Stuff I’ve Been Reading: Summer 2026

books read:

• A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction—Elizabeth McCracken
• London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth—Patrick Radden Keefe
• The Things We Never Say—Elizabeth Strout
• Stations—Louise Kennedy

books bought:

• Buckeye—Patrick Ryan
• Greengates—R. C. Sherriff
• A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction—Elizabeth McCracken

There are some books that cannot be read late at night, not if you have any trouble getting to sleep. Usually this is because you are so gripped that you can’t bear to turn the light off, or because the world the writer is describing is so terrifying that you can’t bear the darkness. Elizabeth McCracken’s A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction is not a scary book, and it was not intended to be gripping. It consists of 280 short observations about the art of writing, and consuming them all at once would rather defeat the point—how many lessons can anyone realistically be expected to learn in a day?

There is nothing in this book that you can ignore, if you have ambitions to create a work of fiction, for the first or the fifteenth time. I have read it through once, but just recently I have been opening it at random, like the I Ching. Here’s number 179:

People use adverbs to equivocate. Slightly, nearly, imperceptibly, almost, kind of, sort of, somehow, perhaps. Sometimes they double up: nearly imperceptibly. Linguistic equivocation is irresistible, but you should resist it, even that namby-pamby verb of beauty, seems. Think of Hamlet: “‘Seems,’ madam? Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems.’” Tell us not what things might be nor almost do, but what they are. 

Oh, how my students love, somehow, its gauzy magic. Me, too.

This is what happens if A Long Game is your bedtime read. First, the shock of recognition: Oh my god. Linguistic equivocation. I think I do that. Then comes the urge to do something about it. I am going to get up, go to my computer, open the novel I am writing, and remove all equivocating adverbs. Done! My forty-two thousand words have now become seventeen thousand words! Then you go back to bed, hating yourself and your own incompetence, and wondering how you’re going to find twenty-five thousand words that don’t equivocate. Thanks, Elizabeth McCracken!

The reference to “my students” is significant. McCracken, as I hope you know, is one of our very best writers; I have read literally everything she has published. When I first saw this book, I hoped she would be able to confer some of her magic on me—I wanted to be her student, to learn how she did this, and that, and also that. But what is unusual about A Long Game, what differentiates it from the other how-to books about writing you may have come across (by Stephen King, Annie Dillard, or Anne Lamott, among others), is that it is the product, not of her writing career, but of her years of teaching fiction—thirty-five of them, she tells us, “and I am now filled to the brim with opinions… I hope to provoke my students into thinking the most interesting thoughts that they can, so they can teach themselves how to write.”

McCracken describes herself as an aphorist, and she is a good one (I have turned a line from one of her novels into an epigraph for one of mine); A Long Game is studded with quotable observations:

• “If you’re writing a book, I tell my students, you better make it a book of your heart.”
• “In fiction there are needful mysteries and needless mysteries.”
• “Kindness is an overrated quality in a fiction writer. So is ruthlessness. An interest in all of humanity is useful.”
• “Parental indifference is a great gift for a writer. You can’t buy that kind of privacy.”
• “Fiction is not the cha-cha. It is a fluid substance; remember its fluidity, even if you only sometimes take advantage of it.”
• Some people wait to start a novel until they feel confident enough, but you have to be a little panicked to make it across the ocean in a rowboat.

There is at least one aperçu on every page that you will want to write down. I have found so many that I am in danger of producing a book called A Long Game, exactly the same as ­McCracken’s, but written in longhand.

McCracken once wrote a little memoir called An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. It is about the stillborn birth of her first child. I was reluctant to read it; I have had some difficult experiences with parenting myself, and over the years I have come to regard the reading time I have as an escape from my particular problems. I don’t regard it as an escape from difficulty, per se; I try to read good books, fiction and nonfiction, and good books often contain a lot of pain. But I knew that Elizabeth McCracken’s book would be about life, not a particular and unusual kind of loss, and that proved to be the case.

A Long Game is about writing, but it, too, is a way of looking at the world and our place in it. Number (lesson? verse?) 151 is about plot and the inner lives of characters: 

If you have ever read a story that seems beautiful and is full of both emotion and event but feels fundamentally dead at its heart, it’s because it has an emotional plot and an active plot that have nothing in common. They just run parallel to each other. 

If you have ever met a compelling human being who is unknowable: same thing. Their insides have nothing to do with their outsides.

(Who needs a little notebook to copy out the book when you have a column in an arts magazine?) The point I am making is that you will get a lot from A Long Game even if you have no intention of writing. Maybe you live with a writer, or work with writers. Or maybe you’re just interested in what makes people tick, whether these people are real or invented.

Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of two of the greatest nonfiction books of the twenty-first century (Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, about the history of the Troubles, and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty). A couple of years ago, he wrote a riveting article about a London teenager named Zac Brettler, who fell—jumped—to his death from an apartment block overlooking the Thames. Now he has expanded that piece into an equally riveting book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth. What Keefe saw when he started to think about Zac was that the boy encapsulated an even bigger story: the story of how one of the world’s great cities became vulnerable to, and eventually compromised by, financial criminality, Russian oligarchs, tax dodgers, a police force uninterested in investigating anything that they could (and did) argue didn’t need investigating. His parents thought he jumped to escape someone or something, and they were almost certainly right. The police took the view that some cans of worms don’t need opening.

Zac Brettler spent part of his education at Mill Hill, a prestigious and expensive private school in North London; it is the sort of institution that was particularly appealing to the Russian oligarchs who had made London their home. The most famous of them, Roman Abramovich, bought himself a football club, Chelsea, and set about transforming it into the most successful team in England. (When sanctions were introduced after the invasion of Ukraine, Abramovich sold Chelsea to an American, who has been spending just as much money, but who has been nowhere near as successful.)

There are—were—many others, too, some of them seeking refuge from the wrath of Vladimir Putin; several defectors have been found dead in suspicious circumstances—hanged, poisoned, impaled on railings. One of the most shocking anecdotes, in a book full of them, concerns the Cipriani Five, a group of middle-aged men who ate together occasionally at the eponymous swanky restaurant in Mayfair. One of the five was the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, but the rest, all English, had dealings with the Russian business community in London. All five died between 2010 and 2014. These deaths seem mysterious, but there was always another, more straightforward explanation—he jumped! he hanged himself!—which was convenient for a police force unmotivated to solve mysteries.

Zac wanted to emulate the lifestyle of some of the kids he was at school with—and London Falling can be read as a terrible warning about the dangers of an expensive education. His parents were not oligarchs; they were pillars of the Jewish community in London, leading a comfortable but ordinary life. So Zac became someone else. Akbar Shamji, who became a friend and “business partner” of Zac’s after the teenager left school, told the police in an interview that Zac had “fancy watches, fancy cars, planes, all the stuff that is very aspirational wealth in London.” Shamji hadn’t actually seen any of this stuff, unsurprisingly. After all, it didn’t exist. But Zac talked the talk, so he was taken at face value. And this led him into a demimonde that resulted, somehow, in him leaping from a building to his death. This is a revelatory book: What it revealed is that the London I know, the London I have lived in for half a century, is now built on a hidden grid of dark power and dirty money. I will now try to forget all about it and get on with my life.

There is a darkness in Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, too, a shadow cast by the current president of the United States. There is very little in the novel, which is set mostly just before and just after the last election, that names the darkness precisely—just a devastating passage toward the end of the book that lists the horrors of the past couple of years. “Artie watched all these things,” it concludes, “and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true: His country was committing suicide.”

We have not met Artie Dam before, and Strout readers will know that this is a big deal. Either Olive Kitteredge or Lucy Barton (and, in the previous novel, Tell Me Everything, it was both) have been at the center of the last few books. These two women have become dearly beloved by just about everyone who reads literary fiction, but there is no need to worry. Artie Dam is defiantly Stroutian: troubled, lonely, ambivalent about his marriage, a high school teacher crippled by his own decency. When we meet him, he is contemplating suicide, but he wants to kill himself in a way that looks like an accident, to spare his wife and son. Drowning at sea (he has a boat) seems best to him. Soon afterward, he nearly drowns at sea accidentally, and realizes that he wants to live. How he wants to live, however, remains a mystery to him.

Time in this novel is a fluid substance—it’s not the cha-cha. We learn a lot about Artie’s past: his friendships, his relationship with his father-in-law. But sometimes Strout interjects with a parenthetical containing information about his future too. A few years back, I wrote here about Carlo Rovelli’s brilliant little book The Order of Time, which explains how quantum physicists know it is wrong to think about time as a line. Time is not like “the English at a bus-stop, forming an orderly queue”; rather, he says, it’s a “crowd of Italians.” And that’s what narrative events occasionally feel like in The Things We Never Say : Strout knows what will happen to these characters after she has described this particular part of their lives, and she doesn’t see any reason not to tell us. Strout, however, despite her omniscience, is unable to do much about the storm that is enveloping us all.

Recently, I went with Louise Kennedy, the author of Trespasses and now Stations, to see Elizabeth Strout talk, at a college in Cambridge. We both came away determined to rip off her approach to her craft in any way we could; her explanation that she wrote scenes, not plot (a word she has no time for), we found especially inspiring and consoling. But it has to be said that Louise Kennedy, despite being at the beginning of her career, doesn’t need an awful lot of help. Trespasses was a devastating love story set during the Troubles (Kennedy grew up just outside Belfast); Stations, which takes us from the 1980s to 2007, is mostly about the Irish in London, although there is some back-and-forth that inevitably recalls the travels of Eilis Lacey between New York and her hometown in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, set thirty years earlier.

But the world has changed, become edgier. Róisín McCaffrey’s London life is all freezing-cold squats and drugs and parents lost to their demons; the young man she loves, Red Camelin, smart and charismatic, is disappearing into the bowels of the city. Stations is a beautiful novel about loss and being lost; at its center is a brilliantly drawn collection of found family, memorable people with their own ornately carved crosses to bear. But it’s also about another lost Irish generation, driven away by the politics and poverty that have blighted their island for so much of its history.

None of these books are happy books, with the possible exception of A Long Game (although the way that will make you feel likely depends on your sense of self-worth, if you create stories). But then, these are not happy times. These books are all beautiful, though. There is beauty in the writing, and in their empathy, and for me, reading them served the same function as prayer. As the world gets heavier, and its weight starts to feel unbearable, prayers are going to be needed, wherever we choose to find them. Please make some of your own, from whatever you have at your disposal.