You Must Remember This
“On the nature of autobiographical memory”
When we construct our life story, we tap into autobiographical memory, our remembrances of events that we’ve experienced over our lifetime. In this article Jonathan Weiner, the Maxwell M. Geffen Professor of Medical and Scientific Journalism at Columbia University, examines how different peoples’ memories function differently by comparing his own way of remembering with that of his brother.
A Debut Novel That Exposes the Ugliness of American Subjectivity
“In ‘No God but Us,’ two queer Afghan men navigate empire, desire, and the fault lines of shared identity”
Novels are social constructions that reflect the society that produces them. Many current novels examine the immigrant experience of the U.S.—the arrival of people coming to the U.S. in search of a better life. But this article discusses the opposite trend: the emigrant experience, people leaving the U.S. looking for a better life abroad:
Bobuq Sayed’s début, No God but Us, reinvents the modern American Abroad novel––the story, now over a century old, of Americans departing the US and crossing an ocean to find freedom and growth that they could not access at home. From Langston Hughes to Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin to Garth Greenwell, the American Abroad novel follows the solo expatriate moving through a foreign land, usually a European city, seeking reinvention while reckoning with the racial inequality, sexual prohibitions, or moral repressions of American culture. In none of the canonical examples, however, is the protagonist both queer and racialized.
The Most Surprising Book Trend Right Now: Memory-Sharing
Charlie Jane discusses a recent “sleeper trend” in publishing: “novels about people storing their memories remotely, gaining access to someone else’s memories, or sharing a memory with another person. . . . this new wave of novels is using the concept to explore deep questions about personal identity, as well as the ways that our memories can be politicized and policed by repressive regimes.”
Smallie by Eden McKenzie-Goddard review – the stories behind the Windrush scandal
“In this warm and tender debut, the family of Barbados-born Lucinda must try to document her decades in Britain after the Home Office threatens her with deportation”
This article in The Guardian demonstrates that cruelty toward immigrants is not restricted to the U.S.
There is a particular kind of British cruelty that thrives on politeness. The 2018 Windrush scandal exposed this in full: rather than chaos or spectacle, it revealed a machinery of clinical decisions that stripped Black and brown people of their belonging with bureaucratic precision. It is now part of our national story, often spoken of in the abstract or invoked as a cautionary tale. But what can be obscured, in this telling, is the texture of the harm, the way complicated lives were reduced to paperwork.
How Reading with My Dying Mother Revealed Her Life
“As a teacher, she would talk about literature with other people’s children. Finally I got the same chance.”
Here’s a moving personal narrative by writer Nicholas Dawidoff about how reading and discussing literature with his mother allowed him to understand her troubled upbringing—and his own.
Exquisite Objects, Exquisite Creature
“On Barbara Pym’s reissued novel of desire, aging, possession, and antiques.”
Poet Eric Gudas looks at the relationship between a society and its artistic products in terms of Barbara Pym, a popular novelist of the 1950s and 1960s who reinvented her work to fit a changing world in the 1970s.
© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown
