Nimona: our favorite comic book murder girl and antihero teen with a secret heart of gold (kind of). I’ve loved her since the day my sister sent me a link to Stevenson’s incredible webcomic, and my love has only continued to grow as that webcomic turned into a graphic novel and now, finally, a movie. I doubt I’ll ever be able to recapture the magic of those early webcomic days since so much of what made it special was the community of commenters. (Bet those words will never come from my keyboard again.) Still, there are a lot of great graphic novels like Nimona out there featuring murder teens, unlikely friendships, queer pining, and unusual fantasy/sci-fi settings — not always in that order.

I have a lot of thoughts on graphic novels like Nimona and what makes them like Nimona, because it’s not just a matter of *hand-wave* magic and technology and supervillains. But first, because we are in the Year of Our Lord 2023 and live in a dystopian capitalist hellscape where billionaires refuse to pay their employees fair wages, we have to talk strikes.

Regarding the current WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes: current guidelines do not advise boycotting streamers or struck content, and unless or until it’s called for it could do more harm than good. WGA member and author Neil Gaiman posted on his Tumblr to say that watching content from struck studios/streamers doesn’t constitute “crossing the picket line,” and that “until the WGA calls for it, I don’t suggest doing it.”

If you’d like to support the writers and actors who make great media like Nimona, consider donating to the Entertainment Community Fund to support creatives as they fight for fair pay and conditions. That’s likely the best way to help at the moment.

Now on to the fun stuff: graphic novels like Nimona for all of you out there who just can’t get enough!

My husband and I are currently watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, me for the first time, him for about the billionth. After watching one episode where religious fundamentalists insist that the space station’s school teach their holy stories instead of scientific fact, and bomb the school when the teacher doesn’t agree, my husband leaned over to me and commented “But you know, Star Trek was never political.”

“[Sci fi story] was never political” is a running joke of ours, usually said with an eye roll and a bitter laugh at the complaint du jour about sci-fi stories that dare to centre anyone who isn’t a white, cishet man. Sci-fi has been decried as “political” for telling stories about people of colour or women (and predictably, some of the worst backlashes have come when a central character happens to be a woman of colour). Stories have been panned or banned for including LGBTQ+ people and relationships.

Writers who share the marginalisations of their characters are at the greatest risk of being harassed and attacked for daring to publish in a space that reactionary gatekeepers see as “theirs”. The ‘Sad Puppies’ campaign was a coordinated attempt by right-wing, “anti-diversity” pundits to influence the results of the Hugo Awards and push works by authors of colour, women, and LGBTQ+ people to the sidelines. Fortunately, it was unsuccessful — and not only because it was a clumsy, transparent attempt at attacking diversity. The fact is that sci-fi has never been a white, cishet, male, or conservative domain. It has always been a space for subversion, radical thinking, and rebelliousness — and marginalised people have been there from the beginning.

While Cavendish and Shelley were both upper-class women with financial resources, they were still women writing at times when only men’s writing was considered to be worthy (the Bronte sisters, writing 30 years later than Shelley, still had to publish under male pseudonyms to be taken seriously, while Jane Austen, whose life overlapped with Shelley’s, published anonymously). Literature as a field was not open to women, and yet women writers had a huge influence in kickstarting the sci-fi genre. Not only that, but continuing it with the works of writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, and many others writing in the mid-20th century, when sci-fi had truly come into its own as a genre.

I know what you might be thinking. You’re imagining a poem, all dressed in a tuxedo or an evening gown, ready to celebrate the next winner of the Pulitzer Prize. While it’s a fun image, particularly depending on the shape of the poem you’re imagining, that’s not what “formal poetry” means.

A formal poem is one that sticks to a particular form. It could be a Shakespearean or Italian sonnet. It could be the ghazal, villanelle, rondeau, or sestina. The poem could take one of many Japanese forms like the haiku or tanka. There are also more recently created forms like the golden shovel. What we’re not talking about are “free verse” poems that don’t pay much attention to form or line control.

As you can imagine, much of poetry has moved away from these strict forms. But in formal poetry, poets can actually find a fun challenge and a strange freedom that comes from it. And there are plenty of poets still writing in specific forms. Maybe those forms are older than any of us. Maybe those forms are brand new or even created just for the book they’re writing.

Either way, here are 10 amazing and modern formal poetry books.

I can’t remember the first book of hers I read — the one that made me realize that, for the next 25+ years, I would follow her anywhere — but that’s because all of Barbara Kingsolver’s books manage to make me feel some kind of way. And for a time there, back when I was in my late teens/early 20s, I was reading as many as I could get my hands on, all in quick succession.

Twenty-five years later, I can’t help feeling validated. This past spring, Kingsolver was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her most recent novel, Demon Copperhead, and it seems everyone is considering the title for their book clubs and bedside tables.

Demon Copperhead is a doorstopper of a book, a modern retelling of David Copperfield that provides a glimpse of what life is like for those touched by institutional poverty, and by the opioid epidemic, in the mountains of southern Appalachia. In this book, Kingsolver does what she’s always done best: She provides a lush, sweeping, engaging narrative that manages to interrogate larger cultural and systemic issues in a way that is not heavy-handed or overbearing.

But that’s not even what drew me to her work in the first place. Rather, I’ve always admired her ability to make me fall in love with places I’ve never seen. As a stubbornly indoorsy person, her work nevertheless makes me experience a reverence for our natural world that I find difficult to replicate when I’m soaking in my own boob sweat in my backyard.

Kingsolver has published 17 books since 1988, and I have more than half of them on my bookshelf, which made this post extremely difficult to write. (I know this might seem outrageous, but I’m not allowed to say, “Here! Read these 16 books first!”) After much deliberation, here are the titles I believe provide an ideal entry point into her work.

Tonight, the sun will begin to set before 8 P.M. once again, a milestone that always fills us with some low-level dread. This is all the more reason to participate in summer fun of all varieties. Here’s what the Review’s staff and friends are looking forward to next week:

Wine & Water Lilies at the New York Botanical Garden, August 17: Between 3 and 6 P.M. next Thursday, come to the New York Botanical Garden for a drink with a side of plants! This recommendation comes from our new intern Izzy Ampil; you can have a water lily–themed cocktail, a glass of wine, or a brownie with marshmallows while wandering among the lotuses. There will also be music.

The National at Madison Square Garden, August 18: Are you feeling vague malaise for no particular reason, which seems to sort of seep into everything, but is also not entirely unpleasant and in fact maybe kind of nice? If you’re not, and you want to be, you should join our web editor, Sophie Haigney, and go see The National, the prolific, excellent, low-grade-sad band whose new album includes a song that goes: “And there you are, sitting as usual / with your golden notebook …”

Annie Baker’s Infinite Life at the Atlantic Theater Company, opening August 18: This new play, an excerpt of which first appeared in the Review’s pages, features five women in chaise longues at a fasting clinic discussing life, sex, and chronic illness. Their exchanges are unforgettable: “You had great sex with him but you left him because he was a screamer,” one woman says. “No he left me,” her friend responds. “He left me. And I was a wreck.” Their conversations probe the connection between physical pain and sexual desire, and much else; they show, in a sense, where conversation can lead. In partnership with the Review, the Atlantic is offering tickets to shows between August 25 and September 10 at a 30 percent discount if you use the code PARIS online at checkout. 

“With a diving suit and helmet,” said Yannick Poirier, the owner of Tschann bookstore on the boulevard Montparnasse, where he has worked for thirty-five years, “and with dark glasses, earplugs, and a plan for survival and retreat to the countryside. I hate sport. That’s personal, but I hate sport, and I have a horror of circus games, and, how to put this. You are American? So you know Jean Baudrillard. For us he was a friend, Jean Baudrillard. So he has The Consumer Society, like Debord has The Society of the Spectacle, and all that sticks to us like shit. No, frankly, the Olympic Games—for me they leave me neither hot nor cold. They leave me totally indifferent.”

“There are books about sport,” offered a bookseller at Le Genre urbain, “but they are very distant disciplines, all the same.”

“If there are any,” they said at Le Monte-en-l’air, “and if they are good, we have them.” This clerk, like their counterpart at Le Genre urbain, was “against” the Olympics (“in a personal capacity,” they added at Le Genre urbain). Both bookstores, singled out for questioning out of the city’s hundreds, are in the twentieth arrondissement.

“We’ll of course have a few books,” they said at Les Traversées, “but in a corner.”

On August 3, the poet Jessica Laser visited the offices of the Review in Chelsea and treated us to a reading of her poem “Kings,” which appears in our Summer issue. The poem, which our poetry editor Srikanth Reddy described as a “dreamy, autobiographical remembrance,” includes memories of a drinking game she used to play in high school on Lake Michigan, and is charged with eros:

… You never knew
whether it would be strip or not, so you always
considered wearing layers. It was summer.
Sometimes you’d get pretty naked
but it wasn’t pushy. You could take off
one sock at a time.

A perfect poem to read or listen to in the dog days of August, as summer flings might be coming to an end!

It seems no less than highly appropriate that when Ian Nairn’s Modern Buildings in London first appeared in 1964 it was purchasable from one of a hundred automatic book-vending machines that had been installed in a selection of inner-London train stations just two years earlier. Sadly, these machines, operated by the British Automatic Company, were short-lived. Persistent vandalism and theft saw them axed during the so-called Summer of Love, by which time, and perhaps thanks to Doctor Who’s then-recent battles with mechanoid Cybermen, the shine had rather come off the idea of unfettered technological progress. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its malevolent supercomputer HAL 9000, after all, lay only a few months away. And so too, did the partial collapse of the Ronan Point high-rise (a space-age monolith of sorts) in Canning Town, East London—an event widely credited with helping to turn the general public against modernist architecture.

As it was, Nairn’s book was published in the middle of a general election campaign that saw the Labour Party’s Harold Wilson become prime minister on the promise of building “a new Britain” forged in the “white heat” of a “scientific revolution.” And Modern Buildings in London is, for the most part, optimistic, or least vaguely hopeful, about what the future might bring—or definitely far more so than much of Nairn’s subsequent output. This is an observation rather than a criticism. In many respects, his growing disillusionment with the quality of new buildings in Britain was not unjustified. Modern Buildings in London finds Nairn at the peak of his powers; it is a book studded with as many pithy observations and startling thoughts as cloves in a ham. Not unlike D. H. Lawrence in his essays and travel books, Nairn’s sentences appear almost to jump-start, as if landing halfway through, punchy opinions falling instantly in quick-fire lines shorn of any unnecessary preamble or padding. Like in Lawrence, there is rage here, much of it directed toward the London County Council and their municipal architects and planners. Of the LCC’s handiwork in the Clive Street neighborhood of Stepney, he bluntly states: “I am too angry to write much about it,” before going on to argue that the old streets by comparison had “ten times more understanding of how people live and behave.”

This week, the Review‘s staff and friends are enjoying a drop in temperatures in New York City and the beginning of the August slowdown. Here’s what we’re looking forward to around town:

“Not Tacos” at Yellow Rose, August (6 and) 7: The downtown restaurant Yellow Rose is known for, primarily, tacos. (And really good frozen drinks.) But friend of the Review and meat purveyor Tim Ring recommends their upcoming collaboration with the Vietnamese food pop-up Ha’s Đặc Biệt that will explicitly not be tacos. Or will it? Their event poster features the words “Esto no es un taco” in Magritte-like font below what might or might not be a taco, depending on your definition.

Mark Morris Dance Group at the Joyce Theater, August 1–12: August is normally a quiet month for dance in New York City—for professional dance, at least. (We like to imagine that many people are dancing on their own.) But with the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet on hiatus, our engagement editor, Cami Jacobson, recommends seeing the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Joyce. This series will include some of Morris’s lesser-known pieces and be set to live music, in what Jacobson describes as an “unusually small, intimate theater” for seeing dance.  

An overnight trip to the Irish Pub in Atlantic City, anytime: The Review’s Pulitzer Prize–winning contributor, friend, and Atlantic City expert Joshua Cohen writes in: “The Irish Pub, in Atlantic City, is the best bar I’ve ever slept at. But really, you can use their rooms for anything. At fifty dollars a night, the only thing cheaper is the beach, which is down the block.” 

The dessert landscape in New York is generally defined by extremes—by how far flavors can be taken from their origins. ChikaLicious, the East Village dessert bar that opened in 2003 and is run by the chef Chika Tillman, is good for the opposite reason: its success comes from its dishes’ almost extreme subtlety of taste. I ordered a three-course menu centered around the bar’s star dish, the Fromage Blanc Island Cheesecake, a kind of cheesecake mousse that’s served (ascetically) in the form of a mound, on a bed of ice, atop a pile of white dishes. It was preceded by an ice cream appetizer with kiwi syrup, and followed by a plate of small cubes that felt like what eating (delicious) chocolate-flavored air might be like. Unfortunately for the subtlety, every flavor was also mixed with the taste of my own blood, which continually seeped into my mouth due to a post-tooth-extraction wound I’d suffered the day before.

Surprisingly, the best dish wasn’t even a dessert but the Very Soft French Omelet, which had the texture of omu rice without the rice. It came topped with truffle butter, was served with an herb biscuit, and was so good that it made me question why Chika was making desserts at all. Our final dish of the night—which, as with the omelet, we ordered in addition to the three-course cheesecake menu—was a plate of pink peppercorn ice cream that I found disturbing only because of how much it literally tasted like peppercorn.

But the food, bloody or otherwise, didn’t even really matter: the cuteness of the bar ultimately took precedence. The entire space could fit about twenty people comfortably, with most of the seats lining the bar, which doubled as an open kitchen. Chika Tillman, a kind of silent spectacle, prepared every dish herself there, while wearing a signature bonnet that she’d had specially made from the pattern of a baby’s hat, while her bow-tied husband (a former jazz musician) served the food on an assortment of heavily patterned china (he let me come to the storage space in the back to handpick my teacup). During the hours I sat at the bar, multiple regulars came to check in with Chika, among them a former sous-chef from Bar Masa who insisted, graciously, that I take a picture of his dessert (something served in a tiny Crockpot). If it wasn’t for my deep-seated fear of intimacy, I imagined, half-delirious from the wound in my mouth, that I would like to become one of them someday—a regular.

—Patrick McGraw

It was 115 degrees outside when I left my house, around 5 P.M. My steering wheel was hot to the touch. So hot, in fact, that I had to steer with the bottom of my palms; some people store gloves in their car during the summer, but I keep forgetting. This was the second Friday of Las Vegas’s heat wave, our seventh consecutive day over 110 degrees. The National Weather Service had issued an excessive heat warning: “Dangerously hot afternoons with little overnight relief expected.” Emergency room doctors treated heat illness patients. At the airport, several passengers and crew members fainted after a plane sat without air conditioning on the tarmac for hours. A man was found dead on the sidewalk outside a homeless shelter.

I drove a few minutes downtown to a Deuce bus stop near Fremont Street, and when I parked I saw a woman in a one-piece swimsuit and tube socks posing for photos in a square of shade. My bus pulled up, and I climbed to the second level. We cruised south, down Las Vegas Boulevard, past wedding chapels and personal injury attorney billboards. The Deuce is my favorite way of traveling to the Strip.

At the Treasure Island stop, two women, their faces pink and perspiring, slid into the seats behind me. “I couldn’t stand there for much longer,” the first woman said.

As a response to challenges from the public and/or the state, several public libraries across the country have come to compromises with these bodies in terms of access to collection materials for minors. Among the compromises are library cards with age restrictions. In some facilities, all library cards for those under 18 have been made void and every child now needs to reapply for a new card with parental/guardian restriction choices on them. In other facilities, the new cards based on age are being implemented either when old cards expire or when a new card is requested. Age-restriction cards might look like limiting access to materials for those under 8 in one category, those in the 8-12 category, and/or those in the 12-18 category. Every library going this route is doing so a bit differently.

These cards not only go against everything a public library stands for, but they are a tool of censorship. And while it is a means of avoiding problems from the community or the state — so read this knowing most public libraries going this route are not doing so without a lot of thought — these age-restricted cards are opening up the potential for endless lawsuits at public libraries.

Although it is parents/guardians who will determine what card is appropriate for their child, that is where the parental responsibility ends. Now, every decision afterward falls explicitly on the public library. Knowing how litigious right-wingers pushing for such measures are, they, too, are fully aware that their “parental rights” arguments really mean they want to foist the real parental responsibilities off on underpaid, overworked, deeply battered public service workers like librarians (and educators, of course). Demanding a library create separate cards for different age groups and restrict certain materials based on those cards isn’t about parenting. It’s about ensuring you don’t actually have to parent. You get to sign off on a card and let the library handle it from there.

So for the libraries doing this, some questions.

What happens when a circulation worker miscategorizes one of the cards when a young person and their legal guardian signs up for one? This is not out of the realm of possibility in the least, particularly with how cumbersome such changes or modifications can be with an integrated library system (and especially if that system is shared among different libraries who are offering different “levels” of access). One wrong click and suddenly, right-wing mommy’s daughter, who is 16, has checked out Gender Queer, which is a no-no for card holders in the under 18 category. Who gets sued then? Is it the individual who made a mistake? Not likely; they won’t have money. It’ll be the library itself, putting the entire facility and its funding in a chokehold — again, this is precisely what that contingent of folks want to have happen.

Hi, Barbie! What books do you like to read? And what do those books say about who you are? This Barbie book quiz is designed to tell you exactly that. Are you more of a President Barbie or Mermaid Barbie? Maybe even Weird Barbie? We all have the Barbie we’d like to be, but which Barbie are we really?

Whether you loved the movie or just enjoy a good quiz, this Barbie quiz should give you a nice little serotonin boost. After all, Barbie (or at least the Barbie of the Barbie movie) is all about optimism and positivity. No matter which Barbie you get, it’s gonna be good news because all the Barbies are perfect! Well, except Weird Barbie, but we love her all the more for it.

Speaking of imperfect — at the time of writing, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are still fighting for fair wages and protections from the studios who continue to refuse to negotiate in good faith. Sounds like some serious corporate suits, if you ask me. *cue video of Mattel corporate riding the world’s longest tandem bike across the screen* Anyway, we all know which side of things Barbie would be on.

You can support the creatives and entertainers who make movies like Barbie possible through the Entertainment Community Fund.