to be flipping through a newspaper.

Is there one thing you’ve read that you feel really informs your viewpoint?

Recently it’s been When the Clock Broke. Before that, I would say it was All Things Are Too Small, this book of essays that I really adored. I grew up pretty sheltered in rural Missouri, and I went to college and had a pretty large political awakening. I knew a certain amount about U.S. politics just by virtue of being poor, so those things were occurring around me all the time and happening to me, but I would say particularly around race and imperialism, the two most important books I ever read that I recommend to absolutely everybody are—of course, and go ahead and kill me for being the guy who recommends this—A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, and probably even more than that, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. That book doesn’t get the same level of lobbying as People’s History of the United States, but I had no fucking idea. I had absolutely no idea what our prison system was like and how we got here. That book just totally changed my entire viewpoint of our country and our criminal system—I don’t even want to say justice [system]. I think about those books once a week, every week.

You’ve talked about going through this moment of transition in a few interviews—from kind of being well known to being really well known. Have there been books that you’ve read or even interviews with other creatives that inform this more personal moment?

That’s a really good idea. I’m really trying to push myself into new spaces and books, and maybe that would be a place I could go. I certainly will not be reading a celebrity memoir. I do not care. Every celebrity memoir, I’m like, Who gives a fuck? I don’t care how interesting your life is. Especially a comedian celebrity memoir. That being said, when I write mine, let’s get it on the New York Times bestseller list. When I was starting comedy, a bunch of people were recommending comedians’ memoirs to me, and I was like, “What would that possibly tell me about being funny as me right now?”

Is there a book that you turn to when you’re looking for inspiration?

Like every mentally ill person in their 20s, I of course had a moment with The Artist’s Way. It has to be number one for books that just scream cry for help. If you see your friend doing The Artist’s Way, you need to check in. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I got a lot of writing inspiration at a time when I really needed it. There’s an essay, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad by George Orwell, that I read every spring. It’s really, really short, and it’s just basically him talking about how even in authoritarian, dark times, we can still enjoy the blooming of the flowers and the coming of spring. 

Is there a book that you loved as a kid that kind of sticks with you?

The Dollhouse Murders. That one was crazy. What else jumped out to me as a kid? When everyone was doing Harry Potter, I wasn’t doing it. I didn’t read any of those huge fantasy kids’ books.

You’re on the right side of history now with those books.

Yeah, that sucks. Those movies really were, and I assume the books as well, so phenomenal. All my love to her and the black mold situation that she seems to be going through—allegedly, allegedly, allegedly. 

Is there a book that you stopped in the middle and you’re like, I’m not getting to the end. 

Plenty. I have Work Won’t Love You Back. That was a book that my friend recommended to me—drag of the century, by the way. I stopped that one in the middle, not because it was bad. It got pretty granular.

What’s the best book recommendation you’ve ever gotten? Or the worst one…

I think Work Won’t Love You Back is the funniest book recommendation I’ve got. It’s a crazy thing to say to your friend, “You should read this book, Work Won’t Love You Back.” I was enjoying it. I need to finish it. Best book recommendation I’ve ever gotten? I went to the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, and was recommended this book called Heartland by Sarah Smarsh. I just absolutely adored it. I wish a whole bunch more people would read it. That was just recommended to me by the lady working in there. That book Nickel and Dimed. It was written in the fucking early 2000s about how people are struggling to survive on low wage jobs, and 20-something years later, it’s still so, so relevant. To me, that’s just remarkable. I can’t believe how much worse things have gotten. How they’re still the same in many ways.

Is there a book that someone should read if they want to get to know you, that’s you in a book?

I wouldn’t say necessarily this is me in a book, it’s very explicitly not me, but any of Sam Irby‘s books. She’s so funny and fucking brilliant, and she has this mix of genuine intellectual insight and also just crass, disgusting humor. I just really admire her and I feel like she’s done it her way, the whole way.

Have you guys had a chance to connect? Did you get any words of wisdom from her?

I do know Sam. I am cursed by being her friend. It truly is a nightmare. Whatever the opposite of a blessing and a gift is, that’s what it is to be Sam Irby’s friend. [Laughs] We’ve talked about books, we’ve talked about writing books. She’s lovely, and her advice is mostly just like, “I don’t even really know how I did it, good luck.” But she’s phenomenal.

Do you read about yourself online?

I used to read about myself online all the time. It’s almost inescapable when people first start talking about you. It’s very human to seek it out and want to know what’s being said and wanna know basically just, Do they like me? But if you want to maintain your sanity at all, you have to stop. I have, for the most part, stopped. 

I get a lot of calls from friends that are in the public eye, and they say, “Oh my God, people are saying this about me.” I go, “Where did you read it?” They go, “Reddit,” and I go, “Delete that fucking app from your phone, block that website.” Reddit is the scourge of the earth, and if you are somebody who has any kind of public presence, you cannot ever open Reddit.com. That’s definitely where I saw the most upsetting things about myself back when I was still doing that particular self-harm ritual.

Was there a moment where you were like, That’s it. That’s like the last thing. It would also feel crazy if someone’s saying, “This is the funniest, best person I’ve ever seen,” and you have to maintain some objectivity.

It’s all subjective. The funny thing about comedy in particular is the only way to break through is to have a point of view. You have to have something to say about the world that is unique. Words put things together and take things apart, so inherently, by having a point of view, you’ll bring a bunch of people into the fold, but you’ll also exclude a bunch of people. Nobody is ever going to be universally loved. The only person who is living and currently close to it is Dolly Parton. I don’t have any delusions that I’ll be Dolly Parton.

Caleb Hearon’s Required Reading

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, 1980
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, 2010
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, 1994
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, 2018
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)

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A last name can betray a lot. Even for the more anonymous of us, a Google search can reveal everything from idiosyncratic Spotify playlists to that one time you won a prize for archery as a teenager. A first name may signal you know someone, but what succeeds it gives you the shortcut to knowing about them. 

Lila Feinberg, a poet turned playwright who has also worked as a Hollywood screenwriter, started going by Lila Raicek after her marriage to clothing manufacturing exec Douglas Raicek in 2024. The name change, until recently, obscured her connection to her ex-fiancé, the disgraced Amazon Studios founder Roy Price, who was accused of sexual harassment days after the Weinstein story broke in October 2017. (Raicek called off the wedding, which was scheduled for the following month.) 

Now, her first novel, The Plunge, is resurfacing the media maelstrom that engulfed Raicek almost a decade ago, if only for the rough parallel between its logline—a writer picking up the pieces of herself in the aftermath of her fiancé’s very public scandal—and hers.

Raicek’s protagonist, Liv, does not have a last name. When we meet her, she has, in fact, very little. In the wake of her betrothed’s literal downfall—he has died, in the first of many departures from Raicek’s own biography (Price is alive and recently wrote an op-ed for The New York Times)—she’s sought refuge in a garret on the Upper East Side of New York, living out of a suitcase. In the ensuing 300-some pages, we follow Liv into a downward spiral that involves her yoyoing between a former neighbor and the older widow who’s become his disciple, trips to the Hamptons and Italy, and many metaphors about gems. (Damon, the neighbor, is a jeweler.) 

The Plunge’s psychosexual intrigue makes it an apt binge read, but the novel deals in less easily packaged emotional territory: what regaining trust—in oneself and others—looks like after trauma, how cycles of denial and avoidance register in a body, where the fear of feeling numb will lead you. Raicek can veer into the verbose, but punctuates any melodrama with a subtle layer of self-aware humor that coaxes the reader back in willingly. She is at her strongest when reflecting our own voyeurism back at us. We rubber-neck scandal with little attention to the microseisms that follow it, when the people involved have to keep living. Liv is a walking, talking, fucking (lots of fun sex in The Plunge) study in the long shelf-life of pain that’s been made public. 

Last month, I met with Raicek to discuss the experience of writing The Plunge. Perhaps fittingly, our conversation began with a discussion of the novel’s many name changes.

In reading the acknowledgements, I saw that you mentioned a title change. I always love to think about the road not taken. Can you tell me about that decision, and how you ended up with The Plunge as the book’s title?

Art is often an inspiration for my work and how I visualize a world. I was drawn to works that spoke to me as I was writing, and I kept kind of using those titles. Originally, it was Jules Olitski’s painting Burn and Glitter for a long time, and then it was Helen Frankenthaler’s Slice of Red, or A Slice of the Stone Itself. There was Blue Fire for a while, which had come from an [Anna] Akhmatova poem. Then, of course, the harsh reality of the commercial aspect settles in. 

In naming my plays, it’s usually immediate for me. I’ve never actually grappled with a title. This was such an endless road, and I kept retitling and retitling, going back to art and going back to poetry. Then when I finally had a publisher, they were like, “Yeah, I don’t think a Jules Olitski painting is really the one.”

In this endless search, I was reading the diaries of Sylvia Plath, and there was a line that struck me, which ended up being in the epigraph: “This would be the one to finally pull me out of my plunge.” I had never heard the word like that. Of course, in the book, metaphorically, Liv is free-falling, plunging into darkness after she’s had this physical, real-life accident where she’s plunged off a cliff. 

I love how stripped down it is.

There was the line, I think, that the character of Sam says to her: “You’re plunging from one thing into another.” I felt like that was the place I was actually writing from in terms of exploring the character. Even after we’ve gone through something deeply traumatic, how do we lose ourselves even further to get back to ourselves? I thought that was such an interesting word. Of course, now I see it everywhere—her plunging neckline, plunging off a cliff. 

There’s the destructive death drive, but also sex drive, in the impulses of the main character, Liv. Reading it, I thought often about the female characters in literature who are unabashedly destructive. Someone like Chris Kraus in I Love Dick, almost monstrous with desire. Liv has these self-aware illuminations, and then she just continues to do it anyway. How did Liv come to you?

It is a work of fiction, not a memoir. It is a cobbled-together composite of personal experience, research, and my vivid, overactive imagination. I had gone through a very transformational period of my own life when I was grappling with the duality of two cataclysmic and different losses: the dissolution of a very public relationship, paired with the devastation of the loss of my best friend.

I had moved from LA, where I had kind of transformed my own career in Hollywood, back to New York, and I was living in the maid’s room of a female mentor of mine. In personally charting the treacherous waters of grief and loss, and asking what it means to start over when you feel like the bottom has fallen out, I thought creatively it was an interesting time to explore the place of aftershock and aftermath. There have been a lot of portrayals of women who have gone on these very linear paths: Trauma happens, we move on. But what does that liminal space look like?

With Liv, I was interested in exploring the thanatos and eros and the drive of these two incongruent things, self-preservation and self-destruction. What does that messy middle ground look like? The other day I went back to the Neue Galerie, and I was looking at the Klimt she talks about in the beginning—this hollowed-out body. The character feels so depleted and devoid of her identity; she’s seeking light and heat and sex and all these things to make her feel again, and that felt like a really interesting and dramatic place for a character to begin from.

The Plunge is also such an uptown New York novel. I feel like people treat downtown often with more complexity than uptown, especially in the contemporary era. What did setting the book uptown afford the novel?

I think I’m drawn, as a writer, to grounding the reader in an outsider perspective in a world that you think is familiar. Isabel and Damon do live downtown, and Liv’s only safe space is the cocoon of this derelict maid’s room. She can feel geographically separate from the self-destructive spiral she’s in by retreating uptown. The room she’s living in mirrors her psychological state. I thought a lot about The Yellow Wallpaper, and I was rereading Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight. I’m always interested in writing things you don’t expect. You don’t expect this derelict room to be in a place that we associate with uptown. Central Park also becomes a very reflective space for her, where she’s taking these circuitous grief walks.

The Plunge is inserting itself in a long lineage of stories about trespassers, from The Talented Mr. Ripley to Saltburn to The Guest. I’m not saying that Liv is exactly that, because she’s almost invited in. And at one point you understand that Isabel knows exactly who she is. Still, from the beginning, there’s the sense that she’s the charity case. Why do you think there is such a fascination with the interloper and how you wanted to relish in that trope and maybe challenge it?

I am fascinated by those tropes, as I think we all are. You named the great ones. Those characters are often cast in binaries: pathological liars, manipulators, or grifters, like Emma Cline’s great book.

In the character of Liv, I was interested in subverting that role. She is an outsider, yet she doesn’t want to become part of the world, and she isn’t looking for any sort of financial gratification. What she wants is to feel connection again. She has come from a very public trauma where she feels like there’s a scarlet letter she’s walking around with. Often, with either public or private pain, we don’t want to go back to the people who know us the best. In this dazzling world she’s drawn into, they don’t know her. Damon knew her from a different life. Another title the novel was meant to be called for a long time was The Brilliant Glare of Things, from the prologue. She wants to be distracted, and this is a world rife with distraction.

The undercurrent of both the trespasser motif and the setting is of course class dynamics. You worked as the executive story editor on the 2021 version of Gossip Girl. For a generation of people, especially those who didn’t grow up in bi-coastal, cosmopolitan environments, the original Gossip Girl was an introduction to what wealth looked like in New York. I wonder how your experience of working in that tradition shaped this book?

You know, I never watched the original Gossip Girl. As someone who’s lived her life as a playwright, we always look for other sources of art in order to enable us to do the type of art we want to do. In many ways, that show enabled me to come back to New York and write a novel.

It does go back to the idea of the outsider. That juxtaposition of someone who’s not in the world, but can traffic in the world seamlessly, while always feeling like an outsider, is an interesting role to play in fiction. Having lived in New York for most of my adult life, with the exception of a stint in Hollywood, which I’m very much still working in, the boundaries are often blurred between artists and culture and power. Artists can be invited into a world that is bohemian in a sense, but also brushes up against different classes and power. I think I’m more interested, rather than class per se, in the idea of power—especially in the sense of desire. How does desire interact with power? How does it inform a power imbalance in life and relationships?

That also relates to your play My Master Builder, where the drama plays out in a power dynamic between three people, like The Plunge. It’s the oldest power dynamic in the world but still endlessly fascinating to build out. 

There is a great Elizabeth Hardwick quote where she commented, “In Ibsen, it’s always the wives who invite the young woman into the house.” It’s in a way resonant with The Plunge, with Isabel. But the setup itself—the inciting incident of an outsider being invited in, the impulse to light a bomb under the past—feels very theatrical, almost Aristotelian. The three sides of the triangle and who at any given moment has the power are fascinating tensions to play with.

Who was the hardest character for you to write?

What was most challenging was the first-person narrative of Liv, which was the challenge I set up in wanting to write a novel. Theater is thrilling to me because, unless you’re breaking the fourth wall, you don’t really know the internal landscape. You’re watching that manifest in behavior, but one emotion can have 10 different actions behind it. With Liv, and making her an unreliable narrator, I wanted to give myself the challenge of asking: What does it mean to get inside someone’s head, even if she is grappling with truth and memory and the way it’s warped by trauma? How do we get under the skin of a character? 

What did the writing process look like, compared to how you write your plays? 

The intensity of writing a novel was something I had never quite experienced—the interior pain it requires, and the exclusion of my personal life. I was writing 18-hour days. The poet in me agonized over every word, every phrase. That was very different from writing a play, where you’re hearing it in somebody else’s body. 

When did you know you could let the novel go?

A novelist friend said to me, “Novels are never finished, they’re merely abandoned.” This was the first thing I’ve ever written where I felt like it could just keep going. There’s something really thrilling to me about the containment of theater. It has to end. You’re watching it happen in real time. A novel can feel endless. 

In the background of all of this, you’re contending with your own personal biography. You were set to marry a very powerful executive, Roy Price, when sexual harassment allegations against him came out in 2017. I’m wondering how you decided to toe the line between the autofictional parallels between you and Liv and how you let her come alive independently. 

The writers I’ve most admired have unapologetically transformed emotional pain into fiction, and memory and experience into art. I decided to write this very much as a piece of fiction, and not as a memoir, for a multitude of reasons. As a writer, making meaning out of emotional discord means processing through fiction. Personally and creatively, as I was trying to understand how we chart the treacherous waters of starting over, I kept returning to what happens when our center of gravity has been lost, when we’ve been stripped of our identity. The book challenged me to reconnect with my own creative roots in prose and poetry, and to really think about how we transform darkness into art. In a lot of my work, there’s an emotional truth that becomes the scaffolding from which I build a story. 

The Plunge is already rumored to be adapted with Nicole Kidman as the lead. You’ve been adapted as a playwright, you’ve adapted other authors. I’m curious how you feel about adaptation, having been on so many different sides of it.

I’ve been on multiple sides of adaptation, and it’s always fascinated me. So many beloved movies are adapted from source material people don’t even realize exists. Being on different sides of it keeps my life as a writer interesting. With something like the play My Master Builder, which was inspired by Ibsen, I was taking a scaffolding that was problematic in its portrayal of women and rewriting it in a completely different way.

Part of why I challenged myself to write a novel was that I wanted some agency over my own work. But it is a very interesting moment for adaptation. Dipping into the well of novels and plays often creates really interesting art. I’m excited about the prospect of my own work being adapted.

Theater is very much back in the zeitgeist too. Matthew Gasda published a piece for us last year about theater overtaking prestige TV as a cultural disruptor. There’s something about being in a room with other people and having a collective reaction that feels newly important. The rawness of it also feels very exciting. 

My experience in London [where Raicek’s play My Master Builder, about a marriage that unravels during a Hamptons party, had a West End run last year] was wild. Being a provocative American playwright putting a very provocative play on stage was thrilling in itself, but having that on such a magnified scale—on the West End, a thousand people a night, sold out every night for 13 weeks—I almost felt like an outsider in my own play. It was unbelievable watching the audience cry, laugh, scream. So many people said to me that they couldn’t snap themselves out of the play, versus the desolation and isolation of writing a novel. It’s such an internal process.

Theater’s so much more porous. 

Yes. Theater is a mirror for our lives. My goal as a playwright is to ask unsettling questions. You want people to walk away in an unresolved place.

The ending of The Plunge leaves you in that space too. What are the next couple of months going to look like for you?

Hopefully, my play Fire Season is coming to New York. I’ve been commissioned to write [another play] about Edvard Munch’s muse. And my graduate school play, Vertebrae, has resurfaced too, and I’m adapting it for television with Nina Dobrev [attached]. It’s an erotic thriller that takes place in the medical world and subverts the trope of a medical drama. And hopefully another novel in the works. 

I think the only thing we didn’t talk about was desire. Is that an interesting thing to talk about?

I really appreciated how you wrote the sex scenes in The Plunge. Sex scenes can be so annoying in books, honestly, but these felt very cinematic. Are there any books about desire or sex that felt like touchstones?

A director who saw my play and read the book said, in a very pithy way, “Oh, your genre is eroti-cry.” Even though it’s very arch, I thought it was so true. What I find so interesting is the space where we can hold two incongruent and almost juxtaposed truths at the same time: desire and pain, desire and suffering, pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy. There’s such raw work by women in that genre that have felt underappreciated—Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux. I also got a great blurb from Susanna Moore—[her book] In the Cut is one of the great books that really toes that line.

You’re mentioning Duras, and there’s so much in her work about alienation, and being alienated from yourself. That feels really present in how Liv is dealing with sex. It’s a way to both abstract herself but also to feel very whole.

The character transports herself through sex as a way to both connect and disconnect from her body. I’m always interested in looking at the dark underside of passion and desire, at the dark cracks beneath the lustrous surfaces of things. That feels like an interesting place to write from, and a harder place to live from—[I’m] learning that lesson.

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It’s almost time to curl up beachside with a good book. Who wouldn’t want to do so with a tome about the increasing instability of an A.I.-riddled world? Or the descent into depression of a small-town professor? All joking aside, any of this season’s best new releases would be equally enjoyable on warm sand or park bench or, for the less outdoorsy of us, a good AC-pumped reading nook. Pulitzer winners and cultural critics alike return with publications so good, they’re sure to be the subject of every warm-weather dinner conversation this summer.

Backtalker by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

Genre: Memoir
When: May 5
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The legal scholar who gave the world the concepts of intersectionality and critical race theory tells the story of her own life, tracing her path from childhood in Canton, Ohio, to becoming one of the most influential public intellectuals of her generation.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Crenshaw frames “backtalking” as the guiding practice of her life, starting young. The book arrives as a personal history, further exploration of Crenshaw’s theories, and a roadmap for the next generation of resisters.

John of John by Douglas Stuart

Genre: Literary Fiction
When: May 5
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo is releasing a novel set on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. The book follows John-Calum Macleod, adrift after art school, as he returns to his hometown and his formidable preacher father.
Why It’s Worth a Look: A slow unraveling, John of John depicts the tension between father and son circling the same truths, salvation, and questions about their complicated relationship.

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

Genre: Literary Fiction
When: May 5
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout steps out of Maine, setting this new novel in a coastal town in Massachusetts and following Artie Dam, a beloved high school history teacher living a double life.
Why It’s Worth a Look: When a secret about Artie’s family surfaces, it forces him to reconsider every relationship he’s built. Strout develops a rich story around the distance between people who think they’ve fostered a certain intimacy.

The Hill by Harriet Clark

Genre: Fiction
When: May 5
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Debut novelist Harriet Clark, winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and a Wallace Stegner fellow, introduces Suzanna Klein, a child whose mother is serving a life sentence after a bank robbery, and who spends every Saturday in line at the prison gates.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The Hill is an unexpectedly funny and intergenerational novel, its pages filled with grandmothers who were once Communist Party members and still bicker over the Hitler-Stalin pact, set against a childhood spent discovering what it means to grow up in the shadow of a parent’s conviction.

How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI by Trevor Paglen

Genre: Essays
When: May 19
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Artist and MacArthur Fellow Trevor Paglen turns to the question of what A.I. is doing to visual culture: not just how it generates images, but how it watches us, learns from us, and shapes what we think we’re seeing.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Paglen moves through psyops, UFO imagery, adtech, and recommendation algorithms to argue that the shift underway isn’t just about fake images, but about images that require no human eye at all. For anyone trying to make sense of what’s happening in the current digital and A.I. age, this is an equally readable and rigorous guide.

On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward

Genre: Essays
When: May 19
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward collects more than a decade of essays, speeches, and newly published work in her first nonfiction collection, spanning her upbringing in rural Mississippi, explorations of grief and social commentary, and her life as a parent to a Black son in contemporary America.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The collection’s titular essay—about the sudden death of her partner—gathers alongside Ward’s other nonfiction work, creating a formidable body of work from an essential contemporary voice.

Whistler by Ann Patchett

Genre: Literary Fiction
When: June 2
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The PEN/Faulkner and Women’s Prize-winning author of Bel Canto and The Dutch House has developed a novel about Daphne Fuller, a middle-aged English teacher whose chance encounter with an elderly man at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is revealed to be a reunion with her former stepfather, whom she hasn’t seen since she was 9.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Patchett wrote Whistler while grieving someone close to her, so the book itself evokes a deep emotional texture while exploring the brief periods we are truly known.

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

Genre: Historical Fiction
When: June 2
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Women’s Prize-winning author of Hamnet returns with a multigenerational epic set in 1865 Ireland. O’Farrell follows Tomás and his 10-year-old son, Liam, as they work for the Ordnance Survey mapping a country still devastated by the Great Hunger—until a disturbing encounter sends the family on a different journey.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Having just received global recognition for Hamnet’s film adaptation, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, O’Farrell is releasing the book she says she always wanted to write, based on her own family history.

Over/Under: An Unexpected History of Sports Betting by David Bockino

Genre: History
When: June 2
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: A former ESPN producer and sports media professor at Elon University delivers a sweeping narrative of American sports betting, from 19th century New York gambling halls to the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that made it legal across the country.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Bockino argues that gambling didn’t grow out of American sports fandom, but rather created it. The book traces his thesis through Churchill Downs, Chicago, Las Vegas, and the Caribbean with the color and insight of someone who has spent years immersed in sports for a living.

A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson

Genre: Criticism
When: July 7
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Critic David Thomson, author of the definitive Biographical Dictionary of Film, delivers a one-volume history of cinema from the Lumières to the present day.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Thomson is widely regarded as the greatest living writer on film, which gives him the right to indict it. Rather than simply a history of cinema, A Sudden Flicker of Light argues that film has spent a century training audiences toward passivity and fantasy, which has had consequences for culture and politics. 

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead

Genre: Historical Fiction
When: July 21
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys closes out his Harlem Trilogy with this final installment following Ray Carney, a furniture dealer, and his longtime accomplice and thief Pepper across a decade of Reagan-era New York.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Cool Machine moves through 1981, ’83, and ’86, deepening the stakes every year, as Carney risks the respectable life he’s built for one last heist. Pepper takes a gig that drops him into the East Village art scene, and both men reckon with whether the city will ever fully let them go.

A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee

Genre: Literary Fiction
When: August 11
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize finalist Chang-rae Lee returns with a coming-of-age novel following Jeon-Gi, a Korean-American boy on the cusp of adolescence who spends his time running with a pack of neighborhood kids, until the summer he turns 11, when a series of events sets off dramatic repercussions.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Lee is an emotionally precise writer, and in this book he further proves his expertise through his examination of guilt, innocence, modern masculinity, and boyhood.

Under the Falls by Richard Russo

Genre: Literary Fiction
When: August 11
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls is back with his first stand-alone novel since Chances Are… The crime story is set in the fictional upstate New York town of Stone Mountain, and follows aging musician Tyler Sinclair.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Russo has created a captivating setting where everyone knows everyone, and everyone has something to hide. Sinclair moved out of his claustrophobic hometown when he was 18, but after returning home for a one-night benefit concert, Stone Mountain proves to be a place you can’t escape twice.

Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty

Genre: Thriller
When: August 25
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The long-awaited sequel to Big Little Lies—the bestseller behind the mega-hit HBO series—reunites Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata, and Bonnie a decade later.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The playground politics of the original have curdled into something darker: drugs, sex, and a stranger lurking around their kids’ school. HBO has confirmed a third season of the series will be based on this book, which makes it an even more timely read.

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UPenn’s Department of Religious Studies chair is undoubtedly one of the country’s most unorthodox professors—and one of its most popular. McDaniel’s classes include day-long reading sessions, forgoing technology and sex, and crying sessions. But, he’s managed to accomplish what many academic institutions haven’t: getting the younger generations to finish a book.  

Name an influence of yours that might surprise people.

Fugazi and the Fifth Dimension.

What keeps you up at night?

Christopher Isherwood’s books and the entire city of Philadelphia, I love this place, but it’s loud as fuck.

What is your biggest vice? Your greatest virtue?

Drinking and drinking. 

What’s been the hardest part of your career so far?

Paper cuts.

What do you think is your biggest contribution to culture?

I try to introduce great books to my students. Many of my students are complicated—most people are—but literature takes them from complicated to complex. Complexity defeats simplistic arguments, binary thinking, knee-jerk reactions, base bigotries, prosaic reflections, emotional drolleries, and uninformed opinions. Complexity makes us kinder, better listeners, more empathetic partners, and reliable intellectual and emotional resources for those around us. We feel pain, joy, loss, anxiety, longing, passion, and regret alongside characters. Our perception becomes embodied and nonlinear. We slow down and sit with boredom, sit with discomfort, and sit with sadness. We feel more and feel more deeply, not just know more. Good literature helps us understand akratic choices—those choices that we and others constantly make that seemingly go against our best interests. We might not make better choices, but books help us develop a more complex awareness of the bad choices we inevitably will make.

What do you want to see more of in your industry? Less of?

In education, I want to see a return to valuing the humanities over “practical” or “real world” training. Students often seek out literature, music, art, dance, or even wine or peach pie not because they want to accumulate knowledge or pleasantly pass the time, to remain in familiar rivulets, but because they crave something more, some mystery, some uncertainty. I want my students to see the classroom not as a place of transferring and acquiring knowledge only, but a space of shared and expansive thought, a hypnotic topography, for us to not simply learn about history or art, poetry or music, but to learn from it. To dance in the uncertain.

What are you looking forward to this year?

What I look forward to every year: getting into long conversations about really sad books with people who just want to hide.

What’s one work of art that got you through an important moment in your life?

James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Carson McCullers’s Ballad of the Sad Café—they both ask, in the most complex ways, the only real questions that matter. Who should I love? Who will love me? Am I lovable? How could I love better? Have I ever made another feel loved? What would I risk for love?

What’s something people get wrong about you?

That I’m lonely. Just because I often like being alone doesn’t make me lonely.

When you were little, what were you known for?

Being forgettable.

What question do you ask yourself most often while you’re making work?

Will this create more kindness in the world, and if it doesn’t, then why the fuck am I doing it?

Where do you feel most at home?

In a library, ironically, a quiet place, where I have met the loveliest of people.

What would you like the headline of your obituary to be?

“Local Falconer Killed in Totally Predictable Falcon-Related Accident.”

What would you wear to meet your greatest enemy?

Short shorts, because my calves are so nice.

What would you be doing if you weren’t working in your field?

Being an itinerant existentialist, captain of industry, amateur antiquarian, capable hostess, mendicant phenomenologist, southeast regional comptroller, proto-indo-europeanist, or assistant branch manager.

To read more from the 2026 CULT100 honorees, see the full list here.

Not every Pulitzer Prize winner can say their novel brought a celebrity couple together. Hernan Diaz can. (Bookworms Dua Lipa and Callum Turner!) The Argentinian author won the award for Trust, about a 1920s Wall Street tycoon. His follow-up? This September’s Ply, which imagines one possible future for a crumbling American empire.

What’s one work of art that got you through an important moment in your life?

The unlikely combination of Johann Sebastian Bach, John Coltrane, and a handful of extremely shouty bands has provided the soundtrack to both the hardest and happiest times in my life.

Where do you feel most at home?

In the English language.

What do you think is your biggest contribution to culture?

My awareness campaign for syntactic responsibility.

When you were little, what were you known for?

My impressions—a talent I’ve been lucky enough to lose.

What question do you ask yourself most often while you’re making work?

Does this sentence do many things at once?

What’s been the hardest part of your career so far?

Failing, day after day, to combine formal rigor with depth of feeling.

What keeps you up at night?

That noise, this worry, those memories, these vague aches.

What are you looking forward to this year?

A thorough sleep study that I booked about a year ago.

What would you be doing if you weren’t working in your field?

My range is so limited; I’d be toast outside the world of books.

What grounds you, and what invigorates you?

A fantastic dinner will both ground and invigorate.

To read more from the 2026 CULT100 honorees, see the full list here.

In Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico captured the definitive portrait of millennial expat life and the lifestyle signifiers—digital nomad visas and Danish armchairs—that come with it. The book sold in 42 countries and, with its iconic Fitzcarraldo Editions blue cover, became a status symbol in its own right.

What do you think is your biggest contribution to culture?

I wouldn’t say it’s mine alone, but I feel part of a moment that Italian literature is having internationally. It started with Elena Ferrante and led to the success of, among others, Claudia Durastanti and Veronica Raimo, both of whom are among my closest friends, and eventually to me. And it’s continuing: Matteo Melchiorre’s The Duke has just been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. This collective dimension, to me, feels more rewarding and more true than any supposedly individual accomplishment.

Name an influence of yours that might surprise people.

Mathematics. It was my passion much earlier than literature, and I didn’t pursue it only because it eventually became unavoidable that I wasn’t talented enough.

However, its very specific concept of beauty still remains with me. Every now and then I go over a famous proof as one might do with a beloved poem. I see traces of it in my writing, or delude myself into thinking I do.

What’s been the hardest part of your career so far?

For almost a decade, I have been trying and failing to find some holy grail of writing—a form halfway between nonfiction and novel, allowing me the former’s rigor and the latter’s invention. I can’t explain it better than this, which is probably why I never found it. I started so many different books and dropped them for no specific reason other than a dim awareness that they didn’t sound right. This eventually led me to writing Perfection, so in retrospect, I can cast it as a fruitful pursuit of sorts. But retrospect is easy.

What’s one work of art that got you through an important moment in your life?

Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, whose first part is itself about how he got through a crisis in his life at the same age I was when it first came out. I happened to be in Paris that day, and I spent a whole morning reading it and crying on a park bench near the Invalides, which, of course, is pathetic but also somehow sweet.

What question do you ask yourself most often while you’re making work?

Why would anyone spend hours, days, reading this? In good times, listening to this concern is key to making honest work. It constrains your freedom by just the right amount. In bad times, it’s an endless spring of insecurity, but in bad times, everything is. 

What keeps you up at night?

A lifelong insomnia, which by this point has become entirely tautological: I’m kept up at night by the thought that something keeps me up at night.

When you were little, what were you known for?

I was an excellent Magic: The Gathering player. I still remember many of my deck lists by heart. 

What would you wear to meet your greatest enemy?

A double-breasted suit with a shawl collar and beautifully wide lapels. I answered this instinctively before realizing it’s also what I wore at my wedding. I don’t know what to make of this insight. 

What would you be doing if you weren’t working in your field?

Before publishing my latest novel, I had worked in construction for over a year and I was considering retraining as a carpenter. I’m sure there was a measure of romanticizing on my part, but I enjoyed it immensely.

When’s the last time you laughed hysterically?

It doesn’t happen to me very often—not because I’m composed, but because I’m secretly shy. However, I giggle a lot.

To read more from the 2026 CULT100 honorees, see the full list here.

A midcentury novel going viral on BookTok five decades after its publication? It’s a minor vindication for Edwin Frank, who’s been giving long-forgotten masterworks and international voices their due at New York Review Books (the literary magazine’s publishing arm) since 1999. His NYRB Classics series has become a shorthand for the discerning reader everywhere.

What’s one work of art that got you through an important moment in your life?

When there’s nothing else, there’s always Wallace Stevens.

What do you think is your biggest contribution to culture?

I’m glad to have helped bring the work of the great Soviet writer Andrei Platonov into English. He is a writer who emerged from and recorded the determination and desperation and devastation of revolution to capture the tenderness and brutality and vertigo of a moment when living in the world becomes an open question, terrible and beautiful.

What question do you ask yourself most often while you’re making work?

How can this be done better? When can I stop?

Where do you feel most at home?

Looking at a painting.

When you were little, what were you known for?

Arguing and dreaming.

What would you like the headline of your obituary to be?

“Publisher of the Dead Joins Them.”

What’s been the hardest part of your career so far?

Lucking into it.

What do you want to see more of in your industry? Less of?

In the early ’70s, Penguin, then a British publisher, went through a moment of publishing paperbacks—then still the core of the publishing house’s business—in bold, stark designs with the most matter-of-fact and minimal copy and quite often no blurbs of any kind.

There was, for example, an edition of Sartre’s memoir, Words, whose unillustrated cover read, “I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it,” Words by Jean-Paul Sartre—the background bright white, the quote in red, the title in black, the author credit in orange (Penguin’s identifying color then). All the words were justified left and set (the title a discrete exception) in the same font, all running freely one after the other. In the upper right corner, the Penguin logo.

The cover caught your eye and held your attention. It was semantically clear and visually attractive. It hit home. It was even smart about the book, since it dramatized the question the book’s title implicitly raises about the place of words in life and in writing a life: always central, suspect, the author’s above all. It was direct, elegant, unapologetic, and completely free of the hype that covers books and fills book reviews these days. How good that was.

What’s your biggest vice? Your greatest virtue?

Sloth/taking my time. “Nothing,” as Henry James beautifully put it, “is my last word about anything.”

What would you wear to meet your greatest enemy?

I always wear the same thing.

What are you looking forward to this year? 

Finishing the book I’m working on.

To read more from the 2026 CULT100 honorees, see the full list here.

Romance was already the most bankable thing in lit. Then the genre was catapulted into the stratosphere when two books from author Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series were adapted into the phenomenon that is Heated Rivalry. Fans of the franchise rejoice: the next chapter of Shane and Ilya’s saga is slated for 2027.

What’s one work of art that got you through an important moment in your life?

The Coen brothers’ Barton Fink is a film I’ve watched many times that I find oddly comforting as a writer. It’s a brilliant screenplay about, among many other things, someone who is struggling to write a screenplay. I like to watch it when I’m really having a hard time getting words on the page.

What keeps you up at night?

Lately it’s been so many things, but mostly it’s my own fictional characters. They love to talk to me when I’m trying to sleep and then ignore me completely when I’m actually trying to write.

What’s something people get wrong about you?

Believing that I think actual male hockey players are hot.

What’s been the hardest part of your career so far?

The hardest part was finding the courage to submit my first manuscript to publishers. I had to get over my fear of other people reading fiction I’d written. It’s terrifyingly vulnerable to create fictional characters and to ask people to love them. To ask people to spend time with them and think about them. I mean, the ego you have to have to expect anyone to do that! I still don’t know how I got past that first hurdle.

When you were little, what were you known for?

I think I was a very forgettable child. I do remember other kids at school playing a game where they tried to make me mad, and they were never able to do it. So maybe I was known for that? Suppressing my emotions? Oh god, I think I just unlocked something that I need to tell my therapist about.

Name an influence of yours that might surprise people.

I am a huge Roger Miller fan. My dad loves his music so that got me into it at a young age. I’ve always admired Miller’s approach to songwriting. His songs are funny and sometimes philosophical. Some have incredible wordplay, and some are just delightful goofy nonsense. He was unique, and his songs and his persona were charming and sweet and laid back. It takes a lot of confidence to be that silly, and I’ve always found his music very comforting. As a writer, I’m inspired by that confidence. Write for yourself and don’t be afraid to be different.

What do you want to see more of in your industry? Less of?

I want to see way more queer stories with happy endings, and fewer romance novels with misogynistic undertones.

What would you like the headline of your obituary to be?

“The Coolest Person Who Ever Lived Dead at Age 300.”

To read more from the 2026 CULT100 honorees, see the full list here.