At a launch event a few weeks ago for Tiana Clark’s searing new collection Scorched Earth, the poet had her audience scrambling to take note of the various writers she lovingly name-checked and quoted—Terrance Hayes, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jericho Brown. It gave the evening the intimate feeling of receiving a folded piece of paper scribbled with reading recommendations, and the expansive one of attending a party under a big tent where everyone is invited.

I love books that lead me to other books, poems that open up paintings, music riffing on plays. Between sinking deep into Very Big Novels I’ve been working slowly through Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, a set of lectures that tangles with the magic and mechanics of writing poetry, and that constantly has me making additions to my list of books to read, songs to listen to. It’s fitting that the Los Angeles gallery Stowaway has taken one of Ruefle’s lines as the title of a group show that opened this weekend and is up through May 3. Artists include Mark Milroy, Morag Caister, and Karin Campbell. (I met Campbell at a residency this winter, along with the show’s curator, Indiana Hoover, with whom I discussed Ruefle’s work.) The title, borrowed from Ruefle’s lecture called “Secrets,” reflects not only the ethos of the paintings on display—by turns whimsical and melancholic, kinetic and contemplative, each rippling with life—but the crux of making and experiencing art writ large: In The End I’d Rather Wonder Than Know.

So come join our party: here are more of the books, new and old, that are keeping us wondering. —Keziah Weir, senior editor

The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI by David Hajdu

David Hajdu, the author (Positively Fourth Street, Lush Life), critic, and composer offers a truly novel approach to understanding the mechanics of how artists have made art and music from the machine age to today. The Uncanny Muse runs the gamut from early photography to player pianos; from MoMA’s 1934 “Machine Art” show (cocurated by Amelia Earhart) to modernist “machine-crafted” architecture (and its connection to fascism); from the bluesmen of the American South, who moved north and introduced rock musicians to the wonders of the electric guitar, to fiction created with computer-assisted technologies—and, most recently, AI. Hajdu’s polished prose, wide-ranging scholarship, and original reporting, support a compelling two-pronged thesis: (a) that synthetically generated art is, in fact, the product of human beings, and (b) that artists have always used tools/machines/virtual extensions of themselves to generate their work. In one inspired chapter, Hajdu recounts the birth of the electronic music scene in Berlin in the 1970s and ’80s and its overlap with the corresponding DJ-powered underground gay club culture that arose from New York City’s converted warehouses, explaining how both worlds were foundational to subsequent genres (techno, house, etc.) and contemporary methods of recording. In a word, The Uncanny Muse is a tour de force, a radical reappraisal of how to think about the very essence of artistic creation. (2025, Norton) —David Friend, editor of creative development

Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow

Scott Turow’s most formidable protagonist, Rusty Sabich, has been with us since 1987. The assertive prosecutor at the center of Presumed Innocent—the novel that established Turow as a master of the legal thriller—also appeared in the celebrated 1990 film version (played by Harrison Ford); then in Turow’s 2010 follow-up, Innocent; and again in last year’s Apple series (played by Jake Gyllenhaal). With Presumed Guilty, the author (and sometimes VF contributor) has delivered a riveting Sabich sequel. This taut yarn (a cord of rope is a central plot point) follows Sabich through his quixotic crusade in defense of his lover’s son: a young Black man accused of strangling his white girlfriend, the local prosecutor’s daughter, in a rural Midwestern county. The novel is an intricate thatch of corkscrew twists, vivid characters, dead-on colloquial dialogue, and lawyerly minutiae that culminates in a courtroom showdown worthy of Dominick Dunne. Redolent of Crime and Punishment, Twin Peaks, and the Serial podcast’s Adnan Syed episodes, Presumed Guilty, for all its meditations on criminal justice, also raises nuanced questions about aging, race, drug abuse, small-town dynamics, and, as Sabich calls it, “the warp and weft of existence.” On par with Presumed Innocent and Ordinary Heroes, Turow’s 2005 World War II epic, the novel showcases a storyteller and stylist at his pinnacle. (2025, Grand Central) —DF

Open Socrates by Agnes Callard

In Edward Berger’s Conclave—a fictional dramatization of the process of picking a new pope—Stanley Tucci’s Cardinal Bellini, who comes to see he is not suited to lead the Catholic Church after all, tells Ralph Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence, “I had the temerity to tell you to examine your own heart, while all the time it was my own…it’s shameful: to be this age and still not know yourself.” It’s a compelling piece of dialogue and alludes to one of the more well-known dictums in the Western canon: “The unexamined life is not worth living,” attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. In Agnes Callard’s interpretation of Socratic philosophy, the problem of not knowing oneself, a.k.a. ignorance, goes way beyond the realm of religion—it’s the state in which we are all born and, much more often than not, die. Our dissatisfaction, despair, unhappiness, wavering principles, violence, and lack of courage are all just “ignorance” by different names. On the other hand, virtue, justice, courage, and truth are all unified as forms of “knowledge.” How does one move away from ignorance and toward knowledge? For Callard’s Socrates, there is only one way: unceasing, open-minded inquiry into seemingly simple questions in conversation with others. Callard claims that for the ancient philosopher, inquiry—which is a form of thinking—is not a meditative act that happens in one’s mind but a social quest that requires the mind of another who can refute you (as we cannot refute ourselves). To go on such a quest, however, requires that together you ask real questions, or what Callard calls “untimely questions.” These are the inquiries most important to us but which we are also most likely to turn away from because they’re uncomfortable (we’d have to admit our ignorance) and inconvenient (knowledge forces us to change). And so we distract ourselves. We deflect. We perform a wisdom we do not have. But Socrates, via Callard, says it need not be so since the rigorous, constant, rational pursuit of knowledge is life’s greatest pleasure. Not only that, but to be persuaded by another is a greater good than to persuade and should be met with gratitude. Our ignorance purportedly looms largest in the areas of love, death, and politics. It’s Callard/Socrates’s discussion of the latter I find the most urgent. What would it look like to have political disagreements that are not framed as a zero-sum game where one side wins and the other loses? What would it look like to enter into arguments in which we did not pretend to already know the answers? (2025, W.W. Norton & Company) —Natasha O’Neill, digital line editor

Y2k: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was) by Colette Shade

As a ’90s baby, I remember the beginning of the 21st century with equal amounts of nostalgia and dismay. The radio hits were innovative, the furniture was plastic, and the fashion was incredibly zany. In her debut essay collection, Colette Shade joyfully reconstructs the era’s aesthetics while cannily deconstructing its politics and legacy. Though this book has plenty to offer the younger generations who have only experienced the era through its recent algorithmic reprisals, it’s the most rewarding to those of us wondering how our childhoods in a seeming capitalist utopia gave way to adulthood in a world with so little optimism. (2025, Dey Street) —Erin Vanderhoof, staff writer

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

To everyone else, The Grapes of Wrath may be the Steinbeck novel, but of East of Eden—a project he started thinking about soon after Grapes in 1939, and published 12 years later—the author once wrote, “I’ve been practicing for a book for 35 years, and this is it.” Accordingly, it’s a big sprawling story set in Northern California’s Salinas Valley, tracing the histories of the rich Trasks and the poor Hamiltons, whose fates entangle when they end up the owners of neighboring farmland. Part Steinbeck family history, part fuguish reworking of the Bible’s Cain and Abel dynamic (two pairs of brothers across two generations experience the reverberating effects of longing for a father’s love), it’s peopled by human monsters and living saints. Yet there’s always more thrashing beneath the surface than easy goodness and raging evil, and Steinbeck’s constantly prodding at tropes of race, gender, and class. Lee, a Chinese-American son of railroad workers who works in the Trask home, enters the book speaking what’s described as “pidgin English”; later we learn that he deploys the dialect in front of white people in order to serve an easily digestible version of himself, saving his erudite thoughts for only trusted companions. (Percival Everett deploys similar code-switching in last year’s Pulitzer Prize–winning James, to virtuosic effect.) East of Eden’s cold flame of an antagonist is also its central love interest, a sociopathic woman who wields sexual desire as a weapon and, for most of the novel, is presented as evil incarnate. And yet, amid stories of her bad behavior, the slippery, biased narrator (he’s a younger generation member of the Hamilton family) muses late in the book: “When I said Cathy was a monster it seemed to me that it was so. Now I have bent close with a glass over the small print of her and reread the footnotes, and I wonder if it was true.” For myriad reasons it’s a good time to read this heavyweight of moral ambiguity, not least because a Netflix adaptation is on the way. (1952, Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) —KW

Six Pack