6 Excellent Things

Including 4 book recs and the perfect pencil

Tiny Fey’s little BOOKS-embroidered L.L. Bean tote (screen grab from the trailer for her new show The Four Seasons)

1. I recently scored a burnt orange hat that says “Fiction” in fuchsia lettering across the front from the OG source: the Windham Campbell Foundation. If you can’t nab one, this “Serious Literature” hat has me laughing.

2. May I suggest buying a rattan trolley like this one and turning it into a mini rolling library?

3. A brand-new state-of-the-digital-world novel has dropped, and this essay is making me desperate to read it and then feel superior.

4. I can now say I am a Tessa Hadley completist, having finished the last of her eight novels and four short story collections for a big piece I’m working on. My top recommendations, in order:

   - Clever Girl: A vivisection of what it means for a bright woman to make mistakes.

   - Bad Dreams and Other Stories: Includes the perfect first story “An Abduction,” about a 15-year-old girl who is absolutely not kidnapped.

   - The Past: Four siblings decamp to their family country house and revert to all their childish ways.

   - Everything Will Be All Right: A wide-open, multigenerational story about women’s (lack of?) progress.

5. The perfect pencil does not exi…. Oh yes, it does.

6. I wrote about a new female dystopia (for The Atlantic) that makes Margaret Atwood look tame.