Shereen Lee

“John has a theory that everyone is either a squid or an eel,” writes Elisa Gabbert in the final essay of Any Person Is the Only Self (FSG Originals). Baby squids are born entirely formed, “teeny versions of their later selves,” while eels, on the other hand, go through radical changes, and are hardly recognizable from their beginnings. “In part to test my squidness,” Gabbert takes up rereading the novels of her youth—Updike, Salinger, the works. Satisfyingly, most of them hold up—more or less.

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House) is the culmination of six years of dreaming for poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib. The book has followed him in draft form through a MacArthur Fellowship, the releases of three other award-winning titles, the hosting of two podcasts, creating over a hundred Spotify playlists, and through the paradigm shift that the pandemic brought to the world’s doorstep.

The first time I read Colin Barrett, I had the sensation that my nervous system was being vigorously flossed. I still remember the inciting passage, from the 2016 story “Anhedonia, Here I Come”: He stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through, inhaled three one-euro hamburgers and a fries and a Coke, and took a spumous dump in a toilet cubicle bathed in the purple-blue glow of UV lighting installed to prevent junkies from finding the veins in their arms.