Weekly Readings #194 (10/20/25-10/26/25)

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

If you’re still looking for your seasonal book, something to go with the mists and candles and turning leaves, there’s still time for my new novel, Major Arcana, with its occult themes and many scenes of dark magic in a darkening world, as one reviewer sagely observed:

More than two hundred years ago, at a time when Enlightenment rationalism claimed to have settled all the great questions, Blake proclaimed the idea that human nature could never be defined—that human beings would always strain toward the infinite. His prophetic works ultimately helped usher in the Romantic counterrevolution. Major Arcana hints that we might be living through a similar moment…1

You can order Major Arcana here in all formats—print, ebook, and audio—or in print wherever books are sold online. You might also suggest that your local library or independent bookstore acquire a copy, and leave a Goodreads, Amazon, or other rating and review. Thanks to all my readers!

Then there’s The Invisible College, my literature podcast for paid subscribers. We are about halfway through a 15-part sequence on the modern American novel. This week, in an episode called “Everything You Know About the Night,” we explored Djuna Barnes’s cult classic of high-modernist Gothicism, the queer phantasmagoria of Nightwood. For longtime readers, I used the episode to revisit my decade-old essay on the novel, an early intervention in debates about identity and literature elaborating on the paradox that “Nightwood is among the most reactionary of American classics, despite or even—what will confound the identity politics of today—because of its having nary a straight white male in its cast of characters.” The episode culminates in a defense of Barnes’s work as universal vision of the human dilemma in excess of all ideologies. Next week: a Halloween episode on that apotheosis of Southern Gothic literature, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! A paid subscription to Grand Hotel Abyss buys you access to The Invisible College’s ever-expanding archive, with over 80 two- to three-hour episodes on literary subjects from Homer to Joyce.2 Thanks to all my current and future paid subscribers!

For today, I repost with some annotations a recent piece on my super-secret Tumblr answering a question almost impossible in its simplicity. Please consult the footnotes for a review of After the Hunt, the further adventures of