Weekly Readings #203 (12/22/25-12/28/25)
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
-
Tarot
14 min read
The novel 'Major Arcana' is titled after the trump cards in tarot decks. Understanding tarot's history, symbolism, and cultural significance provides essential context for the book's themes of 'art, magic, love, and death.'
-
Romanticism
12 min read
The article extensively discusses 'New Romanticism' as a literary movement and references the author's essay on Romantic truth. Understanding historical Romanticism's principles, key figures like Blake and Keats, and its revolutionary aesthetic philosophy is crucial context.
-
Persephone
13 min read
The author's new novelette is titled 'The Persephone Complex: A Letter.' The Greek myth of Persephone's abduction, descent to the underworld, and cyclical return encompasses themes of death, rebirth, and transformation central to understanding the work.
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
I will keep this final Weekly Reading post of 2025 as brief as I can, since I released a novelette yesterday and will release a podcast episode1 and the the new Invisible College syllabus later this week. Below is my year in review, written countdown-style, in reverse, beginning with a few thoughts on yesterday’s new release, climaxing with the publication of my new novel Major Arcana, and ending with a general reflection on The Invisible College 2025. Please enjoy!
Auld Lang Mine: 2025 in Review
While 2025 has obviously been the biggest year so far in my literary “career,”2 I will try to remain calm. I got a taste, as the poet said, of the glamorous life.
Reviewing the year in reverse, I notice that Ross Barkan’s new literary journal, The Metropolitan Review, was there at the beginning, in the middle, and here at the end. Yesterday, the Met released my new novelette, The Persephone Complex: A Letter. As I summarized the matter in my too-excitable Substack Note:
I’ve told myself over the years that I was finished writing short stories, that the form itself may even be finished; before Persephone, I hadn’t written a story since the 2010s. (See my thoughts on the form and my “collected stories” here.) When the Met’s fiction editor Django Ellenhorn solicited a story this summer, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t say no, though; I spent the last two decades having my submissions rejected, so I’m not going to turn down invitations! I pieced Persephone together, therefore, over the course of August, wondering what it meant and where it came from all the while. I submitted it, with its early episode of political assassination and shell-case messaging, the week before Charlie Kirk. Then I figured I’d been onto something. Regular readers and listeners will recognize in Persephone motifs from the Invisible College and themes from the New Romanticism discourse (see below). Finally, at the novelette’s conclusion, the very end, I played a possibly annoying Nabokovian trick, the kind I would hypocritically deride in another writer, such as Nabokov. Please don’t give it away in TMR’s comment section, but the first person to identify the trick in the comments section to this post will
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.