Ed Simon, Editor-in-Chief: There is something endlessly beguiling about the various avant-garde artistic manifestos that proliferated in the first decades of the twentieth century. Artistic movements with evocative names like the Futurists, the Surrealists, the Dadaists making grandiose claims not just to art, but to life and politics as well. Hyperbole was the operative mode of figures as diverse as F.T. Marinetti to Andre Breton, and the manifestos of those movements are somehow simultaneously utopian and nihilistic, idealistic and cynical, with a gauntlet of positions across the ideological spectrum being expressed. Art historian and gallerist Morgan Falcon’s excellent How to Be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art has a subtitle that’s purposefully a misnomer, for the intention of many of these movements wasn’t to end art per se, but to make it synonymous with a broader experimental program of how we live and organize our relationships.
For Falcon, the revolutionaries like Duchamp or Tatlin who worked in places as varied as Paris, Milan, Zurich, Moscow, Berlin, and New York, were responding to the convulsions of modernity (particularly the First World War) by trying to break out of the white-walled silos of museums and galleries in favor of an aesthetic that understood experience itself to be art. They failed of course – Duchamp’s signed urinal didn’t abolish art so much as become canonical itself – yet Falcon’s book is not just an introduction to a period of incredible cultural firmament, but also a deeply personal meditation on the intersections of culture and money, politics and art, and what all of that might mean during the spectacle of our own current day.
Sarah Steinberg, Associate Editor for Essays: One of my goals this year is to write more, so I’m starting with Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I’m hoping it will offer both practical advice on developing a writing practice and the encouragement I need to write more personally and professionally throughout the year. I’m also in a book club with friends, and we’re kicking off 2026 with Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. While my friend picked it, I’m excited to dive into a science-driven narrative that promises to reshape how I think about human history and biology.
These two books represent a shift in my reading intentions for the year. Rather than my usual escape into historical fiction, I want to prioritize books that help me grow in new ways. I’m carrying forward a commitment to read more nonfiction that challenges and empowers me, setting the tone for a year of learning and honing my powers.
Shanzeh Afzal, Managing Editor: Graphic novels are my first love, so I have started off the year catching up on my graphic novel TBR. I’ve always found the form comforting, they are easy to read when you need a mental break, not to mention the beautiful artwork.
The first one I read this year was Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength, a wonderful memoir of the author grappling with aging and the fragility of the distinction between the self and other. After that, I found myself going to the library and picking up any graphic novel there that caught my eye. I read But You Have Friends by Emilia McKenzie in one sitting at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh on a particularly cold day, a coming of age graphic novel about one best friend watching the other slowly decline and lose her life to depression. Then I read the third and final part of Tillie Walden’s series Clementine, a post-apocalyptic story set in the world of The Walking Dead. And finally, I read Ephemera by Briana Loewinsohn, a story of grief and loss of a daughter who watched her mother slowly fade away, tracing her absence and presence in her life.
My next read will be Solutions and Other Problems, the second part of Allie Brosh’s graphic memoir. I hope to keep reading graphic novels this year while I am in the United States because of the large collection available at the library
Christopher Schaberg, Columnist: I started off the year reading Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites, the second in the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, which is fascinating to think about amid current debates and advancements around A.I. and human identity/agency. When do we become more-than-human, and when do our computers become too lifelike for our comfort? Before bed I’ve also been rereading Jim Harrison’s Brown Dog which is lewd and wildly inappropriate (I don’t think it would get a starred review from Publishers Weekly, if it were published today). Harrison’s epic story (a collection of novellas that follow the titular character) reminds me of my home, as Harrison’s farm in northern Michigan was a few hills over from our house (and now some old high school friends of mine live in Harrison’s place). I recognize some of the exact trees and bogs that Harrison mentions during Brown Dog’s picaresque. Approximately the same size as Brown Dog, I’ve been reading Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, because my 15-year-old son is into video games, and I wish we could be reading it together, but he doesn’t read much these days so I’m going it alone. Speaking of video games, I’ve been enjoying an e-galley of my video game theorist and designer colleague Ian Bogost’s forthcoming new book The Small Stuff. (I even have a cameo in one chapter!) It’s a great book about appreciating the things in life that are ordinarily overlooked or relegated to the sidelines of ‘what matters’. Ian’s new book comes out in July; pre-order it for good summer reading!
Shelly Shi, Associate Editor for Reviews: There’s something quietly radical about beginning the year with Fernando Pessoa. As we’re all drowning in productivity discourse and self-optimization think pieces, Pessoa’s poetry offers a different kind of threshold that makes space for contradiction, fragmentation, and the beautiful strangeness of consciousness itself.
If you’re new to Pessoa, start with The Book of Disquiet. What makes Pessoa perfect for January is his refusal of singular selfhood. This is the poet who invented over seventy heteronyms—not pseudonyms, but fully realized alternative selves, each with their own biography, philosophy, and aesthetic. Alberto Caeiro writes as a pagan shepherd-philosopher, Ricardo Reis composes neoclassical odes, Álvaro de Campos channels Whitman-esque modernist intensity. Pessoa himself, the “orthonym,” occupies yet another position.
In January, when we’re supposed to declare who we’ll be this year, Pessoa whispers: why choose? His work dismantles the tyranny of coherent identity. “I am nothing,” he writes. “I’ll always be nothing. I can’t want to be something. But I have in me all the dreams of the world.” That’s not resignation, it’s expansiveness.
His melancholy isn’t depressive; it’s generative. Reading Pessoa in early January means sitting with seasonal ambivalence without guilt, letting the year arrive without forcing meaning onto it too quickly. For anyone exhausted by the performance of New Year optimism, Pessoa offers permission to simply be, unresolved and multiple, at the beginning of something we can’t yet name.
Asia Thompson, Associate Editor for Interviews: Happy New Year! Last year was hectic and wonderful in all its small moments, and full of theory-heavy, critical writings for my reading. This year, I aim for a more relaxed agenda, incorporating more fiction/memoirs into my reading. Although I adore a good book that really gets my head going with tons of theory to apply in and out of literary fields, my brain also needs a break before it explodes. To kick it off, I’m currently reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, and I cannot express how much I enjoy reading something that is not only satirical, but something I can relate to in my own life. Bourdain’s sly comedic comments and tablecloth remover of the gastronomy world is a feast for my eyes, one that is different from the content I usually digest, but nevertheless enjoy. We can learn so much from reading and each other, and that, to me at least, is the biggest joy (and hope) of reading in 2026.
