The Newsletter Explosion That Caught Everyone Off Guard I have to tell you something that felt weird to admit at first: I cancelled my book club last year. Not because I didn’t love those women or our midnight wine-fueled debates about whether we’d actually read the assigned pages. But because by the time we met […]
Why Percival Everett’s ‘James’ Destroyed Me (And Why BookTok Won’t Stop Talking About It)
The Book That Made Everyone Stop Scrolling I need to tell you about a book that has completely consumed my brain for the past few months. Not in the way a thriller does, where you’re racing to the ending because you need to know what happens. This is different. This is the kind of book […]
I Read All 5 Books on Oprah’s 2025 Book Club List So You Don’t Have To (Spoiler: Two of Them Wrecked Me)
The Setup: Why I Committed to This Particular Reading Sprint Look, I wasn’t planning to become the person who reads Oprah’s entire annual book club list in real time. But then I realized something while scrolling through Oprah’s Book Club official selections in early January: I genuinely wanted to know what she was choosing. Not […]
Why BookTok Can’t Stop Talking About Percival Everett’s ‘James’ a Year Later
The Pulitzer Moment That Changed Everything I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Percival Everett’s “James” had won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Standing in my kitchen, coffee growing cold in my hand, scrolling through the announcement and feeling that peculiar electricity you get when a book you’ve been quietly obsessed […]
The Emotional Uncanny Valley: Why AI Fiction Feels Different (Even If We Can’t Always Say How)
The Numbers Everyone’s Talking About (But Missing the Point Of) Let me start with what’s actually happening in the literary marketplace right now, because the numbers are genuinely staggering in a way that deserves real conversation instead of hot takes. According to the Alliance of Independent Authors AI publishing report, Amazon KDP saw approximately 700,000 […]
I Finally Read All Fours and I Understand Why Everyone Has Such Violent Opinions About It
The Book That Would Not Stop Being Discussed I kept seeing All Fours everywhere for months. On the subway, in coffee shops, in that particular category of Instagram story where someone photographs a book spine with some version of “this is destroying me emotionally.” By the time I picked it up in late 2025, the […]
Romantasy Is Eating Itself: What the Backlash Against Copycat Fantasy Romance Means for Readers in 2026
The Moment Everything Shifted I need to tell you about the night I realized romantasy had a problem, and it wasn’t the problem I thought it was. I was scrolling through my feed around midnight, the way you do when you’re supposed to be sleeping but instead you’re doom-reading book reviews, and I saw something […]