Weekly Readings #192 (10/06/25-10/12/25)

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

October 12th would be a very auspicious day to buy my new novel, Major Arcana, for a host of reasons, some explicit, some im-.1 I could say more, but then it wouldn’t be arcane, would it? (I was in the final throes of the novel’s composition when I wrote the metaphysically paranoid post at the link.2 I doubt reading it will drive you as crazy as writing it drove me, however, unless that’s what you want, in which case I guarantee it will.) Major Arcana is about comic book writers and online influencers, teachers and students, parents and children, magicians and revolutionaries, men and women, cities and suburbs, art and magic, time and eternity, you and me. It’s been called “a sort of secret history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries” and “the elusive great American novel for the 21st century.” 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. Thanks to all my readers!

Then there’s The Invisible College, my literature podcast for paid subscribers.3 This week we continued our survey of modern American fiction this week with Jean Toomer’s Cane in an episode called “Do Not Torture Me with Beauty.” Toomer’s unclassifiable hybrid high-modernist text inaugurated the Harlem Renaissance, and I was stunned all over again by its tortuous beauty, its autumnal sweetness and terror. This is a good episode of The Invisible College, and it’s good because Cane is so good, a book whose wisdom we are only now catching up with, over a century later, the only book-length work of fiction by a man who called himself “the first American.”4 Next week: the modernist adventure continues as Gertrude Stein narrates her own genius through the eyes of her wife in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. A paid subscription to Grand Hotel Abyss buys you access to The Invisible College’s ever-expanding archive, with almost 80 two- to three-hour episodes on literary subjects from Homer to Joyce. Thanks to all my current and future paid subscribers!

For today, a bit of this, a bit of that, mostly in the footnotes. Please enjoy!

In Fear of K: Approaching the Apocalypse