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Memoirs of life with an animal have boomed ever since John Grogan wrote in Marley & Me about an over-the-top dog that chewed furniture and ate part of his wife’s pregnancy test. But stories like his can have a drawback: The animal often dies at the end, and if so, they can leave you a little weepy.

Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare is a sweet exception. Dalton took in a baby hare abandoned near her home in the English countryside, and both survived the adventure. Dalton didn’t intend to keep the animal, but it didn’t seem to want to leave her, and she writes about their life together in a widely praised memoir that’s become a bestseller in the U.S. and U.K. Raising Hare is also finalist for the 2025 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction that you don’t need an XX chromosome to appreciate, and I say more about why you might like it , my Substack feed.

I’ve always found dogs more interesting than cats–no doubt in part because I had a beagle and German shepherd while growing up instead of feline companions. But a new book by a cat psychiatrist (yes, that’s a thing) has helped me to see the matter with fresh eyes.

I write about The Interpretation of Cats at @Medium and explain what I learned from it, including that cats and dogs reacted differently to the lockdowns and boom in remote work early in the pandemic. It seems that dogs liked having their owners at home (more chances to play and beg for treats) while cats saw their space as being occupied and wanted to have it back. Did you know that? I didn’t, and if not, you might enjoy .

You think moving your books was hard? Try being someone who reviews them for a living. I just did it and describe the sobering realities at @Medium. (Three things that helped: looking for a mover on Nexdoor, the free boxes at Dollar General, and purging books I wasn’t going to write about again.) Here’s to my story of how it went down:

Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal is his best known book, but it tells you less about him than another book everyone forgets: his Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (HarperCollins, 2007). Think Big has a chapter called “Revenge,�� in which Trump spells out his philosophy of life and business: “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.��

Trump is all about retribution and hitting back harder than you were hit. To my mind, that fact explains more about him than, say, his egomania, which speaks to his character but not his motives.

Take the recent blowup Trump and J.D. Vance had with Volodymyr Zelenskky, Ukraine’s president. Did it result just from Trump’s desire to appease Vladimir Putin? Some pundits think so. But during the 2024 presidential campaign, Zelenskky visited Pennsylvania, a battleground state, in a move widely seen as an effort to boost the prospects of his rival, Kamala Harris. And in The New Yorker, Zelenskky called Vance “too radical.��

It’s plausible that with the Oval Office attack, Trump wanted to avenge what he sees as acts of betrayal during the campaign as much as he hoped to appease his ally Putin. Not sure about that? I say more about Trump and revenge in my latest story Medium. to that post if you’re still shaking your head about what happened at the White House as so many of us are.

Popular wisdom says that publishing is a young person’s game, and you can’t make a splash if you wait until your 50s or older to write your first book. An author who proves that view wrong is 92-year-old Gill Johnson, whose memoir Love From Venice: A Golden Summer on the Grand Canal was recently published by the Big Five firm of Hachette.

It’s Johnson’s first book, and it tells the delightful story of a magical seven months she spent, at the age of 25, living in one of the grandest palazzos in Venice with a count and contessa and their four children. The couple had hired her to help two of their boys perfect their English.

But Johnson’s months with the family included much more than that: a visit with Aristotle Onassis on his yacht, encounters with the novelist Nancy Mitford on the Lido beach, and amusing talks with an American author who had come to the palazzo to sort out whether to marry the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.

What enabled Johnson to land a major publisher and praise from critics at an age when other authors might have folded their tents? At @Medium, I write about some of in an ever-more-brutal publishing market and what you can learn from it, especially if you’re hoping to write a memoir of your own.

You know how much a great translation can add to a book if you’ve read a novel like Anna Karenina or Love in the Time of Cholera. But literary translators traditionally have had too little respect for the important ways they bridge cultural divides in a world that’s increasingly interconnected.

That’s starting to change. More major awards or arts organizations are establishing prizes for translated books or otherwise giving translators the respect they deserve. Among those that have created awards for them are the National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Booker Prizes.

If you speak a second language, the new attention might make you wonder: Could you earn a second income as a translator of books or other media? If so, what experience would you need, how much could you earn, and where could you find work? At @Medium, based on a study published in 2024 in the bulletin of the Authors Guild, the leading U.S. organization for authors.

California wildfires have become so common that there’s a growing shelf of books about them. Which are the best to read if you’re interested in learning more?

At @Medium, I write about some of my favorites, including both recent books and classics like Joan Didion’s , which has a short but excellent essay on the Santa Ana winds that are driving the recent blazes in Los Angeles.

One of my most popular Substack stories dealt with why your book won’t win a Pulitzer no matter how good it is, inspired by my having read a remarkable post by a Simon & Schuster editor predicting that a book by rival Penguin Random House will win: Percival Everett’s James. It was like Pepsi predicting that Coke would win a taste test to be aired on the Super Bowl.

But my story at Jansplaining didn’t deal with the obvious question the prediction raises: Are the Pulitzer Prizes rigged? Those awards won’t come out until May, and an editor already thinks he knows who will win?

So I’ve tacked those questions head on over at @Medium. My story about them is normally paywalled, but if you’re interested in my perspective as a former awards vice president of another major prize, the National Book Critics Circle Awards.

Percival Everett’s James is this year’s Homecoming King, a book that has people blowing kisses to it from every corner of the literary arena. So why didn’t I finish a novel that’s won a National Book Award and was a Booker Prize finalist?

The short answer is, to quote an editor friend, “It didn’t capture my heart.�� At @Medium, I say more about after about 60 pages of a novel that’s a book club favorite.

For more than a decade, I edited the book review section of Ohio’s largest newspaper. I wrote a column about books, assigned them to freelancers, and put the best on our weekly “Recommended�� list.

But I refused to compile an annual list of the year’s “best�� books. My newspaper received more than 400 review copies a week from publishers, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

To do an annual list of the “best,�� as I saw it, I’d have to make unfair calls. Which was “better��: a brilliant first novel, a Nobel laureate’s poetry collection, or a journalist’s investigation into a drug company dumping harmful chemicals into the water supply of a small town and causing an epidemic of birth defects? Would’t that depend on how you saw the relative importance of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry?

Yet at this time of year, you see countless lists in national media that purport to have found the “best�� of the half million books a year that come from traditional publishers alone (with 2 million more from self-publishers). Some of the results are disturbing.

Eight out of 10 titles on the New York Times best-books-of-2024 come from Penguin Random House, the largest U.S-based publisher. You see nothing from Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, or small or university presses. And that’s just the beginning of the problems.

Why is this happening? What’s wrong with all of it? And why should you–the reader–be concerned about all of it?

You’ll find my answers in my latest story at my free Substack newsletter, Jansplaining, which deals with why you can’t trust the year’s “best�� lists in media like the Times: