Full Stop

Meyer’s revue of misfits, dreamers, guards, clerks, and cleaners are not at pains to identify with the reality they don’t feel invited to participate in — something their wild whims and delusions show us on every page.

Potatoes will devastate. Famously.

Without any dogmatic adherence to the collection of conspiracies, QAnon followers often choose which of the individual narratives to follow within the larger collection, a build-your-own history.

Festivals turn writers into characters, Mona explains. Writers arrive as the creator of possibilities and worlds, but they depart as puppets, functionaries for a plot. Or worse, as flora and fauna for the landscape.

Meyer’s revue of misfits, dreamers, guards, clerks, and cleaners are not at pains to identify with the reality they don’t feel invited to participate in — something their wild whims and delusions show us on every page.

Festivals turn writers into characters, Mona explains. Writers arrive as the creator of possibilities and worlds, but they depart as puppets, functionaries for a plot. Or worse, as flora and fauna for the landscape.

Asylum Road is a gripping blend of character study and psychological thriller that reads like a macabre love letter to a generation that was told the fairy tale version of globalization only to find that it ends anything but happily.

These essays or pieces or feuilletons or Barthesian mythologies — whatever you want to call them — are the correct form for our age

Potatoes will devastate. Famously.

Babies are definitely enemies of romcom!

“I would like someone to ask me whether Red Dead Redemption 2 has any influence on the creation of this book.”

Is that a sort of equation for inviting the imagination in — wonder + weirdness? Maybe. Maybe not. But it helps me register and engage

Without any dogmatic adherence to the collection of conspiracies, QAnon followers often choose which of the individual narratives to follow within the larger collection, a build-your-own history.

As we look to philosophers, our sense of failure only grows in intensity.

The Gaddis I like best to think of is a God-haunted aristocrat. Thrown pearl-clutching into a fallen world, he gathers himself and understands it as his task to recognize what instances of the eternal still obtain, among things melted into air.

What began in 1947 as a largely hopeful movement defined by wonder, openness, and concern for mankind, plunged into the paranoia-fueled mire that skeptics had always assumed the UFO movement to be.

Building an audible nest for intensifying, as a bird might shed drab feathers for bright ones in a time of courtship, an ordinary song for a mating call, my sonic ornament was a customized flush of puberty, a condensed libidinal vehemence.

Publishing’s leaders composed careful statements in the height of this summer’s protests for racial justice. But these ring hollow in the face of an industry rife with sexism, classism, and racism.

We discuss travel writing, its pitfalls, and what might come after the pandemic … if there’s really going to be an after.

The year’s best books, as selected by the editors of Full Stop.