Now that our president is minting gold coins with his face on them, building a triumphal arch, and sponsoring blood sport in the capital, it seems like a good time to read up on ancient Rome. That’s what I was thinking when I wrote Lessons from a Lost Republic: What Ancient Rome Can Teach Us About This American Moment. It explains how the ancient Roman Republic collapsed into autocracy and how we might prevent it from happening to us. For those who might want to learn more about the messy world of ancient Rome, I recommend starting with historical fiction and an ancient Roman epic. While others are busy poring over Marcus Aurelius’s late-life musings about how to be a better Roman emperor (hint: slaughter “barbarians,” persecute Christians, choose your idiot son as your successor), you can enjoy these books instead.
This 1972 novel about the rise of Augustus—the man we call the first Roman emperor—is told almost entirely by those who surrounded and enabled him. The transition from republic to autocracy is narrated through (imagined) letters and journals of his closest advisors, friends, and family. Even for those of us who know what happened, the author creates an intimate view of this extraordinary period through the inner thoughts and conflicts of the aspiring emperor’s closest confidantes (imagine a novel about Donald Trump told entirely through Pete Hegseth’s Signal chat and Melania’s diaries, but beautifully written). Augustus is at its most compelling when we hear from his exiled daughter, Julia, who does not get her say in the historical sources, but whose tragic fate is sympathetically drawn in this novel.
There is perhaps no greater Roman writer than Virgil (apologies to another recommended author, Ovid, below) and no greater Roman poem than the Aeneid. It is an epic in the mold of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but written centuries later by a poet working under the watchful eye of a still-figuring-it-out Roman emperor. In the Aeneid, Virgil crafts the story of Rome’s distant past in a way that “predicts” the best possible version of the world he was actually living in. Even if he did not necessarily believe it all, Virgil shaped the story of Rome and Augustus into a masterpiece. If you think you don’t know the Aeneid, imagine the story of the Trojan Horse and thank Virgil. I don’t think he is credited in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, but he probably should be.
If you find yourself missing Virgil after the Aeneid, you can turn to this lesser known, but brilliant novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is an early contribution to what is now a cottage industry of stories told from women’s points of view in classical mythology. Lavinia was the young woman whose hand in marriage was promised to Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s Aeneid and founder of the Roman people. Her role in the origin story of Rome is crucial but unvoiced. Le Guin not only gives Lavinia something to say but also conjures her whole life and her world as they could have been or should have been. A brief but essential bit of science fiction provides the marvelous, impossible conceit that gives Lavinia agency she never had even as she remains a character written by a man in the future. She knows what is to come but makes her choices and lives her life in a magnificently described world. Le Guin’s version of pre-Roman Italy is the version I now imagine whenever I read the Aeneid.
A saga of the first dynasty of Roman emperors in all of their back-biting and conniving glory, this 1930s novel inspired a soapy 1970s mini-series that set Derek Jacobi up for a lifetime of wearing togas on the silver screen (I once asked AI to generate a picture of a bust of a Roman senator and it made one with his face). Extrapolating from salacious and rumor-filled ancient sources, the novel offers an inside scoop into the machinations of the first Roman imperial family. It paints a picture of Livia, the wife of Augustus, as someone not to be trifled with, unless you like your figs with a dash of poison. A huge bestseller over the decades, it remains in print. Graves wrote another novel about a different famous family of the first century CE—it’s called King Jesus (good, but not as good as I, Claudius, imho).
No one is sure what the Roman poet Ovid did to tick off Augustus, but whatever it was, it got him exiled to a seaside town in Romania for the rest of his life. Although a nice enough place, it wasn’t Rome, and Ovid never stopped complaining about it or trying to get the emperor to let him come home. The Tristia is a series of poems describing his exile and making a case for forgiveness. It even includes a poem that addresses the book itself, telling it how to present itself when it gets to Rome. Ovid’s Tristia is less famous than his magnum opus, the Metamorphoses, but if you want to know what it is like to be a once-famous artist who gets on the wrong side of an autocrat, this is for you.
As a person who lives on a peninsula between two rivers used for shipping, this is surprising to me. I assumed water traffic was lower emissions for some reason.
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7 Literary Sinsby Carey Baraka, Sabrina Jaszi, Anna Juul, Karim Kattan, Ahmed Naji, Francesco Pacifico, Imogen West-Knights
Confession: When we thought about what we wanted to ask our writers this summer, our desires immediately turned to the gossipy, the secret, the lurid. What was it that they were not telling us? What might they not even be telling themselves?
The editorial process is, of course, set up to root out any misdeeds. Every piece of writing you read in our pages has been copy-edited, fact-checked and carefully scrutinized. Any expression of fault — a correction or apology — is the source of great embarrassment.
And yet, as we put together this series of essays, we wondered: Is there value in occasionally stepping out of line? Could it be that, in a world that is always pushing us to conformity and similarity, a little sin here and there is the ultimate sign of individual spirit? Seven of our contributors gamely shared (some of) their secret sins.
At the age of 13, I became addicted to stealing from other writers. It is what I call literary kleptomania. It started after I fell in love for the first time. She had green eyes, and I didn’t know what to do with the hungry fire inside me, so I fell ill with a fever. My grades were declining. My grandfather visited me, checked my temperature, and left a small book next to my bed. It was a study of Abu Nuwas, an Arabic poet (c. 756–814) famous for his poems on alcohol, love, homosexuality, and other sins.
In bed, with a new notebook, I started to copy the lines of poetry that drew me in. I recovered from the love fever in a week. But I never recovered from my addiction to copying the work of other writers. I would go to the library and wander around, flipping through the books, not looking for something to read but for the jewelry hidden inside them. Sometimes it was a paragraph written in a style that was new to me, sometimes a sentence that blazed, sometimes a single word I was learning for the first time. I never cared about ideas, or plot, or themes. They were pebbles on the road; the true hidden diamonds were the words and phrases whose true power was hidden. Look, for example, at this jewel that I stole recently: “Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.” Because of it, I learned about the beautiful tree Laburnum, and its golden flowers in spring, which become pods in autumn, perfect as a metaphor or something to recycle to write a colorful picture. I will not tell you, of course, who I stole from, although any reader of American poetry might recognize her in those lines.
There is a legend about Abu Nuwas. He went to a master and asked to be taught. The master told him to go and memorize a thousand lines of poetry. He spent a year doing it, then returned. The master said: "Good. Now forget them. If you can, you will be a poet." That is what I have been trying to do all these years in Arabic and English. I convince myself that I forget what I memorize, but ghosts of writers and people I stole from keep chasing me.
I am a thief, good at hiding what I take, memorizing it, until it flows in my bloodstream, so no one can tell where the blood comes from, or which writers I stole from. Still, in most of my books, I have a list of writers that I stole from, to thank them.
—Ahmed Naji
My biggest literary sin is probably that I don’t like full stops, in fact I don’t use them at all if I can avoid it, really, I’m a comma girlie, my sentences go on and on, both when I write and when I speak, and sometimes I completely forget what I’m talking about as I’m talking, since I’m also fond of the occasional aside, especially a very long one, to the point that everyone including me loses the thread, because fundamentally I write the way I speak, and I speak the way I think, I don’t have the filter that full stops represent, I can’t tell where one thought ends and the next begins, until sometimes my editor pleads with me to add a full stop, like she’ll say you’re moving too fast here, Anna, and then I listen, because I have great faith in authority. And I try to remember it for the remainder of the text. That I’m supposed to take it slow, or, alternatively, at least, to rotate between short and long sentences. But then I get carried away again, fingers flying across the keyboard, like that time I had a manic breakdown while I was writing a book, when I felt at my most brilliant and I was comparing myself to Jesus and I think maybe also Aristotle, a bit, and I do remember some sort of long argument about why the most logical thing to do was to stop smoking without any help, because that’s what Jesus would have done, given that nicotine gum didn’t exist in his day, but in the end I wasn’t able to quit cold turkey, and people continued to try to teach me to use full stops. Sometimes I do.
—Anna Juul
The literary sin I want to confess (to the internet?) is that I’ve stopped unquestioningly trusting an author’s vision. I want to let them carry me into their story. But I find myself throwing a book on the floor as soon as a flourish in a sentence feels unearned or the writing contrived. Suddenly, I no longer trust the way the author deals with grief, marriage, breakups, unemployment, politics, or anything at all.
It is an insane way to react to prose. Prose has sloppiness built in, it’s a loose art form. You cannot expect truth at all turns. Sentences are prepared every minute like sandwiches at delis. When I reread Balzac or Woolf I find so many dishonest things, instances where they have twisted an obvious reality in service of some kind of cohesive moral meaning. Yet these authors have raised me, and I’m happy with the result.
But I can no longer delve into novels that I feel have betrayed the bizarre unilateral trust I had in them — and yet I’ll spend weeks on a page I like, and read it aloud to friends, and worship it like you worship a bakery, or a grandmother, and be content.
I’m not proud of this. It’s not healthy. And besides, what am I really looking for — poetry?
—Francesco Pacifico
In the English-speaking literary circles, I often hear that writers should “show not tell.” This expectation is not as present in my literary world (I write mostly in French), but even so, I’ve noticed a growing appreciation of efficiency. Sentences are praised when they are ciselées (“chiseled”) — an adjective French literary critics over-use to describe any good sentence. Characters must be coherent; plots must be tight and any gaps in the plot must be patched. As if a short story or novel’s natural destiny is to become a well-crafted miniseries.
In my novels, characters plod through their lives. They are opaque to the narrator, to the reader. So often, they explain things to themselves. If they fall in love, they analyze the phenomenon until they exhaust it. If they’re sad, ditto. This is not as a gratuitous literary gesture; it’s because I think we are mostly opaque to ourselves and the written text feels like one of the only places where this opacity can still exist.
Instead of going straight to the point — or even having a point — a novel should meander with its characters, look for and fail to find explanations. The most compelling narrators often think they are telling a story but are in fact hapless as the narrative slips through their fingers.
Writers manipulate a cumbersome, reluctant material. Something happens when stories resist their forward momentum and characters resist their writers. Sure, we can hammer language into efficiency, but it doesn’t always yield. It’s unwieldy and it’s this unwieldiness I love.
Don’t get me wrong. I love compelling and exciting stories. I do not think that one type of literature is better than another, just as I would never consider inaccessibility for its own sake a virtue. But I also love stories that can only exist as texts, because they explore the singular features of this weird, inefficient, awkward art form of ours, because they stubbornly tell and don’t show.
—Karim Kattan
I recently copyedited the first draft of my second novel, before a professional copyeditor got their hands on it. I did this because I vividly remember getting my first book copyedited and having to suffer the humiliation of someone else gently pointing out that I had used several words over and over in the manuscript. “Trudge,” “unpleasant” and “lightly,” for instance, had all overstayed their welcome. Ever since, I have been on high alert for repetitions. And when I come across one, all too often I find myself sidling over to Google to ask it for a list of synonyms.
Could I think of my own list of other words for “to stare,” for instance? Of course I could. But for whatever reason, this is the one area of my writing where I am apparently happy to outsource the creative process. Perhaps if I were flitting to a bookshelf in these moments and taking down a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus I might feel less grubby. I would be using a physical reference text, which has a certain literary flair to it. But I don’t own Roget’s Thesaurus. When I need information of any kind, the first place I’m looking is online, because I am normal.
I feel a certain amount of shame about it, because coming up with words is what my brain is for. I know a great many words. There are plenty of them in there. I try to convince myself that there are advantages to my habit. Sometimes I learn a new word, or stumble across an interesting etymology!Sure, occasionally. It’s mostly laziness, though. I am almost certainly eroding some neural pathways by googling the thesaurus, in the same way that using my phone calculator app has slowly robbed me of my times tables. But I’ll continue never to do sums in my head, and I’ll continue to tell myself that, sometimes, it’s all right to choose from a little menu of words brought to me by the internet.
—Imogen West-Knights
A virtuous mentor once told me that I should read a work closely to the end before translating it — to be sure I wanted to take it on, to save myself the trouble of going back over repeated words, motifs and spellings, and to establish the right tone from the start. My mentor meant well, but honestly, where’s the fun in that?
I prefer to remain as ignorant as possible for as long as possible. Going through a text in murky slow motion, every sentence becomes a little thriller. How will the tightly knotted structure of the grammar and syntax loosen into meaning? What subterfuge has the author devised within a sentence, and what chills of humor or irony will run across its surface as the subterfuge is discovered?
The process of translation exposes how much you miss in ordinary reading, even in the language you know best. (I once reread Jane Austen while cramming vocabulary for a graduate school admissions test and noticed, for the first time, words in English that I'd previously read past as if they weren’t there at all.) The less you focus on plot, the more the elements of language come into view. So, for me, often, a quick skim to the end and then right to work. I go sentence by sentence, squinting into the half-light — looking just far enough into the penumbra not to crash into the trees. And when I do crash, there’s always the backspace key to uncrumple the car. Going backward is a small penance for the pleasure of not knowing what’s around the bend.
—Sabrina Jaszi
Every time I begin writing an essay, I promise myself that I’m going to track my sources. That, this time, I’m going to make things easier for myself by noting down where I come across every single fact. And yet I never do. Instead, at the end of each draft, once the fact-checking starts, I begin the arduous task of trying to remember where I read or heard something. Part of the problem is that a lot of the essays I write emerge from years of casual curiosity about a subject. But the bigger problem is that I don’t care enough to solve this problem.
I have many other literary crimes — an extreme snobbishness about what I read, trying too much to write like other writers I admire, and a habit of googling myself every few days — but none of them haunts me more than the inability to track my sources. And so I am heartbroken when a fact is struck from a piece of my writing because I can’t provide a source. My laziness haunts my nights. Once, I couldn’t remember where I had come across a particular crucial detail about a man I was writing about. I went back to all the papers I’d read, all the articles, all the interviews I’d done, but I couldn’t find it. So I convinced myself that I’d dreamed this detail. That I’d wanted so badly to tie things together that this piece of information came to me as I slept. A few days before the final draft was due, I realized where I’d read it. It was an email that someone had sent to me at 1 a.m., and that I’d read in the zone between deep sleep and wakefulness.
Like Sabrina Jaszi, I do not read works to the end before beginning a translation. And that is how I ended up translating a four-volume memoir instead of the two-volume version I intended to translate. (I was working from digital scans of a 175-year-old book, and I didn't check the page count.) Surprise!
On the heels of the news that it was harder for Black Americans to get home loans in the 20th century, research is really confirming what we've known for a while this week.
Newly digitized mortgage records from 38 US states reveal the profound racial inequality of two mortgage programmes during the 1930s and 1940s. These loans, supported by the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, were mainly responsible for the emergence of a US society that idealized home ownership. However, Black households were systematically excluded from receiving such loans. By contrast, immigrants received mortgages proportional to their number.
It's tough to gather good data on long Covid when the definition of long Covid is nebulous, but I'm glad to see they're trying, and that drugs already in wide usage are candidates for prevention.
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