Happy June! Hope your summer is getting off to a good start! For me, summer means batching a ton of cold brew and keeping myself constantly slathered in SPF ∞.
Speaking of getting roasted, the worst people in the world are beefing, and here’s to hoping they both lose. Did you catch all the news this week? Catch up with some Venns!
You’re in luck, readers. We have a lot to love this Friday.
The theme this week is “Forever Young.” We at Lit Hub are getting our kicks in the rearview mirror, reminiscing on everything from our first chaotic friend groups to our first absurd recitals. We’re playing make-believe and suspending disbelief, in full defiance of the mortal coil. The aesthetic may or may not be Nokiacore, or Y2K Futurism.
James Folta has been getting joy from an amazingly detailed indie research project—the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute’s [CARI] Index of Aesthetics.
CARI represents a collective of researchers and designers who classify consumer aesthetics. The index includes hyper-detailed mood boards for late to mid-century categories like “Corporate Hippie,” “Indie Sleaze,” and “Blob World.” James says it’s an excellent resource/rabbit-hole. “It’s like looking up character actors you know from somewhere but for visual styles.”
Elsewhere on the visual style front, I, Brittany Allen, been catching joy from a very old aesthetic: “Soft Colonial Wanderlust.” I’ve been on a quest to find a low-impact craft to treat my escalating case of Second Screen Syndrome, and recently incorporated the art of decoupage into my treatment plan. The maestro John Derian has a lot of warm how-to videos for beginners. And I’m happy to report that it is, in fact, very soothing to make pretty, useless things with your own hands!
Jessie Gaynor went to a children’s dance recital and experienced a Lynchian (“both funereal and heavily medicated”) tap dance routine. “Anyway, it was inspired. Highly recommend watching kids’ artistic pursuits whenever you can.”
Speaking of both children’s pastimes and what the CARI index might call “McBling,” Molly Odintz watched the movie D.E.B.S. for the first time, and says “it was like Charlie’s Angels, Clueless, and But I’m a Cheerleader all combined into one glorious parade of camp.” This action comedy about a group of paramilitary teen spies chasing a super-criminal is an undersung cult classic. Lucky for us, it’s now streaming (for a price). And New Yorkers can catch an IRL showing later this summer, from Rooftop Cinema Club.
McKayla Coyle recommends a new sitcom with classic aspirations: Hulu’s Adults. The show, which follows a motley twentysomething friend group trying to make it through the urban jungle, has a familiar, Friends-y premise. But McKayla hastens to correct the generic impression. “My brother called it New Girl meets Broad City. And I’d add that there’s a little bit of The Other Two surreality to it. Very fun!”
Drew Broussard attended the world premiere of the new Make-Believe Association podcast. This new show is an immersive-audio version of Hamlet that puts you inside the poor prince’s head. Though I’d have guessed this might be a bummer place to post up, Drew assures us, “It’s a very cool take on the play, I learned so much, and it sounds SO COOL.”
If poor Yorick’s also capturing your mood, Oliver Scialdone‘s got a new RPG for you. Blueberry Wine positions a player as a “a cursed soul navigating a land strangled by the legacies of witch hunts and dark magics.” Groups should expect fun and spooky times.
And for pure summer fun and breezy nostalgia, Calvin Kasulke has a very special treat. Joyce Van’s “Midday at the Oasis,” an Easy AM 66 radio project, is some glorious, high-concept nostalgia-nonsense. (Non-stalgia?) I challenge you not to crack a smile while listening to this.
Wishing you a weekend of uncanny viewing experiences, giddy reflection, and playing pretend.
You may know Tove Jansson, the Finnish artist, by her literary fiction. Her bespoke illustrations. Or just her pioneering life as a queer multi-hyphenate, carving out a corner of the sky in post-war Europe.
There’s a lot to know her by. Over a seven decade career, Jansson wrote and drew for children and adults, making comics, paintings, caricatures, and novels.
But you likely know her best for the strange little creatures she invented.
First US edition of Finn Family Moomintroll from 1952.
This summer, thanks to a free exhibit headed for the lobby of the Brooklyn Public Library (Central Branch), New Yorkers can enjoy the Moomins in person. An immersive installation will spotlight Jansson’s life and times in the Moominverse. Pieces on display include archival materials, sketches, props, and actual Moomins. (See below.)
Designed to coincide with Pride Month and the 80th anniversary of these odd Finnish mammals(?), the exhibit and its attendant public programming probably represent the largest gathering of Moomins to ever occur stateside. Which is pretty exciting—unless you happen to live near the Moomin Museum.
So, who are these Moomins? Funny you should ask! They’re technically members of a fictional family, first committed to print in titles like The Book About Moomin, Mymble, and Little My. They go on adventures, and bear a loose resemblance to elephants.
But to be more specific?
Fillyjonk, of the Atelier Fauni.
Some Moomins are stoic.
Snorkmaiden.
Others are playful.
Moominmamma.
Some Moomins are shy.
Snufkin.
And some? Are no-nonsense!
A miniature Moominhouse built by Tove Jansson, Tuulikki Pietilä and Pentti Eistola. © Linus Lindholm.
Oh, and all Moomins are classy. They live in a house that looks like this.
When she wasn’t building a universe for these multi-faceted creatures—all of which can be spotted IRL, at the BPL—Jansson was ensuring they’d live forever, as art. Viewers can find some of that at the BPL, too, taking the form of early book jackets.
First Swedish edition of the first Moomin story, The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945).
Whether or not you can make it to Brooklyn this summer, it’s well worth your time to reflect on this singular lady, whose strange imagination still reminds us that we can build the worlds we’d rather inhabit.
Tove Jansson © Eva Konikoff
Get ready for #ToveSummer, all you strange creators. And in the meantime? Keep Moomin’!
All images courtesy of Moomin Characters.
Today, the Griffin Poetry Prize—the world’s largest international prize for a single book of poetry published in English—announced its 2025 winner, chosen from an illustrious shortlist of five. Karen Leeder has taken home the top prize for her translation, from the German, of Durs Grünbein’s Psyche Running.
“Durs Grünbein’s Psyche Running is a brilliant overview and selection of a poet who satisfies our hunger to be serious, as again and again he finds himself ‘between words and things,’ the judges said. “Karen Leeder’s adept translations establish a new version of Grünbein in English: universal, lyrical, philosophical.”
The prize of C$130,000 will be shared between Leeder, who will receive 60%, and Durs Grünbein, the original author. Each other shortlisted poet will be awarded C$10,000.
The prize was judged this year by Nick Laird, Anne Michaels, and Tomasz Różycki, who read and evaluated a total of 578 books to decide on the winner.
Durs Grünbein, tr. Karen Leeder, Psyche Running
Seagull Books
Edmund White has passed away, and the world has lost a pioneering and passionate writer. He wrote beautifully and frankly about sex and gay life during his prolific career as a novelist and journalist, and prided himself on a view of queerness that was uncompromising and unapologetic. “Gay fiction before that, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, was written for straight readers,” he once said. “We had a gay readership in mind, and that made all the difference. We didn’t have to spell out what Fire Island was.”
His first novel from 1973, Forgetting Elena, about gay life on a fictional Fire Island, was praised by Vladimir Nabokov as “a marvelous book.” White is perhaps best known for his semi-autobiographical A Boy’s Own Story and the sex guide The Joy of Gay Sex, which he wrote in 1977 with psychotherapist Charles Silverstein. I particularly like Nocturnes for the King of Naples, his second novel, which is a series of sometimes funny and oftentimes poignant letters from a young man to an unnamed, dead former lover.
White won many awards, including a Pulitzer for his biographies of French writers. He became a great chronicler of French literature, and lived and worked in France for years. I love this detail from Interview where he rolls his eyes at Michel Foucault: “I invited him to a gay bar. He said it was hard for him to go out in Paris because he was too famous, and I said, ‘Oh, come on.'”
Interview also ran a wonderful piece where 18 men asked White questions about sex, in which he offered this wild and compelling pitch: “I think Gary [Indiana] should write Barron Trump’s fictional memoirs.”
White was always aware and reflective about the political valence of his work, and famously reevaluated the blindspots in his travelogue States of Desire. He also wrote an impassioned defense in 1979 of drag cultural and the power of problematizing gender for The Village Voice. “By embracing drags, lesbians, and especially gay men will take a step towards self-acceptance,” he argued. “By placing drags in a respected position within the movement, gays will have elevated and defended what straight society most despises in all homosexuals.”
His writing was often challenging, especially to straight norms. In an interview for Lit Hub with Damon Galgut, White talked about the power of destabilizing readers:
When I was young I read a remark of Paul Valery (cited by André Gide) that a writer should lose with every book the fans he might have gained with the previous one, which in my case, sadly, has come only too true.
From his unapologetically descriptive The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, Edmund wrote beautifully about his past lovers and in this passage excerpted for Lit Hub, about his infatuation with Keith McDermott:
Keith was careful with his “instrument,” i.e., his body. He drank tiny cups of liquid buffalo grass, ate sparingly, mainly vegetables, and visited the gym daily for two hours, where he’d twist and turn on the exercise rings, climb ropes, and strengthen his arms and core, his shoulders and legs, but he never wanted to become a heavily built muscleman. He was a Peter Pan, the puer aeternus. I was abject in my longing for him. I can’t bear to recall the scenes of my crawling toward him, arms outstretched, or the moment when I saw him as an emanation of God. Once I organized an orgy of several guys I dragged back from the Candle Bar in the neighborhood, hoping to be able to touch Keith in the melee. It worked.
In all of his work, he wrote beautiful descriptions of people, most especially the men he knew. Also from The Loves of My Life, excerpted in The Paris Review:
The Scot was tall and slender and decked out in full regalia—a kilt, a short black jacket with silver buttons, high socks, a sort of pouch or purse on a chain around his waist, the sporran. I knew that under the plaid kilt there was a dick and hairy balls, no underpants. He was younger than forty and had a wide mouth full of white teeth, blue eyes as blue and large as a songbird’s eggs if they’d been made of crystal, a sharp nose, and an accent that was almost intelligible, though less and less so as I became more and more stoned on the joints he was feeding me.
He was a great lover of books, and wrote a memoir about reading called The Unpunished Vice, in which he described the pursuit as a “passport”:
And yet I remember my mother’s sweetness, the good smell, the afternoon sunlight, and my very real feeling of joyful liberation. And, quite concretely, reading has always struck me as a passport to the world, one in which characters are more real than actual people, where values are more intense than in the dim light of reality, where characters fly up into destinies rather than paddle around in ambiguity.
He loved writing like he loved living. White was a devotee of experience, and never apologized for the joys of seeing, feeling, and writing:
I mean that I’m not an especially anguished writer; I tend to like what I write and am possibly satisfied too readily. When you finish reading a book like Lolita you feel that there’s nothing more wonderful in the whole world than writing a novel; you feel challenged and awake and alive, and you have a desire to write with the same keen response to the sensuous world.
He will be missed.
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