A roundup of what the Pittsburgh Review of Book’s class is reading the third week of January 2026:
“The Manifold Mind of Saul Bellow” in The Metropolitan Review
“And what to make of happy, brutal Eisen? The same thing we are to make of all the characters, all dark reflections of each other’s worst sensibilities. The story is a treatise on the grave undercurrent of man, the amoral rivers that flow contiguous to our inner Great Lakes of generosity and big-heartedness, its undertow continually drawing society backward into swamps of blood and brutality, the inescapable sous-terrain of irrationality.
Chosen by Elias Fox
“Listening to Classical Music in Recovery” in Van Magazine
“The magic of human solidarity, like the magic of Good Friday and indeed of music itself, allows us to find strength we could never summon within ourselves. Whether or not we believe in an interventionist god, the real “higher power” turns out to have been inside us—the collective us—the whole time.”
Chosen by Ursula Sturgeon
“Sunny Side Up: Van Gogh’s Fixation with Yellow” in The World of Interiors
“The cultural meaning of a colour, however, is rarely straightforward. After Van Gogh’s death, a friend wrote of yellow: ‘It was, you will remember, his favourite colour, the symbol of the light that he sought in people’s hearts as well as in works of art.’ While his use of yellow might hint at decadence one day, on another it could evoke the heat of the South of France, the cheering prospect of friendship, the life-giving energy of the sun or the promise of artistic revelation.”
Chosen by Asia Thompson
“Homeward Bound?: Housing can make or break New York’s experiment in municipal socialism” in N+1
“Mamdani will take office with the benefit of these tilts toward executive power already in place. […] The incoming administration must build a popular coalition around housing development; how it does so has the potential to make or break New York’s nascent experiment in municipal socialism.”
Chosen by Jennie Tian
“The Last Days of the Southern Drawl” in The Atlantic
“When I go home and I sit with my granny, I don’t want to sound like Dr. Amy Clark,” Clark told me. “I don’t want to sound like a podcaster. I don’t want to sound like a writer. I want to sound like the granddaughter she knows.”
Chosen by Maggie Hua
“The Unexpected Benefits of Reading at Random” in LitHub
“Knowing what you like is one thing, but so much of what we read is dictated by what sells—or at least the idea of what sells.”
Chosen by Sofia Johnson
“Israel, From Genocide to Self-Destruction” in Jacobin
“Gaza is not poor and underdeveloped because the people are lazy or incompetent. It’s poor and underdeveloped because of the systematic Israeli policy of de-development.”
Chosen by Kate Langley
“I grew up in the bungalow belt in Chicago, and years would go by where we wouldn’t see Lake Michigan. The water that came out of the tap and went into the showers was something that came from the City of Chicago. There was no comprehension that it came from Lake Michigan. I think that’s true of literally millions of people in the metro area whose lives are essentially divorced from the lake, except it’s vital to their daily survival.”
Chosen by Riona Duncan
“Newly Digitized Records Reveal How Indigenous People Shared Their Knowledge of New Zealand’s Plants with Captain Cook’s Crew” in Smithsonian Magazine
“In the aftermath of European colonization in the 19th century, these records have become increasingly valuable to communities in the Pacific since they bear traces of knowledge about the natural world that has since been lost.”
Chosen by Rahaf AlMubarak
“The Danger of Reducing America’s Venezuela Invasion to a 60-Second Video” in Wired Magazine
“Polarization doesn’t need a malicious algorithm to disrupt public conversation; it is an inevitable consequence of the basic design of social platforms.”
Chosen by Paul Beer
“Side-Eyeing Science Fiction’s Love of Empire” in Reactor
“While Rome is often the go-to imperial model in Western SFF, the empire that seems from my cursory half-century perusal of SFF to be the go-to model of a benevolent empire is the British Empire.”
Chosen by Suzy Liss
“The Erotic Poems of Bilitis” in Aeon
“Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is what you love.”
Chosen by Jinze Mao
