Vote for Our Next Book Club Pick!

Dear Readers,

Our first of two October book clubs meets tonight, which means it’s time to select our next read.

Because it’s spooky season, we’ve narrowed it down to: a lyrical zombie novel, a historical witch hunting novel (narrated by a wax doll) and, perhaps most hauntingly, “a meditation on the moral complexities that arise in the gap between our values and our lives.”

Here are the nominees, along with their cover copy:

🧟 It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over - Anne De Marcken (New Directions, 2024) $15.95 paperback

CO-WINNER OF THE NOVEL PRIZE

WINNER OF THE URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE

WINNER OF THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD

WINNER OF A PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD

This third perspective on myself is disconcerting.

The heroine of the spare and haunting It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over is voraciously alive in the afterlife. Adrift yet keenly aware, she notes every bizarre detail of her new reality. And even if she has forgotten her name and much of what connects her to her humanity, she remembers with an implacable and nearly unbearable longing the place where she knew herself and was known—where she loved and was loved. Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.

A bracing writer of great nerve and verve, Anne de Marcken bends reality (and the reader's mind) with throwaway assurance. It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over plumbs mortality and how it changes everything, except possibly love. Delivering a near-Beckettian whopping to the reader's imagination, this is one of the sharpest and funniest novels of recent years, a tale for our dispossessed times.

Anne de Marcken is a queer interdisciplinary artist and writer living on unceded land of the Coast Salish people in Olympia, WA, in the United States. She is the founding editor and publisher of the 3rd Thing.

🧙🏻‍♀️The Wax Child - Olga Ravn (New Directions, 2025), $20 hardcover

In seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man who gives them dark powers: they can steal people's happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or death. They are all in danger of the stake.

The Wax Child, narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, is an unsettling horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of premodern Europe.

Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of real witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland in the seventeenth century. Full of lush storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn also weaves in quotes from original sources such as letters, magical spells and manuals, court documents, and Scandinavian grimoires.

Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen's texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen's readership worldwide. Her novel The Employees was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 2021.

Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He won the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik's Love.

💔 Theory and Practice - Michelle de Kretser (Catapult, 2025), $25 hardcover

WINNER OF THE STELLA PRIZE

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

A new novel of startling intelligence from prizewinning Australian author Michelle de Kretser, following a writer looking back on her young adulthood and grappling with what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.

It’s 1986, and “beautiful, radical ideas” are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a “deconstructed relationship.” They become lovers, and the narrator’s feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf’s diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? Michelle de Kretser’s new novel offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in the gap between our values and our lives.

MICHELLE DE KRETSER’S fiction has been praised by Hilary Mantel, Anita Desai, Ursula K. Le Guin, and A.S. Byatt, among many others. She is the author of six previous novels, including the Miles Franklin Award winners, Questions of Travel and The Life to Come, the Man Booker Prize long-listed The Lost Dog, and Kirkus Prize finalist Scary Monsters.

Please vote for your choice here by Tuesday, October 7.

Thanks for your help!

Best,

Kate & Michael