Plus: The Blue Wave Rolls On; Tally Brown; Penelope Fitzgerald; Consider M.F.K. Fisher
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Today in The New York Review of Books: Caleb Gayle appraises the evangelicals’ prosperity gospel; David Cole, Sue Halpern, Mark O’Connell, and Quinn Slobodian surf the blue wave; Melissa Anderson goes underground with Tally Brown; Andrew Katzenstein reads Jessica Francis Kane reading Penelope Fitzgerald; Anne Fadiman eats oysters with M.F.K. Fisher; and, from the archives, M.F.K. Fisher eats the grossest foods around.
In recent decades, the prosperity-minded evangelical Christianity within which I grew up has exerted ever-greater influence on American political culture.
On people power, memes, the view from the North Country, and JD Vance’s double bind
Tally Brown, New York reintroduces an “underground star” to the city whose stages, clubs, and bathhouses have been largely forgotten.
Decades before Penelope Fitzgerald became a celebrated novelist in her sixties, she took a mysterious trip to Mexico. A recent novel imagines what happened there—and wonders whether it delayed the start to her writing career.
Consider the Oyster is not really about cooking; like all of M.F.K. Fisher’s work, it’s about imagining.
Free from the Archives
In today’s newsletter, Anne Fadiman considers M.F.K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster. The illustrious food writer—once described by W.H. Auden as “the best prose writer in America”—only contributed to the Review twice: in 1979 she berated the degraded quality of food writing (“Fresh used to imply new, pure, lively. Now it means, at best, that when a food was packaged, it would qualify as ready to be eaten: ‘oven-fresh’ cookies a year on the shelf, ‘farm-fresh’ eggs laid last spring, ‘corn-on-the-cob fresh’ dehydrated vegetable soup-mix….”) and, in our December 18, 1980, issue, she wrote about the pleasures of gross foods.
“Slugs are one of my few innate dislikes, although I am more tolerant of them as I mature. I have eaten them calmly, so as not to lose face, in several Spaces and Times. I would prefer not to do this again. The Japanese ovaries are very delicate, but the big sea slugs sliced and pickled down in the Rhone Delta in Provence are tough leathery slabs, impossibly rich and heavy. I feel fairly sure that I need not face them another time….”
Monday, November 9, 2026
In November Democrats could take back power in Congress, if the polls are to be believed. But will they? Is Trump’s unpopularity enough to shake up turnout, and will voters’ rights be respected everywhere? Where does the balance of power lie between progressives and centrists in the Democratic Party?
Fintan O’Toole, Advising Editor of The New York Review, hosts contributors Ben Rhodes and Astra Taylor to discuss these questions and more for the latter half of a two-part online conversation, held before and after the midterms, that takes the measure of America at a crucial moment. The event is pay-what-you-wish (with a suggested fee of $10) and open to the public. Registration grants access to both installments.
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