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This past year, I have found myself returning to reading. I’ve always read, of course, but there is something luxurious, in our current climate of micro attention spans and culture flattened by algorithms and hot takes, about devoting hours at a time to a book that operates on a different rhythm. It feels a little bit rebellious and deeply pleasing.
I’m excited to share some of the things I’ve been reading and thinking about in a new newsletter for Harper’s Bazaar called “A Closer Read.” I’m hoping this space will be for not just new releases and the most interesting books of the season but also lesser-known gems.
For the next few weeks, I’m going to be highlighting one book in each edition that I’m thinking about. Right now, I’m reading Baldwin: A Love Story. This is Nicholas Boggs’s upcoming mammoth biography of James Baldwin. It’s smart and lush and part of one of my favorite subsets of books: biographies and memoirs set in midcentury New York City. If I had to live during any time in the past, it would probably be then.
Once, after reading Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” in grad school, I went to a bar to wait for a boyfriend and ordered a Scotch and milk, which is what one of the characters in that piece is always drinking. It was such a retro drink, and it made me think of that time in New York. Unfortunately, I ordered it at an old Irish sports bar on Sixth Avenue and Flatbush in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The bartender laughed, went to the end of the bar and opened an ancient minifridge whose door was covered in some kind of gray lint, poured half a carton of coffee creamer into a glass, and filled the rest to the top with Scotch. I couldn’t not drink it, but after I choked it down and the bartender again laughed at me alongside the then-boyfriend, I did some more research on the drink when I got home and found out it was only popular with alcoholics in 1950s New York because it (allegedly) allowed you to soothe a stomach ulcer while also getting wasted.
The first edition, launching September 16, features a conversation with Arundhati Roy around her new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. In upcoming missives, you can expect to read about writing as embroidery with Joyce Carol Oates, the wonders of taxidermy with Susan Orlean, and Angela Flournoy’s modern classic of Black millennial angst, The Wilderness. Think of this newsletter as a toast to the curiosity and literary joys that might lead you to order a Scotch and milk, in a dark and musty bar, to try to get closer to what you read and loved on a page.
Sign up here to receive “A Closer Read” all season. Keep an eye out for new installments every Tuesday, and stay tuned for more exclusive newsletter content from Bazaar in the future.
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