🌿Lives of Radical Simplicity

Jess Walter's new novel SO FAR GONE and modern American madness...a Character Studies conversation with a 35-year-old woman in remission from breast cancer...Brad & Mira examine popular culture...etc.

Jun 25, 2025

Twenty-fourth newsletter of 2025.

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▶️ On the podcast: A conversation with the great Jess Walter, author of the novel So Far Gone, this month’s official book club pick. Available from Harper.

▶️ On the podcast: in the latest ‘Character Studies’ episode, a conversation with Rebecca, 35, Human Being. A life-affirming and heartfelt conversation with a young woman who is in remission from breast cancer. (Remember: if you know someone who would be a great guest for this series, please email me here.)

🚨Coming up on Thursday: A new episode of Brad & Mira for the Culture, the podcast’s weekly pop culture assessment. Last week’s episode: ‘The Little Horny Pop Star Who Could.’

🎧 Listen/subscribe via Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1. Elisabeth Egan on the book cover trend you’re seeing everywhere.

2. What’s happening to reading? For many people, A.I. may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end. Joshua Rothman reports.

3. Kathleen Schmidt on the vicious cycle of book publishing, or: why your book probably isn’t selling as well as you’d like.

4. Sam Keith on how children’s books on male friendship could help to combat toxic masculinity.

5. Mason Currey on John Cage and the true meaning of discipline.

6. TikTok’s owner wanted to publish books. Not anymore. Alexandra Alter reports.

7. Philip Hensher shares 10 things you need to know about Tolstoy’s War and Peace (if you haven’t actually read it).

8. Are young people having enough sex? Jia Tolentino investigates.

9. Andrew Kay on how OCD came to haunt American life.

10. Jason Zinoman talks with Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Borat, Bruno, etc.) about his life in comedy and his new memoir, Comedy Samurai.

This month the book club is reading So Far Gone, the hotly anticipated new novel by Jess Walter, available from Harper Books.

"A warm, funny, loving novel. . . . It's an American original."—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake

"So Far Gone is a marvel.”—Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of The Leftovers

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins—and in the propulsive spirit of Charles Portis’ True Grit—comes a hilarious, empathetic, and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America, about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.

Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.

Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. So Far Gone is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and moving road trip through a fractured nation, from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

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