In our October 22 issue, Lola Seaton reviews Jonathan Buckley’s latest novel, One Boat. “Buckley’s best fiction,” she writes, “is refreshingly free of self-regard: lovingly crafted but out of devotion to his characters rather than to exhibit his technical gifts.” This commitment to the lives of the people in his stories makes his books “alive right up to their edges,” and while that virtue “may be traditional, what the novel was built to do,” Seaton continues, “it can feel radical.” There is something about this ethic that a critic should inhabit, as well—a craft of devotion rather than exhibition. Seaton is a prolific young critic in the UK who pays as sharp and close attention to the shifting politics of the left as she does to contemporary novels. In venues ranging from Harper’s to the London Review of Books to the Financial Times, she has written about new fiction, Joni Mitchell, and soccer. For the Review, she has also reviewed Sheila Heti, Megan Nolan, and the 2022 London heat wave. She is a contributing writer …

Geoffrey O’Brien is one of those writers who can write about anything: opera, British postwar film, crime fiction, the Third Reich, Grant Wood, Patti Smith, Duke Ellington, Seinfeld. Yet these subjects are often united by a kind of nostalgia—or more precisely, the kind of nostalgia induced by pop culture artifacts. His essay from our August 20, 2026, issue, “A Gust from Another World,” is about the Bridey Murphy craze of the 1950s, which was sparked by the account of a young Colorado woman who discovered, under hypnosis, that she was possessed by the spirit of a long-dead Irishwoman. The dubious story (first documented in a book by her hypnotist, then adapted into a movie) helped give rise to a fascination with the unconscious, hypnotists, the afterlife, and mind control. For O’Brien, who remembers the craze from his childhood, it was “a blast from the country of the dead” that cut through a midcentury world “grounded in practicalities, reassured by material things that functioned: fuse boxes, automobile engines, lawn mowers, power drills, reel-to-reel tape recorders.” O’Brien has …