A roundup of what the Pittsburgh Review of Book’s class is reading the first week of February 2026:
“’We represent in our backgrounds a cross section of the Army and of America,’ they began. ‘We speak as American soldiers.’”
Chosen by Asia Thompson
“The Rise of the Slopagandist” from The Verge
“Engagement bait is slop. The president’s social media posts are slop. The main function of slop is to take something from you: your time, your attention, your trust. It is passive in that it requires nothing from viewers but to sit back and consume it.”
Chosen by Suzy Liss
“Eight Deeply Weird Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy Novels” from Reactor
“The end of the world is a perfect place for weird fantasy. Whether it’s Samuel R. Delany’s mind-bending and reality-warping Dhalgren, Jack Vance’s classic sword-and-sorcery series that begins with The Dying Earth, or Stephen King’s cockeyed take on the Book of Revelation in The Stand, setting a fantasy novel after the end is an excellent way to get even weirder with an already weird genre.”
Chosen by Jennie Tian
“Edward Said and the Task of the Intellectual Today” from The Los Angeles Review of Books
“What is the task of the intellectual at a time when, at the heart of liberal democracies, genocide is normalized and protest suppressed? If being an intellectual means, in part, carrying forward the legacy of those who died in pursuit of our vocation, what obligations does their systematic annihilation impose on us now?”
Chosen by Elias Fox
“On Russia’s New Official Dictionary and the Language of Authoritarianism” from LitHub
“The dictionary, which defines authoritarianism as ‘the most effective form of governance in difficult times’… is… less a catalog offering a description of the Russian language as it is spoken in 2025 than it is a prescriptive ideological document.”
Chosen by Paul Beer
“Typing for Love or Money” from The Public Domain Review
Chosen by Rahaf AlMubarak
“The Family Album” from The Hedgehog Review
“In the album, we are together, year after year, in a curated record of our faces, heights, clothes, hairdos, homes, relatives, friends, the living, and the dead. Unlike the chaos of the ten thousand unsorted photographs on a cellphone, it is a wonderfully organized archive of remembrance.”
Chosen by Riona Duncan
“An ‘AI afterlife’ is now a real option – but what becomes of your legal status?” from Aeon
“…even though the training data for your digital twin might be locked upon your death, others will be accessing it in the future by interacting with it. What happens if the technology misrepresents the deceased person’s morals and ethics?
Chosen by Maggie Hua
“Writing is an Act of Faith, but Publishing is a Practice in Doubt” from Lit Hub
“Being less evasive, along with acceptance, is my current work both in fiction and in life.”
Chosen by Sofia Johnson
“Maximally Perverse Obscurantism: On Michael Lentz’s ‘Schattenfroh’” from The Baffler
“Another zealous blurber named Andreas Puff-Trojan says the book is ‘one of the most interesting experiments in German-language literature in recent years,’ which is a little
like saying that it is one of the best books with an off-yellow cover read by people west of Pittsburgh who also own used 2014 Subaru Outbacks.”
Chosen by Kathryn Anne Langley
“Letter from Minnesota: This is What’s Actually Great about America” from LitHub
“What is happening now in the Twin Cities is a repudiation of the MAGA white supremacist vision of America. It is a celebration of what the best in America has always been, a place where people from around the globe have to come to live because we believe in democracy, in equal rights, in justice and fair play. We are
saying that strength comes from love not hatred, from our diversity not our sameness, from our capacity and willingness to band together.”
Chosen by Jinze Mao
“Trump and Musk Knew Exactly who Jeffrey Epstein Was” from The New Republic
“’A pal is a wonderful thing,’ Trump wrote. ‘Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.'”
Chosen by Sabikun Mazumder
Image Credit to Charles “Teenie” Harris, courtesy of the Carnegie Museum of Art
