A list from Issue 153.

It's Nick Hornby's birthday! Spring 2026’s "Stuff I’ve Been Reading," a Hornby-themed flash sale, and more

Today, friends, is Nick Hornby's birthday. To celebrate: a Hornby-themed flash sale, ten carefully curated—and temporarily unpaywalled—columns, and more:
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The Believer Swim Bundle This is the page for The Believer's special swim bundle. For just a subscription, click here. Spring is here, summer is coming, it's going to be a scorcher out there. Cool off and take a dip in our s...

Reading material for the water’s edge—plus a towel and a swim cap:
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An Interview with Sherril Jaffe - Believer Magazine For more than fifty years Sherril Jaffe has been mining her life for material. Each moment or detail is a brick that might be used to build a story or novel. A father’s heart attack, a marriage…

"I’ve been in search of truth, the truth of experience, not an artifact, but something that’s true, and that somehow, because it’s true, is liberating. So I can’t tie things up with a bow."

—novelist Sherril Jaffe, interviewed by @josephgrantham.bsky.social

Resurrector: The Flight to Lucifer - Believer Magazine Harold Bloom published his first and only novel, The Flight to Lucifer, in 1979, when he was forty-nine. It was helpfully presented by the editors as “A Gnostic Fantasy,” while Bloom described it,…

Joy Williams revisits Harold Bloom’s first and only novel, 1979's The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy, “an awkward, stodgy mimicking of a book that had oddly obsessed Bloom for many years":

An Interview with Christine Sun Kim - Believer Magazine When I walked into the Whitney Museum of American Art in February 2025 to attend the opening reception for Christine Sun Kim’s retrospective exhibition, All Day All Night, I found the museum bustling ...

"It’s interesting: We’re having this discussion in sign, and both of us are deaf, but then this will be transformed into English for a hearing magazine."

— @christine.lol, in conversation with @rachelrkolb.bsky.social

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McSweeney's Internet Tendency Daily humor almost every day since 1998.

Join us in our San Francisco offices this summer! Applications for paid, part-time, editorial interns close April 24. For more details:
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Negative Utopia: Worldbuilding - Believer Magazine There is a worldbuilding exercise I often offer to my students. The exercise goes as follows. Begin by choosing one of three options: 1. Dystopia 2. Utopia 3. Negative utopia* *Utopia written as such ...

Congratulations to Lucy Ives on being named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow!

The fifth installment of her Believer column Negative Utopia—six dispatches on creative writing after ChatGPT—is out today:

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A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon

Congrats to Believer contributor John O’Connor on the publication of A Short, Strange Trip!

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Fossil Songs - Believer Magazine The most ephemeral part of an extinct animal isn’t her family relations or her hide or even her color—all things that can leave traces in the fossil record. When the endling of a species dies, what…

“It feels wild to listen, not only across a species gap, but across the long silence of the iridium boundary left by the asteroid that brought an end to the Hadrosaurs’ epoch.”

—Laura Marris in “Fossil Songs”:

An Interview with Sherril Jaffe - Believer Magazine For more than fifty years Sherril Jaffe has been mining her life for material. Each moment or detail is a brick that might be used to build a story or novel. A father’s heart attack, a marriage fallin...

"It isn’t that you read the whole novel and then you get the payoff. I wanted it to be a payoff all the way along... I wasn’t into plot. The books don’t have plots."

—novelist Sherril Jaffe, interviewed by @josephgrantham.bsky.social

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An Interview with Rob Brezsny - Believer Magazine For more than forty-five years, Rob Brezsny has been the author of Free Will Astrology (formerly Real Astrology), a weekly horoscope column that has been syndicated in over 120 newspapers and is…

"I have always believed that the kind of astrology I wanted to practice would liberate people’s imaginations and free them from their own conditioning."

— @rob-brezsny.bsky.social, interviewed by Ginger Greene

End Notes: Absalom, Absalom! - Believer Magazine It’s 1997. Or maybe ’98. My father is still alive. I’m spending Christmas Eve alone. I forget why. I must have been nursing some wound I no longer remember. No, I do remember. I just don’t want to…

"My adviser, Frank Conroy, said anybody who didn’t read Faulkner, and Absalom, Absalom! in particular, had as much chance of becoming an American writer as Mother Teresa."

—Peter Orner, with a cover by @liniers.bsky.social:

Only God Will Judge Us - Believer Magazine Father Ray Riding and I sit in my modest room—a bed, bathroom, and kitchenette—at St. Kateri Tekakwitha Mission Parish, in a weathered residential neighborhood off Thirtieth Street in South Tucson, Ar...

“‘Solidarity’ means that what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other authorities do to them is also done to us.”

—J. Malcolm Garcia on septuagenarian priest Father Ray Riding, who ministers to migrants in Tucson, Arizona

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Ask Carrie: Spring 2026 - Believer Magazine Q: My best friend is about to get married, and I am thrilled to be her maid of honor. I am not thrilled, however, about the hideous color scheme. Based on the lookbook she showed me, I’d place it in…

“Basically, the best way to protect yourself from the inevitable disappointments and heartache is to be surrounded by people who understand you and who have your back.”

—Carrie Brownstein on whether improv classes are worth it

An Interview with Christine Sun Kim - Believer Magazine When I walked into the Whitney Museum of American Art in February 2025 to attend the opening reception for Christine Sun Kim’s retrospective exhibition, All Day All Night, I found the museum bustling ...

"If I had been born hearing, I’d just be a different person. Maybe I wouldn’t be an artist. That would be fine... Now, for my art career, I get to do everything."

— @christine.lol in conversation with @rachelrkolb.bsky.social

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Cents & Sensibility - Believer Magazine

“Cents & Sensibility,” a new schema by William Stone, breaks down the inflation-adjusted fortunes and annual incomes of Jane Austen characters:
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A Review of A Very Cold Winter - Believer Magazine A Very Cold Winter opens with a one-page list of characters—all sixteen of them. Most of them live together in Milan just after the close of the Second World War. It is 1946 and the city is in ruins.…

"The war, with its tectonic structural violences, has undermined reality itself, estranging the survivors from their own lives."

—Sally Olds on Fausta Cialente’s 1966 novel, A Very Cold Winter

A Review of Dad Had A Bad Day - Believer Magazine In Dad Had a Bad Day, Ashton Politanoff’s second novel, Ned, nearly forty and recently laid off, takes over caring for his six-year-old son, Freddie, while his wife works. “Daddy daycare” is plagued…

“Ned’s story is less about the plight of the modern domesticated male than about the enduring traumas of traditional masculinity.”

—Katia Savchuk on Ashton Politanoff’s second novel, Dad Had a Bad Day

“A pastiche of Restoration drama and Gossip Girl... At the time of the 1972 reissue, all three New York Times staff book critics refused to review it, deeming it indecipherable.”

— @laurenleblanc.bsky.social on Djuna Barnes’ 1928 modernist novel, Ladies Almanack

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Stuff I've Been Reading: Spring 2026 - Believer Magazine books read: Flesh—David Szalay James—Percival Everett The Last of the Duchess: The Strange and Sinister Story of the Final Years of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor—Caroline Blackwood Family…

“What is to be done about blurbs on the backs of books? What is to be done to the writers of them?”

—Nick Hornby on Laurie Colwin’s 1982 novel, Family Happiness

My Father's Shadow - Believer Magazine On a slate-gray Vermont day in the fall of 2003, I was on my way to College French 221 when a pair of attractive people in their late twenties stopped me at the crosswalk. “Hey!” called the trim…

How Lyndon LaRouche—cult leader, notorious anti-Semite, and aspiring demagogue—was prosecuted and convicted by the author’s father:

An Interview with Amanda Gorman - Believer Magazine Amanda Gorman was the youngest inaugural poet in US history when her performance of “The Hill We Climb” made her a household name. The nation’s first-ever youth poet laureate was so nervous, she pumped herself up with Moana song lyrics, and then she proceeded to blow everyone away with her poetry and her poise. Since that […]

Read the interview here: www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

Amanda Gorman

"I think there’s sometimes an inclination in children’s books to dumb things down. I think that’s the opposite way you need to go. I think children are smarter than adults."

— @amandagorman.bsky.social, interviewed by @woolyknickers.bsky.social for Issue 153

An Interview with Sherril Jaffe - Believer Magazine For more than fifty years Sherril Jaffe has been mining her life for material. Each moment or detail is a brick that might be used to build a story or novel. A father’s heart attack, a marriage…

"Now that I’m old, that’s my material... I want to write about the reality of pain and age, and in a matter-of-fact way."

—novelist Sherril Jaffe, interviewed by @josephgrantham.bsky.social

Freedom - Believer Magazine This essay has been abridged from the original version of “Freedom.” Copyright © 1940 by E. B. White. Used with permission of White Literary LLC

"I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in."

—E. B. White in “Freedom,” as a comic by Noah Van Sciver in Issue 153

Fossil Songs - Believer Magazine The most ephemeral part of an extinct animal isn’t her family relations or her hide or even her color—all things that can leave traces in the fossil record. When the endling of a species dies, what disappears is her voice. If her calls were deep, the vibration of her last sound may carry through the […]

"When people reimagine the voices of the long dead, what is it they’re hoping to hear? Do these calls come as harbingers, as auguries for the future?"

—Laura Marris on a sound artist's reconstructed Hadrosaur skull

www.thebeliever.net/fossil-songs/

An Interview with Christine Sun Kim - Believer Magazine When I walked into the Whitney Museum of American Art in February 2025 to attend the opening reception for Christine Sun Kim’s retrospective exhibition, All Day All Night, I found the museum bustling…

"The usual way of doing things is to start out by saying, Here’s this artist who is known for developing this specific technique… That’s not how you do it in ASL."

— @christine.lol, in conversation with @rachelrkolb.bsky.social

Resurrector: The Flight to Lucifer - Believer Magazine Harold Bloom published his first and only novel, The Flight to Lucifer, in 1979, when he was forty-nine. It was helpfully presented by the editors as “A Gnostic Fantasy,” while Bloom described it, not...

"Together, Bloom and his brain decided, simultaneously, that such adventurism would not be indulged in again. Which undoubtedly was all to the good."

—Joy Williams on Harold Bloom’s only novel, The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy

www.thebeliever.net/resurrector-...