On Our Nightstands: July 2026

At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month.

Nicholas Dames

Editor in Chief

Frederic Prokosch, Voices: A Memoir

Well, not really. Prokosch’s 1983 swan song, reissued here with an introduction by Kathryn Davis, is not only a fictionalized memoir, but also a book in which the attention is turned more outward than inward: it is structured as a series of Prokosch’s encounters, remembered with untrustworthy minuteness, with artistic luminaries before, during, and after WWII, in the usual locales (Paris, Rome, Manhattan) and some less usual ones (Lisbon, Stockholm, Capri, Bryn Mawr), all of them portrayed elegiacally. The light always seems to be a fading afternoon yellow; the mood is a highly aestheticized nostalgia. And yet comedy keeps bursting in. Ezra Pound, playing tennis in Rapallo, worrying that his female opponent is aiming her returns at his testicles; Edmund Wilson dropping a cocktail shrimp onto the head of Edith Sitwell, who fails to notice; E.M. Forster scurrying away from a lunch in prewar Cambridge to take a nap; Thomas Mann walking ponderously with the author’s father in the twilight of a Pennsylvania backyard, turning to ask Prokosch: “Do you have an ambition?” That these are fabricated vignettes gives them a special quality of humor: you can’t be sure how much of it is a prank on the reader, or a prank on the interloping author himself—the confessions of a literary starfucker par excellence, a Hall of Fame namedropper, every artist’s favorite unkillable parasite. There’s nobody Prokosch won’t hunt up, ferret out, force his presence upon. Only death protects them. Or not even that: he gets Gide to talk about Wilde’s death, Bernard Berenson about Henry James’s, Alice Toklas about Gertrude Stein’s. It’s a tour of the underworld’s Castle of Fame, except instead of Homer and Lucan and Ovid, it’s all the modernists, major and minor—and instead of Dante being beckoned to join their ranks, it’s Prokosch bribing the eternal bouncer to get past the velvet rope so he can eavesdrop and take notes.

Benjamin R. Cohen

Public Thinker Series Editor

Nancy Matsumoto, Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System

I think Nancy Matsumoto can’t sit still. Which is lucky for us. Her book, Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System (2025) is culturally astute, environmentally hopeful, and eminently readable. She goes to Maine, Vermont, New York, Georgia, Kansas, California, Oregon, Washington, Ottawa, Quebec, Belize, Guatemala, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some. It’s a tour of the alt food system and it’s true to its subtitle, as Matsumoto shares story after story about leader after leader, the women in so many places working to overcome an extractive food system for a regenerative one. Among others, you get examples from community-supported fisheries and dairy collectives, you get seed-saving programs and perennial grain projects. It’s also a reasonable book—based on ideas of “good” food that people can debate in relevant contexts more than local and on appropriate methods more than singular answers. I scribbled all over my copy with notes on organizations, certifications to look up, and leaders to learn more about. It also has the rare quality of being very assign-able for students and very gift-able for friends.
 

Megan Cummins

Managing Editor

Laura Kasischke, The Lifeguard

Maybe we all have writers we love who, for us, can do no wrong. For me that writer is Laura Kasischke, a poet and novelist whose books fill my shelf. I was 19 and just starting to dream about becoming a writer one day when I picked up her poetry collection Gardening in the Dark and lines like these, with their slant rhymes and creepiness, lit up my little brain: “They are digging up the terracotta soldiers / the empereror ordered for his grave. They / are scattering Ted Bundy’s ashes / all over the Cascades from a plane.” And the rest was history. Kasischke is back this year with a new novel, The Lifeguard, from Red Hen Press. (She also published a new poetry collection, I Was Bonnie and Clyde, from Copper Canyon, on the same day as The Lifeguard, to which I say: badass.) Much of the novel takes place on July 16, 1969, the day Apollo 11 launched. It’s also the day a child drowns at the local pool of Mission Hills, Michigan, where the book is set. The book’s mystery unfolds in rich, enticing snippets from the different townsfolk orbiting the boy and the lifeguard.

One of my favorite of Kasischke’s novels is Mind of Winter, which is a nail-biting, chain-dragging, creeply-crawl through a single blizzardy Christmas day. The Lifeguard takes place on a summer afternoon between adult swims, with pink lipgloss and popsicles, chlorine in your nose, and grilled cheese sandwiches crawling with ants. You might think the books are polar opposites. But in Kasischke’s hands, you realize just how ominous a sunny summer day can be.

Tao Leigh Goffe

Global Black History Section Editor

Marie Mitchell, Kin: Caribbean Recipes for the Modern Kitchen

Redefining the genre of the cookbook, chef Marie Mitchell’s James Beard award-winning Kin is a culinary intergenerational love letter that relishes in her Jamaican heritage. Notes on survival for the African diaspora experience in the United Kingdom are interspersed between recipes for pumpkin fritters and ginger drizzle cake. The Akan imagery on the book cover of Sankofa, the bird that looks backward while holding a golden egg, gestures to the poetry of West African cosmology imbued throughout the gastronomic narrative. Literary critic Parama Roy has described “gastropoetics” as cookbook writing as life writing, and Mitchell’s vulnerable personal record does just that. Each recipe is accompanied by an anecdote or an annotation, referencing topics ranging reparations for the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans, primal joy, provision grounds, and the Windrush era. One poignant example is her Slow Oxtail Stew. Mitchell writes, “Watching my daughter eating meat as enthusiastically as my mum once did gives me a sense of their symmetry. I don’t get to see that symmetry in motion, in real time, but I do get to imagine it. In my daughter, I feel I see so much of my mum, from a time I didn’t know her.”  Cooking is a verb and social practice for the author who is also the cofounder of the Island Social Club in East London. What makes the book truly modern is how it remixes the resourcefulness of her ancestors’ kitchen  for the appetite of the diasporic future.

Leah Price

Print/Screen Section Editor

Laura B. McGrath, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction

We’ve been hearing a lot recently about agency, whether human or artificial. Laura McGrath’s methodologically capacious Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, just out from Princeton, concretizes those questions in the person of the literary agent, prodding literary critics who have long fixated on authorship to recognize this other maker of novels and indeed of genres.  Polyphonic in its sources and capacious in its methods, this highly readable study brings together interviews with data analysis to grant a new perspective on how literature is made and categorized.

Bécquer Seguín

Literature in Translation Section Editor

Michel Nieva, Technology and Barbarism: or: how billionaires will save us from the end of the world, translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery and Daniel Hahn

I am not a big fan of science fiction. The last science fiction novel I read was Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, which was published in 1994. But, while visiting Argentina last semester, Public Books contributor Federico Perelmuter suggested I give Michel Nieva a try. So, I did. I didn’t begin, as one would expect, with the novel Dengue Boy, Nieva’s weird, alluring, projective mashup of a twenty-third century South American future in which long-ago melted ice caps have paved the way for Polymarket bets on the next pandemic. Instead, I began with Technology and Barbarism, a nonfiction book of a thousand pinpricks of uncomfortably humorous yet serious provocations about our impending climate future. Brimming with essayistic dynamism, the book forces us to confront the climate crisis like no other work I’ve ever read. In one of my favorite chapters, Nieva is commissioned to write a science fiction short story to be included in a capsule with other works of art and shipped to the Moon on a SpaceX rocket—a message in a bottle that would be propelled not by renewable wave power but by thousands of metric tons of fuel. Nieva wavers, but he eventually writes the story. It is called “Cryptopinworms.” He gives us the plot, which takes several pages. Then, he gives us the ending, expletive included. It’s all clever, and funny, and satisfying. Until you realize what he’s trying to say about just how dark our future may be. I admit, I wasn’t expecting this from science fiction. I had no idea what had become of the genre since I last checked in, if I ever checked in to begin with. Now, I feel up to date on the future.

Gustavus Stadler

Music Section Editor

Joshua Clover, Roadrunner: A Song by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

Before he died last year at 62, critic, poet, professor, and proud communist Joshua Clover gifted us this small volume, 119 pages of pop music writing as relentlessly probing, adventurous, playful, and revelatory as any in the genre’s history. In Roadrunner: A Song by Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers, Clover describes this incantatory, two-chord pre-punk anthem—about driving “faster miles an hour” through Boston suburbs with the radio on in an effort to evade loneliness—as a love song that tells the foundational story of the rock n’ roll listener: in an encounter with “an ordinary object, a popular object,” they “see its beauty, they encounter it with a sort of religious fervor, and they see that the world is filled with these things, that the world is thus itself beautiful.” The song’s premise, as Clover hears it: rock n’roll is anti-myth. It is grounded in, and by, a relationship with an object. The nature of that relationship is love, as Richman makes clear when he sings that the music on his AM car radio “helps me from being lonely late at night.” The book’s own infrastructure is Clover’s remarkable erudition in theories of capital and circulation, histories of consumption and production, and, most of all, pop music. But still more remarkable is their blending in the steadily humming engine noise of his prose.