Lynne Tillman writes books–novels, short stories, essays, criticism–that continuously provoke thought. Since the late 80s and the formation of the New Narrative movement in American literature, Tillman has created a body of work deeply engaged with art, culture, history, ourselves, and our relationships with one another.  The first book of hers I read was her 2018 novel Men and Apparitions about an ethnographer named Zeke who studied family photographs. Tillman’s seamless blend of found images, commentary and aphorisms on pop culture, and a narrator naturally inquisitive about others so hooked me that I spent my summer after college reading it so slowly, wishing that both the book and the sunny freedom of being on my own in upstate New York would never end. Drawn to documenting things myself, I related to Zeke, as I had just finished school and made a short diary film about my family and my grief. Not only that, but halfway through Men and Apparitions, the main character experiences a personal betrayal that closely, painfully mirrored something I myself had gone through in the last weeks of my graduating year. 

What we witnessed in 2024 was the culmination and confirmation of several cultural trends that began to come into focus in the early 2020s. In the plague year of 2020, over 350,000 Americans died from COVID-19. The World Health Organization estimated that over 3 million people died from COVID-19 worldwide that year. This pandemic, along with the murder of George Floyd, rocked the United States and the world into uprising. The following year was marked by an uprising from the other side–a violent far-right insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, encouraged by President Donald Trump. The next few years under President Joe Biden felt–at least for a while–eerily normal, but this normalcy was merely an illusion. While the political establishment applauded the restoration of democratic norms, culture continued to move rightward.