Regan’s newsletter publishes book recommendations on a theme and the occasional essay. Past newsletters have covered the 5+ Club and author completionism, the cure for autofiction, women in translation, and more.
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Hello again! Thanks for sticking with me after a couple months’ absence. I’ve been reading lots in the meantime, writing, enjoying the autumn weather in New York, managing the occasional overwhelm of my program, etc., etc.! I’m excited to assure you, though, that I have a hearty queue of mostly-written newsletter drafts I’m hoping to finally get out this month and next.1
Over the past year, I’ve written a few batches of mini-reviews for the Asymptote Journal blog’s “What’s New in Translation” column2 (so has the wonderful fellow Substacker Eva Dunsky, we discovered!). I covered the three new-release books in this newsletter across their September and October columns but felt I had many more miscellaneous thoughts than I was able to include in the few paragraphs we published on each. Hence this newsletter! Would love to hear if you’ve read any translations recently that have stood out to you.
Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman, tr. Ros Schwartz (Seven Stories Press, 2025 reissue—originally 1999)
For fans of…
The Sims™ ✤ Making up elaborate stories about the people you see in public ✤ Literary tomboys (ie Scout Finch, Junie B. Jones, & Jo March) ✤ Proust, Balzac, and Woolf ✤ Of course, Woolf’s Orlando ✤ “Literary romps” ✤ Tilda Swinton ✤ The marriage of snarky wit x deeply felt earnestness ✤ Doctor Who—and body-swapping sci-fi, generally ✤ ie. Stephanie Meyers’ The Host ✤ Girlhood sleepover movies The Parent Trap or Princess and the Pauper ✤ Courtney Minor’s Orlanda book notes ✤ All literary variations of the disenfranchised female narrator/unhinged housewife in crisis ✤ Harpman’s famed I Who Have Never Known Men, but especially the parts about puberty and conceptualizing womanhood absent the existence of men ✤ The feverish feeling of an essay finally coming together ✤ Aristophanes’ split-human myth in Plato’s Symposium
I have been tapping my toes and waiting for this novel to blow up since its reissue a month ago! Like millions, I enjoyed Harpman’s dark, apocalyptic BookTok phenomenon I Who Have Never Known Men (the viral, bestselling Belgian novel about 39 women and one girl trapped in a bunker with no memory, no explanation for their imprisonment).3 But Orlanda blew me away. Harpman’s prose is lively and witty and biting and so funny and sexy! It caught me off guard after the bleakness I’d associated her with! Our cardigan-wearing literature professor is tired of teaching, of her longterm partner, of all the routines in her life; all she wants (but only subconsciously, of course) is to have a rollicking time propositioning men for gay sex in train bathroom compartments—and what do you you know! as she reads Woolf’s Orlanda, part of her “soul” leaves her body, enters that of a sexy young music journalist, and takes control. I also need more people to read this so we can properly discuss the conclusion which, to me, seemed to come straight out of left field?! But what did I expect! I don’t know!
“Do you remember the sound of my voice inside my head?” Aline asks the part of herself sitting across the table. “What does I mean when you say it?”
In Jacqueline Harpman’s Orlanda, the 35-year-old university lecturer has long been uninspired, worn down, forlorn for what seems like forever—or at least since she was twelve, when her mother began demanding the modesty and restraint of young womanhood. Then one day, everything changes in an instant: Aline is reading Woolf’s Orlando when she spots a young man at a train station café. Inexplicably, a part of herself, of her soul, zeroes in on him, departs from her body, and occupies his. As she invades, Aline senses only a tremor, a strange sorrow that matches her melancholy stasis, the “perpetual feeling of emptiness” she’s never been able to shake. The body-hopping part of her, which our narrator christens Orlanda, revels in her—his—new form. The consciousness of twenty-year-old music journalist Lucien Lèfrene has put up no resistance whatsoever.
What follow, in Ros Schwartz’s lively translation, are Orlanda’s ecstatic exploits with men; his gradual unearthing and worming out of the responsibilities of Lucien’s former life; and eventually, his trickster’s impulse to confront the repressed Aline and shock her with his intimate knowledge of her life and desires. He is, somehow, that buoyant, unrestrained, twelve-year-old part of her, become flesh.
Having first published Orlanda in 1996, Harpman is best known for the enormously successful I Who Have Never Known Men, a dystopic story of thirty-nine women and one girl who find themselves trapped in a bunker without explanation. Its main character is a singular girl in this makeshift society of women, facing a coming-of-age within the rigid confines of their prison, and through her, the author poses the question: What could it mean to transform from girl into woman in a world without freedom or possibility? In Orlanda, too, Harpman lingers in the territory of puberty and adolescence through Aline, who feels trapped by her mother’s expectation of charm and femininity and stifled by her mother’s insistence that energy, anger, and vigor has no place in a woman’s life. But where I Who Have Never Known Men never strays from its weighty solemnity, Orlanda shows Harpman at her wittiest and most delightful. The narrator—presumably a fourth wall-breaking stand-in for the author—frequently exclaims in surprise when her characters act unexpectedly, and on every page, the sheer pleasure Harpman seems to derive from exploration and imagination is clear, though the gravity of her characters’ very real dilemmas never seems to fall far out of reach.
After Aline and Orlanda first meet, a cosmic magnetism pulls them back to one another time and time again. Together, they’re relaxed and confident; they give each other strength. Orlanda brings out in Aline abilities she no longer realized she possessed, whether an unabashed attraction to her longtime partner or the ability to confront an obnoxious dinner party host. How would your ego and id interact were they distinct entities? Who might have the upper hand? Aline and Orlanda’s clashes and codependencies help pave Harpman’s way toward an answer: What could we learn from ourselves, about ourselves, when confronted head-on by ourselves?
Diving Board by Tomás Downey, tr. Sarah Moses (Invisible Publishing, 2025)
For fans of…
Latin American horror, real and surreal; think Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin, and Fernanda Melchor ✤ The Netflix series Adolescence (2025) ✤ The 2020 domestic-apocalyptic novel Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam ✤ Watching spooky old episodes of The Twilight Zone on rainy afternoons ✤ Fiction that makes your stomach hurt ✤ Jordan Peele’s sci-fi/horror film Nope (2022) ✤ Grainy found footage in true crime documentaries ✤ Supporting small presses (Invisible Publishing!) ✤ Morally ambiguous narrators, morally horrible narrators, and narrators you can root for just a little ✤ Kim Fu’s gothic/sci-fi story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century ✤ Having a nightmare but then waking up and thinking, wow, thank god that was only a nightmare
Making my way through the stories in Diving Board single-handedly reminded me why I enjoy writing criticism. I liked each of these stories at face value, really liked them, and how strange and unsettling they each are, even in moments when they seemed fragmentary, occasionally broken-off at their ends. But I’ve always had a tendency to speed through short stories, and when they’re only a few pages long, it can feel like you blink and they’re over. If I know I’m reviewing a piece, I’ll underline lines and passages, leave myself notes in the margins: themes that arise, through-lines, my reactions, paradoxes and tensions. I slowed down. On second read, Downey’s stories all seemed to click into place, to fit brilliantly and perfectly beside one another. Moments that failed to stick in my mind on first read became revelatory, suddenly, and integral. Everything built toward a larger thematic conclusion; this book quite honestly ended up taking my breath away! I think about these stories all the time now. And I wonder if the collection would have left as big an impact if I hadn’t given it the time it deserves, or what books I’ve read quickly and casually that could have actually moved me in a profound and unexpected way if I’d paid better attention.
In “Astronauts,” one of the nineteen stories in Tomás Downey’s Diving Board, a man floats to the ceiling and stays there. Why? “Chance is capable of anything,” the narrator concedes. “The universe lacks a will—it just exists, occurs.” Characters across the collection are self-proclaimed skeptics—suspicious of friends and family, their own inclinations, and most strongly, when faced with the inexplicable. In the Argentine writer’s hands, such individuals are a way of exploring the possibilities of universal chance or malice. Facing apparitions or aliens or human urges toward the unforgivable, they try to grasp at the logic of their worlds—and fail.
“It was a question of equilibrium,” the narrator of “Variables” thinks, justifying the increasing, startling neglect of her child as she works from home postpartum. Balance was as simple as “removing something from one side and putting it on the other.” In “Alejo,” a teen steals a scalpel during a lesson on frog dissection to harm a female classmate. Only later, covered in blood, does he realize: “Between desire and action there should’ve been a step, one he had skipped. He’d followed a different logic and that made everything seem more unreal.”
Logic, whether between the members of nuclear families or partners in perfect couples, becomes twisted and distorted in Downey’s dire chronicles. Stories are quick glimpses of lives, their characters cut off before consequences have the chance to set in. I felt my pulse race while reading the final lines of “A Love Story,” about a couple’s weekend trip to a remote cabin where the running water doesn’t work; my stomach sank with each paragraph of “The Place Where Birds Die,” about how a new baby alters a family summer at the beach.
Tomás Downey has mastered the chill in the air, the prickling at the back of your neck; in Moses’s translation, colloquial and keen, these stories could be told by your neighbor or cousin. Recurring instances of the surreal—disappearances, repetitions, the supernatural and unexplained—heighten the characters’ more routine circumstances and recalibrate the way they see the world. Here, the gore, rot, and dread are tools for examining how we deal with the real horrors in our lives. As the narrator of “The Men Go to War” offers in the stead of seeking relief in tragedy’s wake: “Better to hold on to the raw pain that’s perpetual but bearable, like a child who’s sick and in need of constant care.”
Things that Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Kurt Beals (New Directions, 2025)
For fans of…
The intimacy of grocery lists, to-do lists, checklists on scraps of paper ✤ Looking up your childhood home on Google Maps street view and clicking back in time to see it when you lived there ✤ Stray notes-app poetry ✤ Snooping through others’ libraries ✤ Nostalgia !! ✤ Elena Ferrante’s bite-sized essay collection composed of former newspaper columns, Incidental Inventions ✤ Slice-of-life documentaries from unexpected moments in history ✤ Slice-of-life Substacks; I really loved Tia Glista’s Little October list ✤ “Shower thoughts” ✤ Print newspapers, photo albums, antique stores ✤ The three novels I featured in my “Reading Routine” newsletter this summer, by Ayşegül Savaş, Bruna Dantas Lobato, and Marlen Haushofer
My fifth Erpenbeck!4 This is the first nonfiction I’ve read of hers, and it didn’t disappoint! That being said, I might not recommend it as your first foray into her work. It’s short: she’s writing just the briefest essays, and while they’re resounding and emotional and observant and smart, they just don’t have the heft or impact of her novels (in my opinion as one very big fan of her work). So where do I recommend you begin? Great question! The four novels I’ve read by her, in the order I read them, are Go, Went, Gone; Visitation; The End of Days; and Kairos. And I think I’d recommend them in that same order:
Go, Went, Gone feels the most traditionally “narrative” in terms of characters and plot. The novel tells the story of a retired German professor beginning to work with and get to know the African refugee community in Berlin during the 2010s. Deals with contemporary politics, race, privilege. Beautiful literary writing.
Either Visitation or The End of Days could come next. Both are decidedly more experimental in terms of form and scope. Visitation follows one lakeside country home through generations of occupants and over a century of German history.5 The End of Days tells the story of a young woman (from the late 1800s until the fall of the GDR) in five parts; at the end of each section, she dies at a different stage of her life, and the following section picks up with a sort of “if things had happened differently, here’s what could have come next…” Both are emotional, intense, and challenging (but not very long).
And leaving Kairos for last! This is a book to be read in the right headspace. Like Go, Went, Gone, it’s a little more traditionally narrative, but slightly more challenging on a prose level. Kairos is Erpenbeck’s most recent novel and won the 2024 International Booker; it’s about a fraught relationship between a younger woman and older, controlling man in East Germany during the period leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.6
Once you’ve read any (or all) of the above, please do pick up a copy of Things that Disappear. Erpenbeck’s (regular-length) memoir Not a Novel is next on my list.
Booker Prize-winning author Jenny Erpenbeck’s oeuvre has thus far featured an East German romance as the Berlin Wall goes down; the portrait of a country home as generations of occupants experience war and political transformation; and a community of African migrants seeking asylum in Berlin. In her newest book to be published in English—a slim seventy-page volume—Erpenbeck’s steadfast focus on loss and change is even more explicit across a series of fragmentary essays.
These pieces take the shapes of conversations, meditations, even step-by-step instructions. How does one go about demolishing a house? Where have our missing second socks ended up? Throughout, themes of destruction and disappearance span the intimate, political, and existential. Drip-catchers on tablecloths, courtyard rug hangers, the shop that mended tights: Erpenbeck writes of things disappearing when they are “deprived of their means of existence, as if they, too, have a hunger that must be satisfied.”
But what about entire nations that have ceased to exist—where are they? Where, too, are our family’s traditions when we no longer celebrate them? On youth, Erpenbeck writes, “. . . we’re taken by surprise when the years have slipped over us like a dress, and we think that actually, if we wanted to, we could take them off again. . .” We disappear from the places we’ve inhabited; the people we love disappear from us. In Kurt Beals’s delicate translation, Erpenbeck’s prose is compellingly earnest and solemn, and quite playful in moments, without ever straying toward over-sentimentality.
In one vignette, a Russian immigrant visits Erpenbeck’s apartment, cluttered with the decades-long accumulation of objects and ephemera. The woman exclaims at the piano, the books, Erpenbeck’s son’s drawing, “Lovely.” Erpenbeck doesn’t understand her awe—she has children, as well, and so must have similar things. The woman smiles. “You can’t take it all with you,” she says. Things That Disappear is a collection that seemed to slip through my grasp, however much I wanted it to last. Upon reaching the end, I found myself thinking: if only I’d held on tighter.
If you’re looking for more…
For anyone based in New York, I’ll be reading some of my short fiction at Molasses Books as part of the Pity Party Reading Series—8pm next Tuesday, November 11 & would love to see you there!
Really eager to read a. natasha joukovsky’s newly announced sophomore novel Medium Rare when it’s out next spring (March Madness & the Icarus myth)! Her first novel, The Portrait of a Mirror, is a favorite, and her newsletter quite useless was one of the first newsletters I subscribed to, way back.
Looks like Seven Stories Press has joined Substack!
And here, the Substack newsletters I’ve mentioned above!
Hold me accountable! I miss Substack when I’m away :)
Four reviews in December 2024, four in May 2025, and most recently, three across Sept & October
I read IWHNKM in the wake of loving Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall (also an apocalyptic feminist novel written by a European woman in the latter half of the 20th century), and as a result (or for some other reason I haven’t been able to articulate??), I just don’t think IWHNKM clicked quite as totally with me
Petya K. Grady writes about Visitation beautifully in her “September of Shorts” newsletter
Here’s a link to the Kairos review I wrote for Necessary Fiction in 2023.
Love this list!! I've read Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos and next on my shelf is Go, Went, Gone!!
I am starting ORLANDA tonight!!! You know I was so excited about it already, now that I have read your note about it… I am legit upset that I have to fucking work all day and can’t just roll into bed with it!
Jenny 5!!! Congrats!!! Your list of “who this is for” made me laugh out loud several times because it reads like a Petya profile…. Which, of course, checks out because you know how much I love her. Even though I am reading her in the opposite order you have recommended! 😂😂