Sam Sacks

"No previous century of human life has had a more generous and knowing portrait than the one Chaucer gave to his own time in the pages of The Canterbury Tales." Steve Donoghue on a new biblio-biography. openlettersreview.com/posts/chauce...

In the new issue of Harper's there is a quite beautiful essay by Nicole Krauss on Walter Benjamin and his Angel of History, who is "born only to be extinguished, though not before singing to God" harpers.org/archive/2026...

Here's a thoughtful piece by Kevin Ng for the Baffler on the contrasting approaches of these two musically oriented novels thebaffler.com/latest/an-al...

Dwight Garner has been on a good run recently, doing well to find a lot of books he likes, and he focuses enjoyably on the good parts of Chad Harbach's 'The Brightness,' a "more gothic and moonstruck" follow-up to 'The Art of Fielding' www.nytimes.com/2026/10/26/b...

A wonderfully written piece by Kate Riley (known from last year's great debut novel "Ruth") about the art of Japanese body suit tattoos and the people--including the author--who get them: nowvoyagermag.com/reporting/fu...

Here is @emilybregel.bsky.social’s story. CW: self-harm 38yo Andreea Marin is brain dead on life support, her brother says, after not getting the medication she needed for her mental illness in ICE custody. Yet her wrists and ankles are chained to the hospital bed. tucson.com/news/local/b...

ICE causes man to wreck while his children are in the car, then tries to pry his kids from his arms. They got the wrong guy. Toward the end of the video, an ICE officer says law requires the person recording to back up 25 feet and threatens with pepper spray. (There is no 25-foot law.)

Gift link www.wsj.com/world/ukrain...

Our editor Edwin Frank doing an AMA tonight at 7pm eastern. www.eventbrite.com/e/nyrb-class...

'“Who’d read a book about a fucking guards barrack?” asked one old friend when McGahern invited him to the pub to help spend the £100 advance he’d just received from Faber & Faber.' I reviewed Frank Shovlin's biography of John McGahern for @ftweekend.com:

Oh, this is awful. Ann was such a wonderful critic and a lovely person, too. Awful awful. www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2...

"there needs to be a bipartisan reckoning for Mr. Trump’s budding alliance with the Kremlin against Ukraine, Europe and American interests." @wsj.com editorial board

“When it happened to Jose.” For my latest story, I went to Paris Illinois to talk with residents about the Main Street Cafe’s owner being taken by ICE and the pain that brought to town. Please give it a read. @chicagotribune.com www.chicagotribune.com/2026/10/18/p...

NEW: ICE is trying to deport a mother of 4 while her husband is at Fort Benning in Army basic training. When she went to pick up the family's military IDs, Navy personnel turned her over to ICE. She's been in the US since age six. With @nancyayoussef.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

An ICE agent struck a Mexican construction worker with a vehicle in Houston over the weekend. Texas prosecutors are considering criminal charges against the agent, officials said. nyti.ms/4sa9tXo

I completed my ‘Booker decades’ overview by writing about ten of the best long- and shortlisted novels from the 2010s - featuring memories from shortlisted authors and judges from the decade, inc Tan Twan Eng, Sunjeev Sahota and Robin Robertson:

Can't stop thinking about this kid, man. Five years old, watched his dad get shot in the neck and taken away. Now no one knows where his dad is, what sort of condition he's in, any of it. All across the country, every day, we are destroying children's lives.

An ICE member shot and injured someone in the Bronx of New York City: "A grey vehicle with a bullet hole in the windshield could be seen in the middle of the road."

It happens that Anne Carson was a talking head in the 1995 PBS series "The Nobel Legacy," on science laureates. Tom Shales called her "the so-called poet" & said her comments "border on the imbecilic." Carson called it one of the worst experiences of her life. www.washingtonpost.com/archive/life...

Congratulations, Maaza Mengiste! The Norton author has been honored with a MacArthur Genius Award. Curious about Mengiste's work? Then be sure to check out her novels THE SHADOW KING and BENEATH THE LION'S GAZE. wwnorton.com/books/the-sh... wwnorton.com/books/beneat...

Perfect American League outcome this year. The Red Sox (my team) humiliated by their archrival, per the rules of the Curse of Mookie Betts (35 more years of abjection should be enough to atone for that sin). Then the Yankees promptly humiliated by an expansion team! Postseason all gravy from here.

This Robert Currie photo of Anne Carson on the phone is part of a long tradition of Nobel prize-winners getting the call from Stockholm. Staged, but still fun. Worth a short thread, I think 📷 📖

Death of a handyman: ICE cited “convictions for driving with expired vehicle registration” and an unspecified judgment against him in favor of the Maryland comptroller. The 47-year-old Curo-Churata "had volunteered to leave the country on his own, but a judge denied the request."

Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize in Literature!

The government *still* isn’t tracking how often immigration agents detain U.S. citizens. We are. 500+ Americans have been handcuffed, held at gunpoint or held against their will in Trump’s second term. Our tally is almost certainly an undercount. THREAD (content warning: violence) ⬇️

Hilarious review of a new book on Gouverneur Morris, "the forgotten Founding Father" whose place in history biographers have been trying to restore for two hundred years openlettersreview.com/posts/the-fo...

This Saturday: Laura Kolbe will be in conversation with @tricialockwood.bsky.social  to celebrate the release of their new poetry collections, with drinks and merriment to follow. RSVP here:

We watched Ghostbusters last night. Children were rightly puzzled by how something so (justifiably) iconic can also be so lame. In the whole movie we see them bust exactly two ghosts. Hilariously lazy montage that just shows them holding the smoking ghost traps.

'“Your problem is to give value to the irrational,” Pavese wrote to himself. “Your poetic problem is to give it value without removing its mythical essence.”' I commend to you Max Norman's beautiful piece on Cesare Pavese, whose reissues have had too little attention. harpers.org/archive/2026...

For National Poetry Day "Jamesian" By Thom Gunn (From 'The Man with Night Sweats,' which has just been reissued by FSG.)

"During my time with Barry, I seemed to overhear that dialogue of self and soul. One moment, he appeared to be on the cusp of revelation; the next, he would retreat, change the subject, crack a joke." From Giles Harvey's beautifully written profile of Sebastian Barry. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/m...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EItx...

All this TV palaver has made me deeply wistful for Television Without Pity. The episode recap (by an unremembered genius named Sara M) of the series finale of that Christian-themed WB show 7th Heaven, remains one of the funniest things I have read on the internet. web.archive.org/web/20140402...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MJ1...

"To talk about The Gods Must Be Crazy, we have to start with the VHS tapes." I really liked this Carey Baraka exploration into the legacy of the 80s film franchise that was, for me too, a video cassette touchstone of childhood. www.equator.org/articles/the...