🍭Perfect Sweetness

Luke Kennard on mere exposure, high comedy, and his new novel BLACK BAG...revisiting my 2022 conversation with Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield...Brad and Mira grapple with pop culture...etc.

Mar 25, 2026

Twelfth newsletter of 2026.

🚨How to Write Literary Collage with David Shields, the new course from DeepDive, is now available! Check it out.

▶️ On the podcast: Luke Kennard, author of the novel Black Bag (Zando), the official March pick of the Otherppl Book Club. A great conversation about modern masculinity, mere exposure, psychedelics, and more.

▶️ On the podcast: A trip into the archives and a replay of Episode 766. Author Anakana Schofield on voice, violence, and building a fictional universe. Original air date: April 6, 2022.

👉🏼 Coming up on Thursday: A new episode of Brad & Mira for the Culture, this program’s uncalled-for pop culture assessment. Last week’s episode: ‘Excruciating Oscars Recap.’

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

1. A.I. is writing fiction. Publishers are unprepared. Alexandra Alter reports. Emma Alpern also weighs in.

2. Why can’t you finish anything? Joshua Rothman explains.

3. Zak Cheney-Rice on author Ibram X. Kendi and his new book about how The Great Replacement Theory took hold all over the world.

4. Ted Gioia on the strangest book in Harvard Library.

5. Kate Dwyer on the making of Infinite Jest.

6. Alexandra Alter on Amazons, the ribald Don DeLillo novel about a woman who plays in the National Hockey League. It was published in 1980 and then DeLillo disowned it and now he’s allowing it to be reprinted and it will soon be in stores.

7. John Seabrook on how Doodles became the dog du jour. (*Adopt, don’t shop.)

8. Tasbeeh Herwees on how the LA Review of Books destroyed itself.

9. A conversation on the art of translation between Lea Ypi, Joy Williams, and Julia Wiedlocha.

10. Calvin Tomkins, a New Yorker staff writer for more than 60 years, has died at the age of 100 due to complications from a stroke.

This month the book club is reading Black Bag, the new novel by British author Luke Kennard.

An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong?

In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own—in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?—and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing this new situation . . .

A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

Available from Zando.

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