In their candid, comprehensive book Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, legendary actress Dame Judi Dench and actor and director Brendan O’Hea discuss Dench’s experiences performing iconic Shakespearean roles, including Cleopatra, Titania, and Lady Macbeth. I talked with Dench and O’Hea about actor-audience reciprocity, the communal experience of...

I was halfway through writing the first draft of a novel about artificial intelligence when I heard that Christie’s planned to auction a portrait produced by AI. This was before DALL-E, before GPT3, before Gemini, Grok, and the latest chatbots. At the time, the idea of an algorithm producing art was plausible, but ridiculous. In theory, it was possible...

The most exciting thing to encounter in the world of publishing is a writer who doesn’t sound like anyone else. I first read Gabriel Smith at the Drift, where our then fiction editor spied his story, “The Complete,” in the slush, so it’s been a thrill to help bring out his debut novel, Brat, in my other role as an editor at Penguin Press. Brat is sharp,...

The locus of Help Wanted, Adelle Waldman’s new novel, is a big-box store in New York’s Hudson Valley. This is a departure from her usual subject matter. Writing it also required a significant departure from her usual life: Waldman actually joined the workforce at a real Hudson Valley big-box store. Help Wanted draws from that experience—a perceptive,...

A night at the Freud Museum! The idea appeals. I always think twelve hours the perfect length for any holiday. Philip Larkin at his most likable said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day,” and I agree. Packing my case, though, my intent feels heavy. There isn’t the sense of a spree. I think of the bags I took with me when...

In her debut novel, The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden writes a tense, sensuous, and expertly-plotted tale of two women in post-WWII Netherlands who are thrust into a close-quartered and tempestuous relationship with each other. The novel is at once a historical reconciliation, an empathetic character study, a mystery, and a love story, all delivered...