Christian Lorentzen has worked as an editor at US Weekly, the New Leader, Harper’s and the LRB and has edited two volumes of pieces from n+1. He has a newsletter on Substack.
After two hours on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, the flight was cancelled and we were deplaned. I had been seated next to a former congresswoman who lost to another incumbent in 2022 as a result of redistricting, after decades in the House of Representatives. Like me, she was on her way to Chicago to attend the Democratic National Convention. The next morning she was due to have...
The tin cup is empty, and the ass has gone under. Joe Biden’s political career is over, and he had to do it by autocoup. His two most trusted aides came to him at Rehoboth Beach and told him from a distance – because he has Covid – that he no longer had a path to victory. The money had dried up, he was trailing in all the usual swing states, and even in states the Democrats usually win without spending much money, like Virginia and New Mexico. The next day he posted his resignation letter to X (formerly Twitter) and followed it up with an endorsement of his vice president. Oh, yeah, c’mon, man, keep her around. So came to an end a month of blather about the way Biden had become King Lear. The final reckoning was less like Julius Caesar than like sending the president to the self-checkout till at Tesco to pay for his own hemlock.
The debate last month between Biden and Trump was painful to watch because it reminded us that someday we’ll all die. In retrospect Biden’s advanced age was a political asset in 2020. By contrast with the sneering and erratic Trump, given to mocking the disabled and insulting anyone unlucky enough to be in his vicinity, here was a kindly and familiar old man who had suffered...
‘Ihave clandestine conversations with supposedly nonexistent personages,’ Alicia Western tells her psychiatrist in Stella Maris, the second of two novels by Cormac McCarthy published this autumn. The leader of these phantoms is called the Thalidomide Kid. He’s a bit over three feet tall (Alicia measured this by comparing their shadows), has a bald and scarred head and...
The title is ironic. Whatever a ‘fuckboy’ is – my understanding is that it’s a slang term, about a decade old, for young American men in cities who conduct a caddish heterosexual sex life – the narrator of Sean Thor Conroe’s first novel, who shares the author’s name, doesn’t do much fucking. ‘Fucced Boy’ or ‘Fuccup’...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.