🛖 There is Nothing More Glorious

Claire Vaye Watkins returns to the program to discuss her new novel, YELLOW PINE...April Dávila on how meditation can help you write...Zinzi Clemmons reads from FREEDOM...Brad & Mira...& more...

Jul 29, 2026

Thirtieth newsletter of 2026.

▶️ On the podcast: I had a great talk with Claire Vaye Watkins, who returns to the show for the first time since 2013, celebrating the publication of her new novel, Yellow Pine (Riverhead Books).

▶️ On the podcast: A special Craftwork episode on meditation and creativity featuring April Dávila, author of Sit Write Here: 6 Mindfulness Practices to Help You Write More and Suffer Less (St. Martin’s Essentials).

▶️ On the podcast: Zinzi Clemmons reads an excerpt from her acclaimed essay collection, Freedom (Viking Books).

👉🏼 Coming up on Thursday: a brand new installment of Brad & Mira for the Culture. Last week’s episode: ‘Alpha Males in Kitten Heels.’

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

1. More than seven decades after they were first released, the dark novels of Osamu Dazai have become a publishing sensation, as a new generation of readers engage with his bleakness, humor and brilliance. John Self reports.

2. Niela Orr reviews Cool Machine, the final novel in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy, an absorbing work of crime fiction and an ode to black ingenuity.

3. Elisabeth Egan profiles author Alison Espach, whose novel The Wedding People has sold more than 520,000 copies in hardcover.

4. Sheila Heti on the life and death of a chatbot named Alice.

5. Sam Ashworth on how to self-advocate with your small press publisher.

6. Naomi Klein argues that SpaceX isn’t a company—it’s a metaphor for the rapture of the super-rich.

7. Benjamin Wallace-Wells on the Democrats’ tumultuous primary season—and the road ahead.

8. Mallary Tenore Tarpley looks back on a year of book promotion and shares what worked, what didn’t, and what she’s doing now.

9. Welcome to the Age of Broke TV. Soulless moguls and wealth porn are out. Amid a real-life economic downturn, the greatest shows of 2026—from Beef to The Comeback—are all about scraping by. Inkoo Kang reports.

10. Sell the company for $400 million? He’s giving it away instead. David Gelles on Eddie Smith, the owner of Grady-White Boats.

This month the book club is reading The Radiant Dark, the new novel by Alexandra Oliva.

INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER • A People Best Book of the Month • An Apple Best Book of the Month

“Just as engrossing as the mysteries swirling in outer space.”—The New York Times Book Review

In the wake of First Contact, one mother upends her life and her children’s futures, as humanity reckons with its place in the universe.

Tracing five decades of love, loss, ambition, and self-discovery, The Radiant Dark is “Daring and expansive, soul-stirring, and precise, this is a novel about love and belonging.” (Eliana Ramage, author of To the Moon and Back).