In 2015, we decided that the summer issue of the magazine would be dedicated to all things literary, and this year, we’re celebrating a decade of the Summer Reader. We were lucky to begin working early on with the esteemed Barbara Epler of iconic New York publishing house New Directions, and ten years on, we’re happy to share she’s still gracing our pages and sharing her fierce and funny perspective on what makes good writing. This issue, we asked her a series of probing questions, including: What are the best books featuring a cat? What’s the point of apocalyptic fiction? And can poetry be funny?
Elsewhere in the issue, we speak to a Romanian-language novelist who’s never left Japan, we take a deep dive into why the publishing industry appears so much in rom-coms, and Mark Pilkington tells us about his collection of books on UFOs, wartime disinformation, and spontaneous combustion. Isabella Burley lets us peep at her books collection, Nigel Coates transforms a forgotten corner of Venice, and Nadifa Mohamed sits down to lunch with Nobel-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah.
Fendi’s autumn/winter 25 collection takes to the deep sea, we find a series of unearthly beings in a house in Leguria, and Chanel’s Métiers d’art heads to Hangzhou. Plus, we speak to Jackie Ess on cuckolding, Quinn Slobodian on neoliberalism and the far right, Samia Halaby on the principles of abstraction, Kinyan Lam on natural dyeing in the hills of Guizhou, John Grant on Christopher Isherwood, and many more.
