Letters of Recommendation #6

This edition marks one whole year of Letters of Rec. Thank you for reading along! I’ve learned so much, namely that meaningful engagement with art (especially outside of your day job) has a direct correlation to your quality of life. Letters has made me happier, and I’m grateful for the people (you! And the fabulous COPY team) that allow me to keep at it.

To celebrate, I’ve asked a few of my most trusted and well-read friends to share a rec. The prompt I gave was simply: tell me a book you love to recommend and three words to describe it. That’s below the regularly scheduled programming—enjoy!

Television
Lauren Rothery
12/2/15 - New!
256 pp

You’ll find the word “cool” thrown around liberally in the blurbs for Lauren Rothery’s Television. These days, “cool” tends to be deployed as a precursor to “girl,” or, when the author is a woman (as in this case), the “girl” is simply implied. So thanks to the canon of so-called “cool girl” books so dry your internal monologue develops vocal fry, my guard for this one was up.

But Television is cool! It’s cool partly because its characters are, and partly because its subject, filmmaking, is. Mainly, though, Television is cool because it's nonchalantly so smart, funny, and perceptive.

Verity and Helen met as teens and have been tethered to each other since. We’re introduced to them in their later forties: Verity is an alcoholic movie star and self-proclaimed sellout, and Helen is a playwright and self-proclaimed failure. Verity has decided to lottery off the paycheck from his latest abysmal blockbuster, and that’s all that one could claim of a plot, which is to say that Television is a character-driven book, driven by some of the best-crafted characters I’ve read all year. Through incisive dialogue and short, alternating-POV chapters, Rothery delivers a distinctly convincing portrait of soulmates.

This one may not be your cup of tea if you require a thumping plot, though I found the plot to have little to do with the book’s merit. Unlike so many other debut novels that never quite seem to spit it out, Television says what it needs to say about luck vs. merit, selling out, and enduring love.

10:04
Ben Lerner
9/2/14
256 pp

10:04 was the very best book recommendation I received in 2025. You don’t need to know how meta it is to enjoy it (I didn’t on first reading), but it’s interesting: 10:04 begins with our narrator securing a six-figure book deal on the condition that the book is adapted from his recent short story in the New Yorker. The book turns out to be the one you’re reading, and contains Ben Lerner’s own story, “The Golden Vanity,” that was published in the New Yorker in 2012.

Set in New York between the two superstorms of 2012, hurricanes Sandy and Irene, 10:04 is a time capsule. Lerner doesn’t shy away from specificity in his references, citing the Park Slope Food Coop, Christian Marclay’s The Clock film exhibition, various NYC museums and parks, and Joseph Kony, which laces the book with a sense of both credibility and intimacy. It’s autofiction at its finest but is worth the read for Lerner’s linguistic skills alone. Plus, he has a new book coming in April that's sure to be buzzy, so now's a great time to read his earlier works.

Department of Speculation
Jenny Offill
1/28/14
192 pp

When Paul Mescal mentioned Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation in one of his recent press junket stops, I gasped like he’d namedropped an old friend. This book lives so near to my heart. Written in a flurry of tiny, perfect paragraphs, Offill tells the story of a marriage and all the things that get in its way. Profound, unsentimental, and hypnotic, it's a book you’ll read in one sitting and revisit for years. A favorite passage of mine reads:

“How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.” 

Plus:

Braeden Houtman, MFA candidate, recommends Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
“Neat, Analytical, Biting”

Cat Zhang, culture writer at The Cut, recommends Monkey Grip by Helen Garner
“Luminous, Community, Drugs”

Charlotte Weinman, musician and songwriter, Horsepower, recommends Jazz by Toni Morrison
“Haunting, Attentive, Hypnotic”

Chloe Texier Rose, publicist at Little, Brown and Company, recommends Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams
“Heady, Freaky, Sublime”

Isabel Colon, MFA candidate, recommends The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
“Intimate, Heartbreaking, Brilliant”

Jim Olsen, my dad, recommends The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
“Gritty, Adolescent, Fantastical”

Jilly Karande, brand strategy director at Vox Media Podcast Network, recommends Caucasia by Danzy Senna
“Vivid, Deeply Felt, Coming of Age”

Maya Raiford Cohen, editor at Astra House, recommends Fish Tales by Nettie Jones
“Delirious, Sexy, Aberrant”

Mikki Janower, cofounder of Venn Diagramm, recommends The Employees by Olga Ravn
"Otherworldly, Solidary, Relevant”

Nico Burnham, editor at Orbit Books, recommends Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
“Shaggy, Vibrant, Towering”

Taylor Stout, editor at COPY and MFA candidate, recommends The Library Book by Susan Orlean
“Investigative, Civic-Minded, Charged”