Written for Sinatra’s retirement, borrowed by Elvis at the peak of his decline, and assassinated by Sid Vicious before he OD’d, Paul Anka’s “My Way” captures the fundamental anger, defiance, and self-satisfaction of the American character:

DISCUSSED: The Ski Inn; Bombay Beach Estates; Alien Iconography; Walt Whitman; Mullet Island; Healthy Opium Tea; Green Jell-O; Volcom Hats; Optimism; Hallucinations; Pub Crawls; Migratory Birds; Full Gonzo; Distributed Consciousness; Theseus; and more. www.thebeliever.net/the-last-res...

"What makes a novel come to life is conflict, and food is rife with conflict. Inside every pea or potato is an enormous amount of narrative. People get quite emotional about this stuff." —novelist and filmmaker Ruth Ozeki on her first two books

Anna DeForest's interview with Garielle Lutz on the subject of death is available for free on our Substack. Subscribe (15% off with the code "DeForest") for access to next week's interview with Amy Hempel.

“Maybe the only useful thing I have finally learned in old age is that it is possible to be depressed beyond hope and yet still be capable of thrilling to the tiniest joys in one’s day.” —Garielle Lutz, interviewed by Anna DeForest www.thebeliever.net/a-good-exit-...

Rafia Zakaria sat down with managing editor Ginger Greene to discuss her National Magazine Award-winning piece: believermagazine.substack.com/p/a-short-in...

With its dark green Mercedes, Glenn Gould records, and spare but imposing furniture, Thomas Bernhard’s house in Upper Austria is a creation as deliberate and public as any of his novels or plays:

"Every time I get alienated, my family comes and visits me. I don’t have the luxury of that French existentialist angst. I have a large extended family and we bicker and fight." —Suketu Mehta, interviewed by Karan Mahajan in Issue 51

"The auditory capacities of teeth may be demonstrated through a simple test. First, find a quiet room to sit in." From Issue 55: "Bite Me: A Brief History of Dentistry and Music" by Paul Collins:

"I said, 'Whatever you want to call me, just get me up on stage!' And it stuck." —Irma Thomas, known as "the Soul Queen of New Orleans," interviewed by T Cooper www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

"That I should just audition for the rest of my life and get plastic surgery and that was the ultimate outcome of anything I had to contribute: this book is the death of that person." —Amber Tamblyn on her third collection of poems, Dark Sparkler

“Music is... not the cause of what we’re going through. It’s a reaction, it’s our only weapon, it’s our only way to protect ourselves, it’s our only way to fit, it’s our only way to get there.” —Ice Cube, interviewed in Issue 9 of The Believer

“The poets I know don’t want to be famous people half so much as they want their best poems read; I want to help you find and read them.” — @notquitehydepark.bsky.social in Issue 13 on how to read, and perhaps enjoy, very new poetry www.thebeliever.net/close-calls-...

"You’re just lucky to be conscious for a limited amount of time, and what you’re able to do with your consciousness is up to you. You don’t win anything. There’s nothing to win." —artist Frank Stella, interviewed by Sheila Heti

How the punk-heavy soundtrack to an obscure New Zealand art film became an elegy for a lost friend: www.thebeliever.net/mental-chick...

We’re thrilled to share that The Believer won its first ASME National Magazine Award tonight, for Rafia Zakaria’s “Water Pressure”! Congratulations to Rafia Zakaria and to all of this year’s winners. www.thebeliever.net/water-pressu...

"I stood outside the Grecian dining hall, smoking with someone. There was, we noted, a book lying at the base of a nearby column... a long-stemmed red rose lying on top of it." How Namwali Serpell ruined Lolita for herself: www.thebeliever.net/a-sunburst-a...

"Yes, I was playing me, but did I have to dress like it? I had never attended a fictional book-publishing cocktail party before." —Sloane Crosley on the peculiar hazards of playing yourself on Gossip Girl www.thebeliever.net/a-dog-named-...

"With two or three lines, a comic can disarm that and just fucking slay it, just slay those fucking dragons and despair and depression." —Marc Maron, interviewed by Kyle Dowling www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

“I ended my text on brevity there, submitting to my fate. I was no longer a novelist. I was something else. And my name was now Augusto.” —Adam Thirlwell on becoming a jukebox of Augusto Monterroso

Wesley Brown's newest novel, "Looking for Frank Wills," reimagines the life of the security guard whose discovery helped bring down a presidency. Join us for conversations with Wesley Brown in San Francisco (May 20) and New York (May 27).

“A naive or impressionable reader might draw the conclusion that publishing a fact-based personal narrative as fiction and lying in a memoir are equivalent crimes. The problem, however, resides in the ‘fact’ that memoirs are considered factual at all.”

Come celebrate Wesley Brown’s "Looking for Frank Wills," a new novel that reimagines the life of the man without whom there would be no Watergate. SF: May 20 at @greenapplebooks.bsky.social, with Tonya M. Foster NYC: May 27 at P&T Knitwear, with Charles H. Lynch

“In the end, the only sentimentalist truly worth his scorn is the one who exposes his fear of life, his arid heart.” Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Margo Jefferson reads Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son”:

"Everything I’ve read about this record is about its words, literal-minded... But no good song—no good creative work of any kind—is literal." —Greil Marcus on "Ultraviolence" by Lana Del Rey

Our summer issue is headed to the printer! To celebrate, print subscriptions are 25% off through Monday. Each subscription includes full digital access to our twenty-year archive and new web exclusives. Link in bio.

Come celebrate Wesley Brown’s "Looking for Frank Wills," a new novel that reimagines the life of the man without whom there would be no Watergate. SF: May 20 at @greenapplebooks.bsky.social, with Tonya M. Foster NYC: May 27 at P&T Knitwear, with Charles H. Lynch

"It’s much more interesting to hear a critique of something that is really based on the object and not the person behind it." —Meshell Ndegeocello, interviewed by Melissa Locker: www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

"I must be many things simultaneously, but not because I’m an artist, you know. Because I’m a human. Even my cat is simultaneously many things." —Sophie Calle, interviewed by Sheila Heti

In the ’60s a young Palestinian man was warmly received by a town in rural Minnesota. But what would it be like when he returned, fifty years later, in post-9/11 America? From Issue 119, "Our Arab," an essay by Zaina Arafat: www.thebeliever.net/our-arab/

“What Gandhi called nonviolence, or satyagraha—'soul force'—is both a way of life and a scientific, methodological approach to human disorder.” —civil rights justice leader Rev. James Lawson, interviewed by @dianelefer.bsky.social www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

"This is all I know about love." Standing at the intersection of the half-naked girl, the sex worker with the dark past, and the new politics— @stephenelliott.bsky.social in "The Score":

“Narrative stuff is difficult in songs because people don’t want to have to listen to songs and hear a fucking story all the time. They just want to get their rocks off.” —Nick Cave, interviewed by Tony DuShane www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

In the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Indigenous Sápara are first in line for a new form of extinction. And they are staking the only thing they have left against It—their afterlife. From Issue 113:

"If you’re hunting with a child, smear blood on his or her cheeks and take a photo. Resist the urge to post it on Facebook; it might freak out your city friends." — @hedtk.com in "How to Field-Dress a Deer" www.thebeliever.net/how-to-field...

Fifteen years before cofounding the Oulipo, a French chemical engineer made it through his internment at Dora-Mittelbau by mentally re-creating his favorite works of art in exquisite detail:

“I have spent my life trying to wake up, and when I find the right combination of words and sentences, I experience the feeling of being fully awake.” —Robert Glück, interviewed by Miranda Mellis www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

"The nation is still crazy about serial killers... but they have to fit the bill. Highway killers don’t make the grade." —Ginger Strand on what’s found in the landscapes left behind by America’s dreams of mobility:

"I suggested that abusers of the word postmodernism had excuses. I offer the above quotes as exculpatory evidence... But the quotes are also a reminder that the term has serious uses." —Jonathan Lethem on the ritual killing of postmodern literature www.thebeliever.net/postmodernis...

“In prostitution you sell intercourse with something of indifference to me, the body, whereas in publishing you sell intercourse with the mind, which is the thing that writes the books.” From an interview with Helen DeWitt:

In "Anatomy of Melancholia," Victoria Nelson unravels the aesthetic granny knot of Lars von Trier’s darkly jaunty 2011 masterpiece: thebeliever.net/anatomy-of-m...

"The scam of what labels have done is traditionally complete thievery—you lend me money to make a record, you make the lion’s share of the profits. When I pay it back, you still own it? How does that work?" —Trent Reznor, interviewed by Brandon Bussolini

"What I mean by... magic—there’s a way of looking at things that can allow you to transcend the rules of the real world, or in film terms, the cinema vérité. It’s something that hovers above the boring truth." —from an interview with Harmony Korine www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...

“In time, I would come to see that I’d been a pawn, a demographic entry in the larger body count, a casualty of Bill Bright’s war for America’s soul.” —David J. Morris on Campus Crusade for Christ and becoming an “exvangelical”

“I was convinced that... the only thing worth achieving is an understanding that everything—including who we appear to be—is one nonphysical thing. But knowing rarely helps anything.” —from “Adaptive Fictions,” an essay by Ted McDermott www.thebeliever.net/adaptive-fic...

“I love... learning about the saints. I have a pin on my backpack right this second that has a quote on it from Saint Augustine: ‘Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet!’ That sort of saintliness is the kind of saintliness I can get behind.”

For the many hot summer days to come, our swim bundle includes a towel and an Olympics-grade swim cap: store.mcsweeneys.net/products/the...

“On first blush, there’s something romantic about being loved only in a foreign language, as if love were a destination, a private island. The strange words beckon; you grab your passport and leave the ordinary behind.” www.thebeliever.net/ask-carrie-s...

“Signs is defined by its seeping sense of unease, like cold water working its way through shoes and into socks and skin.” — @girinathan.bsky.social revisits M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 film

“In Pattaya, an unnatural paradise has arisen out of the marine idyll.” — @pitchaya.bsky.social on a seaside village transformed by tourism and development