Kyra Kyralina

This was an international WhatsApp book club pick because Panait Istrati seems like an interesting guy, and Kyra Kyralina specifically occupies a niche as the first Romanian novel with a gay protagonist and the first novel in Istrati’s Adrian Zografi cycle. A landmark novel in many respects.

Landmarks aren’t necessarily a fun read, however, and it was a struggle to grasp what Istrati was trying to do. It’s a bildungsroman of sorts, but with a rather disjointed chronology and a lack of interiority. Despite the book’s inclusion in the Adrian Zografi cycle, here Adrian is only a side character. Kyra Kyralina is really the story of Stavro, né Dragomir, as told to Adrian on different occasions over the stretch of several years. The first section focuses on Stavro’s most recent past: the story of his unhappy marriage. The second section then goes all the way back to Stavro’s earliest childhood, and the third and final section fills in the gap between that childhood and the unhappy marriage. The first two sections are narrated rather close in time to each other, with only a few days in between. Adrian doesn’t hear the last section until several years later when he happens to meet Stavro in Egypt.

To put it chronologically: Stavro was born in Braila, Romania, and spent his earliest days with his mother and sister, the titular Kyra. They were wealthy largely due to his mother’s inheritance, though his father and older brother ran a very successful wagon business. The latter two eventually move to the other side of the city to be closer to the wagon workshop, but they periodically make visits to the other home. In their absence, Stavro’s mother and Kyra live the good life, dressing up and hosting parties full of dance and music, attended by young suitors. Young Stavro’s job is to keep a lookout for his father and brother, so the suitors have time to escape out a back window. During these visits home, and just about every day before relocating to the other side of the city, Stavro’s father beats his mother.

The turning point comes when Stavro’s mother decides to throw the party to end all parties, perhaps because she can sense that things are about to take a turn for the worse, or perhaps because she has some kind of death wish. Either way, it turns out as she expects and Stavro’s father beats her within an inch of her life, blinding her in one eye. Kyra is locked in a wardrobe and Stavro taken back to the other house by the workshop. He manages to escape and to rescue Kyra and his mother, and they flee Braila.

Stavro is around twelve years old at this point.

Stavro’s mother leaves him and his sister in the care of her brothers while she seeks medical treatment for her eye and disfigurement. That’s the last we see of her, and given her declaration that she was determined to kill herself if she ever lost her beauty or ability to enjoy life, it’s safe to assume that she takes her life at some point off screen.

Kyra, meanwhile, immediately spurs their uncles into avenging the violence enacted on the family, and the uncles agree. Their older brother is killed in the ambush, but their father escapes and Stavro and his sister are sent to a safehouse. It doesn’t take long for them (or for Kyra, at least) to get bored with their new life, and they are soon kidnapped. Their kidnapper sells Kyra to a harem (which is only mentioned in an aside), while Stavro remains with him as, it is heavily implied, a sex slave.

(So ends section two.)

He manages to escape after a few years and immediately sets about Istanbul looking for his mother and his sister, to no avail. It doesn’t take long for another creepy old man to abduct Stavro, luring him in with false promises of helping to find his family only to once again keep him as a sex slave. More years pass and Stavro once again manages to escape, get some papers (this is the point where he becomes Stavro rather than Dragomir), and then get robbed. One day he ends up in Damascus, and sees a cart pass with a woman who looks rather like Kyra. Stavro tries to get her attention, following the cart all the way to a villa. He’s denied entry, of course, and that’s where an elderly salep vendor finds him and takes him in. They spend many happy years together, even after Stavro serves a stint in prison and is exiled from the city, until the older man’s death.

(So ends section three.)

Stavro ends up in Bucharest, a sort of itinerant merchant and maybe still selling salep. He boards with a family for a while and becomes infatuated with their daughter, telling her stories of his travels. This escalates until they are engaged to be married, but tradition dictates that newlyweds are obligated to prove that the marriage has been consummated (by means of some bloodied sheets). Stavro cracks under the pressure to perform, and under the pressure of his own presumed homosexuality, and promptly faints and then falls ill. His wife is understanding and compassionate about it, and the community at first see him as an invalid, potentially the subject of a curse. But days, weeks, months go by without any sex, and their patience runs thin. Stavro is once again a prisoner of sorts. Neither he nor his wife are permitted to leave the house, and Stavro in particular has become persona non grata in their quarter of Bucharest. The couple makes plans to leave the city, since they’re still otherwise happy and fond of each other and can imagine a life together. Then, mere days before their escape, his brothers in law find an old traveling companion of Stavros, presumably also a lover, who immediately outs Stavro. (Every translation in the WhatsApp book club seemed to use an interrupted slur for a gay man in this reveal. In Swedish it was rendered as “b—”, presumably short for “bög.”) The escape plans come to nothing, Stavro is driven out of the house, and his bride drowns herself in the river.

(So ends section one.)

The framing device is Stavro’s invitation to Adrian to come help him and another man, Mikhail (I think) sell watered-down citric acid as lemonade in another distant town. Adrian has encountered Stavro somewhere out in town, and we get our first impression of the man: a tragic figure, a bit of a buffoon but intentionally so, someone who is hiding something. His scheme requires some kind of go-between and he thinks Adrian is right for the job. On their first night on the road, the three men spend the night in a hayloft and Stavro makes an attempt to seduce, or at least fondle, Adrian. Adrian is a bit naive, while the worldly Mikhail knows immediately what Stavro is trying to do and berates him for it. By way of apology, Stavro then begins his tale of woe, as if to explain why he has become such a creature so burdened with vice. (“Vice” is the specific word used in the Swedish translation, at least, and is used again and again by Stavro to describe himself and by others to describe him.)

Stavro is a tragic figure. Any joy, any pleasure, any human connection he’s ever had is almost immediately tainted with tragedy. That much is clear. But it’s hard to situate Stavro in a narrative. We don’t see a progression from naive to embittered, or ignorant to more worldly. The inside-out chronology means that the book ends in the middle of Stavro’s life, a very deliberate narrative choice that immediately invites speculation. Why does this episode have such an ultimate ring of finality to it?

Putting aside the larger question of the disjointed timeline, it’s hard to like Stavro. It’s hard to like any of the people we’re supposed to feel sorry for. Yes, Stavro’s father is a petty, violent tyrant, but his mother and sister come across as party girls with no interest in taking care of themselves. Of course I’m reading Kyra Kyralina through a different lens than the original audience, in a different social context, but the way that Stavro’s mother insists that she is a creature made to enjoy luxury, love, pleasure, and that she cannot be other than what she is hits a sour note for me. I managed to find an English translation of exactly the passage I’m thinking of:

I was made by the Lord for the pleasures of the flesh, just as he made the mole to live underground without light. And just as that creature has everything it needs to live in the earth, I was lacking nothing to enjoy my life of pleasure. I made a vow to kill myself if I were forced by men to knuckle under and live a life other than what my body and soul dictated. Today, I am thinking about that vow.

From the blog seraillon, who seemed to like Kyra Kyralina a lot more than I did.

Other places describe the story as a picaresque, but it’s hard to read consistently getting kidnapped and imprisoned by different abusers as a picaresque, since much of the time Stavro is confined and not meeting that many people or having that many adventures. Stavro himself isn’t particularly interesting, either. Things happen to him, but we only get surface level emotions in response.

There is also a question of version and translation: Istrati wrote the original in French, but then rewrote it and completely reworked it in Romanian. The Swedish translation, judging by the translator (Barbro Andersson), was from the Romanian version rather than the French. One wonders how much was different between the two versions.

Yellowface

R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface was big and splashy in my circles when it debuted. It was one of the few new releases that I actually noticed, though it appears I didn’t take the step of adding it to my TBR. Alas, it won’t count for that goal!

Someone in my Swedish book club floated the idea of R. F. Kuang, though torn between this one and Babel. I’m a bit ashamed to say that I pushed for Yellowface out of the two, based purely on the opinions of other bookish friends whose taste I trust implicitly. I say “ashamed” because I’m not sure I liked Yellowface all that much and wonder if Babel would have been more interesting.

Juniper “June” Hayward is a struggling White author with one flop of a novel under her belt; her Chinese-American Yale classmate Athena Liu is a literary rockstar. When Athena chokes to death on a pancake after the women go out for drinks, June takes the opportunity to steal her latest novel about Chinese laborers in Europe during World War I. June revises the manuscript and sends it off to her agent, passing it off as entirely her own work. The final product, The Last Front, is a runaway bestseller—maybe in part because June capitalizes on her connection to Athena, blowing their ambiguous frienemyship entirely out of proportion. Her publisher, meanwhile, decides to publish under the name Juniper Song and shoots some new, racially ambiguous author photos. June becomes a darling of the literati and the online AAPI community, setting up scholarships, mentoring aspiring writers, getting retweeted on Twitter and liked on Instagram.

The facade doesn’t last, of course, and accusations of plagiarism eventually make the rounds, but rather than come clean June doubles down. She rides out the scandal in the short term, but after she publishes a follow-up novella called Mother Witch that opens with a line she gleaned from Athena’s old notebooks, there’s no way out. While she struggles to revise and rewrite the novel without the plagiarized lines, spooky messages on social media convince June that she’s being haunted by Athena’s ghost. The campaign continues until June spirals out into a mental breakdown that ends with her recorded confession being released to the public. Her reputation now in tatters, June ends the book by plotting her literary revenge: a tell-all confessional memoir where she frames the publication of The Last Front as an elaborate hoax to expose how misogynistic and racist the publishing industry is.

Yellowface feels like a punching bag of a story for the sake of a few moments. By that I mean, it feels like Kuang had some points she wanted to make, and built the premise of the novel and the entirety of June’s character around creating the opportunity to make those points. The result is that when Kuang gets to have those moments in the story, the criticism is sharp, on point, and biting, such as her account of June and her editor—two White women—revising a story by a Chinese-American woman to include more (good) White people, or the fickle nature of the Twitterati. But the only reason those moments can happen is because, after the initial (understandable if morally icky) theft, June continues to make incredibly poor choices that defy all logic or sense of self-preservation. She flatly refuses to send The Last Front to a sensitivity reader for no other reason than it might delay publication; she keeps the plagiarized opening line in Mother Witch. Maybe this speaks to my own risk-averse nature, but if I knew I was already skating on thin moral and artistic ice, I would do everything I could to cover my ass.

All the while, since this is from a first-person perspective, we’re getting June’s unfiltered inner monologue, and it really seems like the point of the perspective is to make it clear to the reader how entitled and clueless she is, even as a White woman with “good” politics. (“I even voted for Biden!” she assures us early on.) I won’t say these people don’t exist, because they do, but June feels more like a low-effort caricature of them than anything else, which she has to be for the story to work. Without giving away too much of a plot twist, refusing the sensitivity reader is a plot-essential event that contributes to her downfall. But then there are other scenes where Kuang really, really nails what it’s like to struggle with a passion, an art that used to bring you joy but is now just DOA. She also makes it clear that June has some real mental health issues, with a past that includes sexual assault and (it sounds like) childhood bullying. If these scenes are meant to humanize June and provide some depth to the caricature, they feel weird next to the scenes where Kuang’s disdain for people like her just radiates off the page. June doesn’t feel like a more complex character for it; she just feels inconsistent.

I have to admit, for a minute I was hoping that the third act twist would be the slow reveal that Yellowface itself, the book you’re reading, is the tell-all confessional that June was planning to write. A meta ending like that would have done a lot to gloss over the failings of the filler. But Kuang doesn’t go there (I don’t think? maybe I missed some subtext) so I was left disappointed.

Obviously, a lot of the plot rides on June skirting the moral line of presenting as AAPI, or at least AAPI-adjacent. The title alone makes that clear. But I’m racking my brain to think of any equivalent scandal in recent literary news, of a White author passing as some flavor of AAPI to sell their novel because of its connections to AAPI culture. Expanding the field a bit, you get noteworthy racefaking cases like Rachel Dolezal, CV Vitolo-Haddad, and the “Gay in Damascus” blogger, but none of them are masquerading specifically as AAPI or to sell a novel. If you start from the published author angle instead of the racefaking one,  James Frey made up a whole bunch of stuff for A Million Little Pieces, but he never pretended to be anyone other than James Frey. There was the big plagiarism brouhaha over Jumi Bello’s The Leaving in 2022, but again no racefaking. The only case I can think of that resembles June’s literary yellowface is from over a hundred years ago: Winnifred Eaton writing as Onoto Watanna, producing books like A Japanese Nightingale. Still, her writing was her own work, even if it she was still a British-Chinese woman writing about Japan, a country she had no personal connection to or had ever visited. Am I just out of the loop?

2026 Reading Goals Check-In

At least 48 books:
Currently at 21 out of 24, but I’m usually behind this time of year. I have all summer to catch up.

At least 4 are in French:
Absolutely miserable so far: grand total of zero. I started Une rose seule by Muriel Barbery early in the year, when I randomly stumbled across it at the library, but I had to admit defeat in the face of mountains of work and other reading commitments. Now that things are calmer, I have another Barbery novel and some Marguerite Duras on deck.

At least 25% are in Swedish:
Knocking this one out of the park: 13 books in English, 8 in Swedish.

At least 12 are non-fiction:
Knocking this one out of the park as well. At 10 already:

At least 10 have been in my library for over a year:
Falling down on this one. Only 4 so far.

  • Jag heter inte Miriam
  • När Hitler stal den skära kaninen
  • Philadelphia: Holy Experiment
  • Friendaholic

At least 10 have come from my TBR (as of January 1, 2026):
Only 4 so far here.

  • Baby Driver
  • Jag heter inte Miriam
  • The Eagle and the Lark
  • Friendaholic

At least half are by women or enby authors:
Solid numbers here, with 14 out of 21.

At least 10% are by Black authors:
Lagging here. So far it’s only been Marlon James.

At least 1 new-to-me country (as of January 1, 2026):
Finally got around to Norway, and a bonus addition of Jamaica to the list. Done and dusted!

A Brief History of Seven Killings

There is a lot of discussion about A Brief History of Seven Killings in the translation world because the first and biggest decision to make when translating it is: how do you render Jamaican Patois in other languages? It isn’t used incidentally, like in other Caribbean literature I’ve read before, for snippets of dialogue or occasional idiomatic expressions; Marlon James employs the dialect for the overwhelming majority of this 600+ page book. Putting aside the question of sheer weighty wordcount majority, the shifts between Patois and standard English are important pieces of characterization. Each perspective character has their own voice, of course, but even a single character will slip from one to the other depending on who they’re talking to and how they’re feeling. An educated middle-class character sometimes switches to Patois for her inner monologue under extreme emotional duress; others play it up as a racial performance in order to appeal to powerful white Americans and get what they want. These are deliberate choices by the author to convey…something…that falls flat if you were to make it literal or textual.

I don’t know to do it! I won’t pretend to know! But that makes A Brief History one of the rare books published since 2000 that I’m actually vaguely aware of, and so I was excited to see this book proposed for my international WhatsApp book club. I fell behind, however, and only finished this sometime in mid-June even though it was May’s book—probably because I was still making a heroic effort to finish Jag heter inte Miriam.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a fictionalized account of the assassination attempt on Bob Marley, or maybe to put it more precisely, Marlon uses the assassination attempt on Bob Marley as a framing device for a story about Jamaica, Jamaicans, and their relationship to the United States that spans the course of fifteen years. Getting into any more plot than that would miss the point, because it’s less what happens and more how characters develop and inadvertently shape their destinies over the course of the book. In a way, plot is only incidental and is an excuse to bring together a particular ensemble cast that would otherwise have nothing to do with each other.

Stargate. En julberättelse

The same Swedish book club that picked Dead Souls, Stacken, Svälten, and Orbital this year opted for Ingvild H. Rishøi’s Stargate. En julberättelse (Eng: Brightly Shining) for June, at the suggestion of the newest member. Behind as I am in my annual reading quota, it was nice to have something short—even if reading a Christmas story in June feels a bit…odd.

It’s getting on to Christmas, and sisters Ronja and Melissa are trying to make do, since their alcoholic father is having another rough patch. He manages to get a job selling Christmas trees, but after a few good days he blows it and is back to his bad habits. Melissa steps up and offers to take over the job, working in the mornings and evenings after school but for less pay. One afternoon Ronja, desperate to be anywhere but home, turns up at the tree lot and Melissa’s coworker Tommy gets the idea to use Ronja to sell wreaths and other decorations. Shoppers can’t resist a cute kid, he reasons, and offers to split his commission from the wreath sales with the sisters. This goes well until it doesn’t—the owner of the business isn’t thrilled about child labor going on behind his back—and Ronja is left to her own devices. Things spin out pretty badly from there into an ambiguous ending that takes a sharp turn into fuzzy magical realism.

Putting aside the Christmas-in-June element, overall Stargate was an ambiguous reading experience for me. Up until the ending, I was torn between enjoying Rishøi’s writing (in the Swedish translation by Maria Lundquist) and resenting what I felt was emotional manipulation. Unearned sentimentality immediately sets off my alarm bells when it comes to books and movies, and at times it felt like Rishøi was laying it on with a trowel.

The ending, however, is a choice that deserves its own commentary. While Ronja is certainly a daydreamer, the rest of the book is almost hyperrealistic. The title of the book even comes from Star Gate, an actual dive bar in Oslo where the father drinks himself senseless. Abandoning that kind of stark realism in the home stretch for the total opposite gives the reader a bit of mood whiplash, and it also makes me wonder if Rishøi opted for that because she felt like she had written herself into a corner. Namely: if she’s going to end with Ronja’s death, how is she going to actually write it?

Whether Ronja dies is, I suppose, up for some debate. The fuzziness from the magical realism filter provides solid plausible deniability, after all. Maybe Ronja and Melissa are walking home! Maybe they’re really walking through the woods! Maybe it’s Ronja’s fever dream while Melissa is carrying her home! But given how closely Stargate resembles “The Little Match Girl,” I’m skeptical. My take on the ending is that Ronja dies. It’s a weird choice for a Christmas story, but then “The Little Match Girl” takes place on New Year’s Eve so there’s a parallel there.

I found a few reviews of the English translation (Shining Brightly), and more than one of them gave the book demerits for profanity, specifically for using the Lord’s name in vain. Did this get marketed in English as the kind of Christmas story that would appeal to devout Christians? Unclear to me.

Friendaholic

Elizabeth Day’s Friendaholic was mentioned somewhere in my social media relatively soon after its publication in 2024. Was it LitHub? Was it a podcast? I can’t quite remember. But it came into my life at a time when I was reflecting on my own (dysfunctional) friendships and relationship patterns, and a title like Friendaholic spoke to my preferred method of integrating into Swedish society. It ended up on my TBR, which is how it turned into an impulse purchase at The English Bookshop February last year, which means by the time I read it in May it had been in my library for over a year. In terms of my annual reading goals, it’s a grand slam.

Friendaholic is a squirrely little beast in terms of genre. It’s non-fiction, it’s self-help, it’s memoir. Day takes us through some of her own friendships, both successes and failures, with a dash of some light research and interviews. Whether or not there’s a confessional aspect to it for Day isn’t for me to say, but the main thrust of the book seems to be that by reflecting on her friendship patterns and what research suggests, she can help a reader in a similar situation or with similar hang-ups.

Overall I enjoyed reading it, but I’m not sure if there was much in Friendaholic that was new to me in any meaningful way. The drawback of Day’s memoir approach is that if you don’t relate to her personal narrative, there’s really nothing of interest. I could have probably just as well skipped the chapter on infertility, for example, because that’s not a factor in my life.

By reader request, Day has shared the questions she used for the interviews sprinkled throughout the book. I don’t know if I have the nerve to sit my friends down and ask them about (our) friendship, but maybe you do?

 

Förvandlingen

I’m in a philosophy book and discussion club, which is responsible for a small chunk of the nonfiction I manage to get through during the year. Once in a while, however, the group votes for a novel instead of a strict philosophical treatise. That’s how I finally got around to reading Brave New World, for example. Fiction won again in the most recent poll and the book for June was Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, known in Swedish as Förvandlingen and in English as The Metamorphosis.

I’d read it in high school, but since forgotten most of it. Since Kafka was a prominent figure in 1913, it seemed like a good time for me to return to the text regardless. I opted for a Swedish translation, even though my memory of the English is obviously quite dim.

There is a strong tradition in Swedish of translated German literature, so unsurprisingly there are multiple Swedish translations of Förvandlingen. The first one I got ahold of was the older one by Caleb J. Anderson and Karl Vennberg, originally published by Forum but now in a new edition from Modernista. I also managed to dig up the newer one from Hans Blomqvist and Erik Ågren at Bakhåll, complete with an afterword. I’m in the process of polling Swedes in my life about which one they prefer and why, and so far I have to say that there’s no clear winner.

That’s probably the most interesting thing to say about The Metamoporphosis. We all know the story and the famous opening line, what more need be said?

Here’s one nugget from high school that has stayed with me ever since, maybe because it’s only become even more relevant to me as an adult: if you take away the magical event of the first sentence, The Metamorphosis becomes one of the most realistic books ever written, an unflinching portrayal of how families respond to disability or illness.

I don’t know which critic or which writer it was. If memory serves, and it was indeed my twelfth grade English teacher who relayed it to me, then it has to predate 2004. Otherwise, I cobbled together my actual English class and an actual, later quote into a false memory. Regardless of where I first heard it, that quote has been kicking around in my head for years and I finally got to put it to the test, as it were, by coming back to The Metamorphosis over twenty years later. Bang on, I would say.

Philadelphia: Holy Experiment

I rescued this battered old Maxwell Struthers Burt hardback from the collection of books that my dad seemed to have inherited from his own father. I suppose something about moving across an ocean makes you sentimental for the place of your birth, especially since I’m forever explaining to people that I’m from “north of Philly.”

I had a grand time reading it. The footnotes and commentary alone are pure entertainment, if not necessarily the strictest history. Published in 1945, the most important niche that Philadelphia: Holy Experiment fills is as a World War II era time capsule. How were Americans thinking about themselves and their history while they were fighting Nazis abroad? Also, it includes a recipe for Fish House Punch in the endnotes. Amazing.

Dead Souls

I first read Gogol’s Dead Souls in 2014, and I remember even then being mostly baffled by the story. Not only the ending, the legendary mid-sentence cliffhanger, but Chichikov’s entire plan. What was buying these dead souls doing for him, exactly? Then earlier this year it was floated as a suggestion for my Swedish language book club so I had the chance to revisit the story twelve years later to see if I was a better reader.

Short answer: no!

But this time around I went digging afterwards for reviews and commentary, which cleared up my biggest point of confusion—the dead souls, which he was presumably acquiring at a bargain, could function as collateral for a loan—even while Gogol’s satire didn’t entirely land. Individual moments of slapstick got a smile or a chuckle out of me, but I’m a reader who is too far removed in time and geography to appreciate the more subtle digs at Russian aristocracy. (Except all the jokes about them speaking French, I know enough history to understand that much about the Russian upper class of the time.) Russian drama and pathos? Fine, great, love it, lay it on me. Russian comedy? Absolute head-scratcher.

Mostly I want to take the time to complain about The Internet These Days. After I finished Dead Souls again, I did what I normally do these days after a real puzzler of a book: look for blog posts or podcasts that might fill in the gaps of my understanding. The vast majority of what I found for Dead Souls was AI-generated slop. Most of it was simple Cliff’s Notes study guides for the YouTube generation—artificial voiceovers explaining the story to you over janky (I’d go so far as to say Eurojanky) art, either still or animated depending budget. A similarly janky short turned out to be an ad for a series of self-published historical fiction prequels (for lack of a better word) to famous classics. A couple videos, notable for being slightly less janky, used Dead Souls to support, of all things, the Tartarian Empire conspiracy theory, and lo and behold the channels associated with both of them are dedicated to proving, or propagandizing for, the mythical lost civilization.

Dead souls commenting on Dead Souls, if you will.

We’re drowning in useless bullshit that no one asked for, and that makes it impossible to find the useful stuff that we actually want. Of course, this is hardly news anymore and I’m not breaking any new ground with this claim. I just needed to vent my spleen for a minute. And since it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, here are the cool and useful tidbits I managed to find despite the tsunami of slop.

The Bowie Book Club podcast is a great idea for a podcast. Even if I’m not a David Bowie fan myself, I’m glad people are out there doing something fun and creative like this. They did an episode on Dead Souls back in 2024.

While I can’t comment on the rest of his content, Mike Tyulpakov is at least a human standing there talking to you about Gogol. I’m willing to overlook uncritical appreciation of Jordan Peterson elsewhere in his videos in exchange for an interesting alternative interpretation/model of Dead Souls as a Russian language Odyssey rather than Russian language Divine Comedy. Admittedly it’s not an entirely new reading, but it’s always nice to get a hot take on Russian literature from an actual Russian.

For all my complaining about AI slop, the top hit in YouTube for me was still a human podcast with human faces. Unfortunately, it seems like to get to the top the two hosts have to lean into Manic Internet Hype Machine Podcast Energy, which I hate.

I also found a podcast episode from Vollrath Publishing, a one-man (or possibly husband-and-wife) publishing and podcasting venture. So far the one book they’ve released is a new edition of Frankenstein with new original artwork for the cover and the host’s own footnotes to the text. Could possibly be a publisher to watch? I might pick up their Frankenstein to see what exactly they’re doing.

And finally, the crowning jewel of all of this human work is StandardEbooks.org. They take public domain texts from online sources like the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg and clean them up into polished, attractive, and eminently readable ebooks. Nice fonts, comfortable margins and line spacing, properly linked footnotes, no OCR madness. This time around I read their HTML version in my phone’s browser window, but they offer a variety of formats, including for Kindle and Kobo. They don’t know me, I’m not getting any kickback or commission, I’m just hyping them up because I appreciate what they’re doing.

När Hitler stal den skära kaninen

In the wake of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, I asked my Jewish friends which Holocaust novels and movies they would recommend. The topic has a tendency to get mined for sentimentality and melodrama by lazy hacks, after all. One of the books that came up was Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, a title that I recognized from elementary school reading lists but that I had never read myself.

A few years later, I noticed a Swedish translation (När Hitler stal den skära kaninen) by Ingegerd Leczinsky on the book swap shelf at the local arts center and decided this was my moment. It took another year or so, and then in my year of reading history I decided I should finally make good on my previous inquiries.

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is an award-winning classic of children’s literature so any review in 2026 is redundant. Given the state of things in the world—in the US, mainly—it’s probably worth revisiting these classics. It’s also worth understanding the ripple effects of the camps: what it was like for the families who left as refugees, people who would have otherwise never had a reason to leave the only country they’d ever known, people who had to get by with intermittent updates about the friends and family who had stayed behind, people who had to live with the uncertainty of whether it would ever be possible to return or if they would ever want to.

My only gripe is specific to this particular hardback edition from Berghs: Kerr also provided her own illustrations for the book, and her art often (though not always) appears on the covers. But my edition (pictured above) has an extremely grimdark and dramatic oil painting aesthetic that doesn’t at all match Kerr’s simpler, lighter pen-and-ink illustrations inside. Other publishers are also guilty of this choice, though, so it’s hardly controversial. But it’s certainly a choice to feature Anna, Judith’s stand-in, holding the pink rabbit that never left Germany with her.