Image courtesy of Iñaki del Olmo for Unsplash I know I’m a little late to the game for 2026 reading suggestions, but I hope I’m not alone in feeling a post-Goodreads challenge burnout in February, especially amidst the assessment period cram. Anyhow, I was inspired by this burnout to help curate Goodreads to-be-read-piles this year to fight the post-challenge blues.  The ‘new literary canon’ would seem like contradictory wording when the modern literary world has been so intent on opening up...

Photo from Wikimedia Commons The Emperor of Gladness , an Ocean Vuong novel published in May 2025, is a work of American fiction. But is it any more fiction than whatever promises America makes to its inhabitants, if not to the world?  A severe shift from the epistolary, poetic form of  On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous  (an inescapable title in an English Lit classroom) and the experimental poetry collections published in previous, Vuong attempts to write the quintessential American novel and...