Five Reviews Worth Your Time This Week

By Andy — 2026-10-16 — Literary News

The reviews pile up faster than any of us can read them. Most don't stick. This week's batch does.

Shawn Gude's biography of Eugene Debs, the socialist firebrand who shaped American labor politics, asks a question that feels urgent right now: what does socialism actually mean in a country built to resist it? Gude, who edited Jacobin before turning biographer, doesn't fetishize his subject. He shows Debs as an orator who could electrify a room, a railroad organizer who got radicalized in prison, a man whose political language fused Christian mythology and Marxist critique into something that made ordinary workers believe change was possible. Joanna Scutts, writing for The New Republic, notes that the real lesson here isn't about a single leader, no matter how inspiring. It's about collective resistance. About ordinary people.

Then there's Barbara Trapido.

The characters bicker with intelligence, cruelty, wit. Garner has a soft spot for novels about narrow-circumstance kids who get befriended by eccentric urbanites, so this hits him where he lives. He calls it a pocket classic, the kind you want to crawl inside and never leave.

Memoirs about addiction are tricky to get right. Meghan O'Gieblyn's *Will and Attention* doesn't settle for the confessional mode. She interweaves her own relapse into alcoholism with her unexpected turn toward Catholicism—years after she'd abandoned religion entirely. O'Gieblyn draws on Simone Weil, Schopenhauer, Catholic theology, and she doesn't apologize for it. The book becomes something larger than a recovery story. It's an examination of attention itself, of the kind of care we owe ourselves and each other. Actually, that's not quite right—it's an examination of what happens when we refuse that care, when boredom breeds willfulness and willfulness breeds destruction.

Madeline ffitch's *Avalon, Rise* and Tom McCarthy's *The Rhyl Poster* round out the list. Lily Meyer and Max Callimanopulos get their respective say. You could ignore all of this and scroll through your phone. You won't be worse off for it.

Or you could read one of these instead.

Source: "It's a striking portrait of a remarkable political evolution." —