A roundup of what the Pittsburgh Review of Book’s class is reading the fourth week of January 2026:
“There are some heartwarming videos of agents falling down (‘ICE on ice!’) but we slip too, running towards or away from them. It can feel kind of slapstick, until you remember that they will destroy someone’s life today, and that they can kill you.
Chosen by Suzy Liss
“Christ Agonistes” from The Metropolitan Review
As a freelance writer, Ash’s prospects are especially bleak, as she shuttles from one grim North London flat share to another. Even the fruits of sexual emancipation have lost their savor. When Ash starts the book, she is in a lesbian throuple while also nursing an unrequited passion for a young man. It is very unlike the home of life of Ross Douthat: but none of her erotic diversions can nerve her against dread of the future.
Chosen by Elias Fox
“Beyond Black Appalachia” in Poetry
“Affrilachia is not a replica of the experience of all Black Appalachians but a Homi K. Bhabha-esque third space, a hybrid creative movement where elements of Black and Appalachian culture meet and blur; where artists with shared values but from varied walks of life create their art, navigate their identities, and plot their liberation; where they resist the strictures of the ARC’s [Appalachian Regional Commission’s] project by building artistic community far beyond the ARC’s reach.”
Chosen by Riona Duncan
“If You Read This You are Gay” from The Baffler
“I felt almost hypocritical asking my students to aim for rhetorical clarity as we all watched the world play its endless game of Mad Libs. ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ they read out loud, but nobody knew who Sharon Tate was, or Huey Newton, and the stories we were telling ourselves had become increasingly incoherent. The world inside my phone was mocking the principles inside my classroom, and I was caught in the middle, feeling too green to establish authority and too ancient to keep up.”
Chosen by Kathryn Anne Langley
“MAGA as Fan Fiction” from The Los Angeles Review of Books
“What was the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but a fan fiction IRL meetup, a live action role-playing or alternate reality game that some took more seriously than others?”
Chosen by Paul Beer
“Life Storage” from The New York Review of Books
“St. Michael’s has protected the burial places of Woods, Joplin, and thousands more, and there is a growing awareness of the need to commemorate the gravesites of those lost beneath the city’s churn, but elsewhere in the former Newtown even a simple marker still eludes many residents.”
Chosen by Ursula Sturgeon
“Why did Jeffrey Epstein Cultivate Famous Scientists?” from Scientific American
“Scientists might claim that Epstein’s money in no way caused them to lower their standards, but we have broad evidence that the interests of funders often influence the work done.”
Chosen by Maggie Hua
“Good Failures” from The London Review of Books
“Contemporary fictions are preoccupied with apocalypse, human extinction and cataclysm, but as Dorian Lynskey makes clear in Everything Must Go: Why We Are Obsessed with the End of the World, this is nothing new.”
Chosen by Rahaf AlMubarak
“The Cost of Writing” from Granta
“Everywhere I look I can see fear in the faces of my friends and
colleagues who, until recently, could never have imagined they could be coerced by a campaign of intimidation into giving up writing altogether.”
Chosen by Sofia Johnson
“The Dignity of All People” from Dissent
“Socialism is the name of our desire,” Dissent’s founders stated in 1954. It was an ethical and moral demand, a compass rather than a map. It was a “vision,” they wrote, “that gives urgency to . . . criticism of the human condition in our time.”
Chosen by Jinze Mao
“Nigerian Modernism” from ArtForum
“They were not making art for art’s sake but forging visual languages capable of shaping a new national consciousness and contributing to what Achebe famously identified as “an African voice.”
Chosen by Asia Thompson
“Trump is Proving Democratic Presidents Weren’t Powerless” from Jacobin
“I want to remind everyone in the horrible here and now that President Donald Trump’s ongoing second-term rampage of unilateral executive power shows what a complete lie all of that pretend Democratic powerlessness really was. And that reminder is important so that nobody accepts that horseshit excuse ever again.”
Chosen by Jennie Tian
