Think I love this? First of the 2024 Tournament of Books longlist that has really snapped for me. It moves unlike anything I've ever read, and I'm fascinated to peek behind the curtains and see how this was made. It's a collaboration between a husband and wife that reads like an quarantined auto-fictional research adventure. Let's just make that a genre, k?

It's arranged like a series of Post-It notes (textually, not visually) that move through Melville's biography and the fraught marriage between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick and Emily Dickinson and being married in quarantine and and Melville's Hawthorne crush and marshaling kids through Zoom school during quarantine and the obsessiveness of Melvilliana and...and it's riveting? I couldn't wait to get back to it every time I put it down. I think it's structurally magnificent. It makes me want to (finally) power through the whale book, during which time I may read this three more times. I don't often read library books and then buy them. Here's one.