Threadcount Review

An American Non-Fiction from Graywolf

Marguerite Adler — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Christopher Ridenour's The Walking Survey, published by Graywolf Press on 2026-06-11, is a 274-page account of one geographer's attempt to walk the Pennsylvania portion of the Mason-Dixon Line in the summer of 2023.

The Letters of Mavis Gallant to Her Editor

Saul Pickering — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A small archive at the New York Public Library holds Mavis Gallant's working correspondence with her New Yorker editor across thirty-four years. The letters are an education in how a story gets made.

The Gilead Cycle Finished: A Late Reading of Marilynne Robinson's Four Novels

Marguerite Adler — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A return to the four Gilead novels in the spring of 2026, with the question of what the cycle has become now that Jack has settled into its position as the volume that closes it.

The Tsundoku Problem: On the Books One Has Not Yet Read

Saul Pickering — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

An essay on the unread stack, the small guilt that attends it, and the slow shift in how to think about it.

Across the Alphabet: The Politics of Transliteration

Ronan Devlin — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

How a translator spells a name in English can carry centuries of imperial history. A close look at three writers whose transliterated names have changed in print across a decade.

The Strand Dollar Carts at Closing

Saul Pickering — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

An hour spent watching the closing-time ritual at the dollar carts outside the Strand Bookstore at Broadway and East 12th in Manhattan, where the day's final markdowns and the wheeling-in of the carts constitute an unsentimental piece of New York bookselling theatre.

Olga Tokarczuk's The Empusium in English: A Long Reading

Naïma Bouallam — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Antonia Lloyd-Jones's translation of Tokarczuk's 2022 novel reaches English in 2026, and the question of what the book attempts in its conversation with Thomas Mann.

A Day at Actes Sud, and the Long Argument About Place

Naïma Bouallam — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The French publisher's headquarters in Arles operate on a rhythm that the Paris trade has not quite forgiven for forty-eight years.

The Condolence Letter After the Internet

Ronan Devlin — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

What happens to the most difficult of all the personal-letter forms when most condolence now happens in a comment thread, a text message, or not at all.

A Marseille Novel in Translation: The Port House

Naïma Bouallam — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Yacine Halilou's The Port House, translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins for And Other Stories on 2026-06-04, is 286 pages of careful, accumulative work on a single Marseille apartment block between 1972 and 2019.

Virago Modern Classics at Forty-Five: The Green Spine, Considered

Marguerite Adler — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Virago Modern Classics, launched by Carmen Callil in 1978, marks forty-eight years of continuous publishing in 2026. Marguerite Adler walks through the green-spine list across four decades and asks what the imprint still has to do.

The Personal Canon: On the Books One Keeps

Ronan Devlin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A piece on the small private list of books any serious reader carries, and on the test by which a book enters it.

Deborah Eisenberg's Collected Stories: A Late Reckoning

Marguerite Adler — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Picador's 2026 omnibus collects all seven volumes of Deborah Eisenberg's short fiction in one binding, occasion for a sustained reading of one of the strangest careers in American letters.

The Postcard as a Prose Form

Marguerite Adler — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

An argument that the postcard, constrained by space and exposed to every reader along the way, has produced some of the most precise prose of the twentieth century.

The Subscription Shop in Ennistymon

Naïma Bouallam — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A small bookshop in a north Clare market town, operating on an annual subscription model under which members receive one curated book a month and access to a small lending library, considered as one experimental answer to the economics of rural bookselling.

McNally Editions and the Small American Reissue Boom

Devon Cree — Sat, 30 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

McNally Editions, the reissue imprint launched in 2021 by the Brooklyn bookseller McNally Jackson, has now published forty-six titles. Devon Cree visits the imprint's editorial office and considers the wider American small-press reissue surge.

The Footnote or the Gloss: A Translator's Invisible Decisions

Devon Cree — Sat, 30 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

When a foreign word will not behave, the translator can footnote it, gloss it inside the sentence, or trust the reader. Three recent books test all three.

Finishing Javier Marías: A Late Reading of the Tomás Nevinson Trilogy

Saul Pickering — Thu, 28 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A long reading of Marías's final trilogy, completed and translated after the author's death in 2022, and the question of what the late work tells us about the whole career.

Reading in Translation: Trust, and the Limits of It

Naïma Bouallam — Wed, 27 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

An essay on what is required of the reader who reads books written in languages she does not know.

The Letters Rilke Did Not Send

Saul Pickering — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A new edition collects the drafts Rilke wrote and then withheld. The book complicates the figure of the great letter writer in interesting and uncomfortable ways.

A Novel of the Baltic Coast, from Fitzcarraldo

Saul Pickering — Sun, 24 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Kazimierz Linde's The Long Strand, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones for Fitzcarraldo Editions on 2026-05-21, runs to 312 pages and crosses ninety years on a single beach. It is patient, sometimes oppressively so.

The Penguin Modern Classics Rebrand and the Long Memory of a Series

Saul Pickering — Sat, 23 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Penguin Modern Classics rolled out a redesigned cover format in March 2026, the fourth such redesign since the series began in 1961. Saul Pickering examines what the new format conceals and what the long-running list still gets right.

Dialect and the Translator: When Andalusian Becomes Appalachian

Saul Pickering — Sat, 23 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

How do translators handle regional voice when the target language has no equivalent dialect? A look at three uneasy solutions.

Behind the Till at Shakespeare and Company

Ronan Devlin — Sat, 23 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A week working in the rue de la Bûcherie bookshop opposite Notre-Dame, observing the operational realities of a bookshop that has become a literary tourist destination while still functioning as a working bookseller of new and second-hand titles.

Sebald, Twenty-Five Years On: The Four Books, Reread

Marguerite Adler — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A return to the four prose works of W. G. Sebald in the spring of 2026, twenty-five years after his death, and the question of what survives the imitation that has followed.

The Re-Read: On Returning to a Book

Marguerite Adler — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

On the kind of reading that only happens the second time, and the books that ask for it.

The Long Knopf List, Surveyed

Marguerite Adler — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A reading of the Borzoi books published between 1915 and 2025 reveals an imprint whose identity has shifted three times and whose taste, by some measures, has not.

The City Lights Staircase After Seventy Years

Marguerite Adler — Sun, 17 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A long afternoon in the upstairs poetry room at City Lights Booksellers on Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, considered both as a working bookshop and as a literary institution that has carried a particular editorial position since Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened it in 1953.

Long-Running Correspondences in the Digital Age

Naïma Bouallam — Sun, 17 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Three contemporary letter writers describe how they have kept a sustained correspondence going across email, paper, and the years between.

A Tokyo Novella in English: The Window Bookshop

Naïma Bouallam — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Mio Tachibana's 134-page novella, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton for Tilted Axis Press on 2026-05-13, is small in every way it needs to be. It is also one of the best short books of the year so far.

Dalkey Archive After John O'Brien: An Imprint Tries to Stay Itself

Ronan Devlin — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Dalkey Archive Press, the experimental fiction imprint founded by John O'Brien in 1984, was acquired in 2022 by Deep Vellum. Ronan Devlin reads the post-acquisition list and asks whether the catalogue still recognises itself.

When to Retranslate a Classic: The Case of the Sixth Madame Bovary

Saul Pickering — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

In October a new English Madame Bovary will appear from Penguin Classics, the sixth in a century. What does each generation think the last one missed?

The Abandoned Book and What It Tells Us

Devon Cree — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

On the books we stop reading, and the small honest information they carry about us as readers.

NYRB Classics in Its Third Decade, and the Trust Built on Black Borders

Devon Cree — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The New York Review of Books's reissue imprint has now published more than four hundred and twenty titles. Its uniform jackets remain, against expectation, the engine of the project.

Iowa Soil, Iowa Counties: A Small Press Non-Fiction

Marguerite Adler — Sat, 09 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Hannah Voss's The County and the Furrow, from Belt Publishing on 2026-05-06, is a quiet 248-page report on land tenure in three Iowa counties between 1980 and 2024. It is the kind of book that gets ignored and shouldn't.

Roberto Calasso's Last Books: A Survey of the Late Work

Naïma Bouallam — Sat, 09 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The eleven-volume Opera in Corso in the editions Adelphi and Farrar, Straus and Giroux have produced since Calasso's death in 2021, read for the shape they make together.

Carcanet Press at Fifty: A Manchester Poetry List Considered

Naïma Bouallam — Sat, 09 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Carcanet Press, founded in Oxford in 1969 and based in Manchester since 1972, marks fifty-seven years of continuous publishing in 2026. Naïma Bouallam reviews the spring list and the long arc of the press's poetry catalogue.

Translating Poetry: Three Case Studies from a Difficult Year

Naïma Bouallam — Sat, 09 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Three recent poetry translations, three different solutions to the same impossible problem. Notes on the working choices behind English versions of Akhmatova, Adonis, and a young Vietnamese poet.

The Nine Shelves of Morisaki

Naïma Bouallam — Sat, 09 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A small bookshop in the Jimbocho district of Tokyo, run by a man who carries only nine shelves of stock at any time and rotates the inventory completely every three months, considered as a model of editorial bookselling at the smallest possible scale.

What a Small-Press Editor Does in a Working Day

Saul Pickering — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

An eight-hour shadow at Pelham House Press in Manchester reveals an editorial role that is mostly administration interrupted by reading.

The Postscript as a Literary Form

Marguerite Adler — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The PS, the second PS, the marginal note added in different ink: a brief defense of the most undervalued unit in the history of the personal letter.

Reading Aloud as Adults

Naïma Bouallam — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A piece on the half-forgotten practice of adults reading to each other, and on what the practice still has to offer two people in the same room.

Powell's City of Books, After Eleven

Devon Cree — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A late shift in the Burnside Street flagship of Powell's, the Portland used-and-new bookshop that occupies a full city block, when the foot traffic has thinned and the booksellers begin the long re-shelving of the day's churn.

A Corkonian Debut from Tramp Press

Ronan Devlin — Sat, 02 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Donal Twomey's The Bandon Line, published by Tramp Press on 2026-04-30, is a 244-page first novel set on the closed West Cork railway between 1961 and 1979. It is the kind of book the Irish small-press scene was made for.

Persephone Books and the Slow Recovery of a Mid-Century Library

Marguerite Adler — Sat, 02 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Persephone Books reopened its physical shop in Bath last year, twenty-six years after Nicola Beauman founded the press. Marguerite Adler visits the shop and reads the spring 2026 reissues against the original Bloomsbury catalogue.

The Translator's Preface as an Art Form

Marguerite Adler — Sat, 02 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

What can a translator say before her book begins? A close reading of five recent prefaces and the small rhetorical tradition they belong to.

Carcanet's Poetry List at Fifty, Looked at Plainly

Saul Pickering — Sat, 02 May 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Michael Schmidt's Manchester poetry press has issued about nine hundred titles since 1969. Its successor editors are now in their second year of running it.

Rebecca West's Yugoslavia, Eighty-Five Years On

Saul Pickering — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A return to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in the spring of 2026, and the question of how much of West's 1937 Yugoslavia survives a second reading.

Independent Press Accounting, the Unsentimental Version

Marguerite Adler — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Four small publishers opened their books to a quarterly review. The numbers were not as bad, or as good, as the trade suggests.

Fan Letters to the Dead

Ronan Devlin — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A small archive at a Welsh public library holds eighteen hundred letters written to authors who could not read them. The collection is stranger and more honest than it sounds.