The Maris Review, vol 78

Maris Kreizman

28 Oct 2025 — 5 min read

What I read this week

Lily King does it again. My favorite of her novels is still Euphoria, her fictionalization of the experiences of Margaret Mead that is action-packed and filled with both dread and beauty. But with Writers and Lovers and now Heart the Lover King proves to be exceptional at writing realistic fiction in which not that much happens (except everything) at all. If you loved Writers and Lovers, you will likely also love this new one, which takes place before and after the events of the previous novel.

In Heart the Lover we learn how the narrator of both books got her nickname, from two boys in her 17th century literature class in college, Sam and Yash, who decided she was more of a Jordan than a Daisy. Jordan is wowed first by their intellect ("I had never met a scholar who wasn't a professor") and so Heart the Lover joins the ranks of many excellent books (The Idiot! My Education!) about intellectual passion and how it turns sexual or vice versa or maybe it's all one big messy form of passion in the first place. Jordan first dates Sam, but it soon becomes clear that Yash is the one she's meant to be with, if there's such a thing as being "meant to be" with someone. Their romance is physically and intellectually fulfilling, but timing and misunderstanding and being young and poor prevent

We already knew, those of us who read Writers and Lovers, that Lily King knows her way around a love triangle, but this time she pulls off a real tearjerker as well. But even more than that, I love the way King, via Jordan, talks about writing: "A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you're reading it." I think that's what I'm always searching for.

Tokyo Express by Seichō Matsumoto translated by Jesse Kirkwood

We had gone away for the weekend and I had downloaded a new audiobook by a favorite author. Two hours in, I decided to call it quits. I'm not gonna tell you what it was, and I might go back to it with the physical book rather than audio, just know that I was away from my stacks of galleys and eager to find something new.

Josh and I were delighted to stop by Garden District BookShop, a bustling store with a formidable Anne Rice section, and I did some perusing. I was hoping to find the new Rabih Alameddine, but in its absence I just let my eyes wander. That's when I came upon the Modern Library edition of Tokyo Express with that irresistible cover and realized it was perfect timing. The Times called the author "Japan's Agatha Christie" and I liked the sound of that. I had downloaded the audio edition but knew I would want to read the physical book to see all of the charts and maps (I love a good novel with some charts and maps!) and the ways that all of the names were spelled.

Tokyo Express is a book about logistics. I'm a nervous traveler – I always want to know when and where to make a connection and have a route mapped out in advance – so I appreciate the precision with which two murders occur in the novel. Two young people are found dead by ingestion of cyanide on a dark beach on Hakata Bay in 1957. It is presumed to be a double suicide by young lovers, but when you look a little closer some things don't quite add up. At first a local detective, a classically unkempt yet wise gumshoe, calls bullshit. Then a younger, more cosmopolitan detective from Tokyo follows his hunch. By looking into various modes of transportation all around Japan and with the help of a variety of timetables, they investigate how a certain gentleman who might benefit from the death of the two young people might have established a string of alibis that were not as iron clad as he had believed they would be.

It's a funny little caper. The characters are not entirely vivid, we get very little backstory about the detectives, there are no B plots. But with a laser focus on the investigation there's very little room for any extraneous descriptions or scenes in the novel. It's a tight and fun read that is really perfect if you're traveling.

Meanwhile at the bookstore in the Garden District

Glad I got to worship at the shrine.

More platform bullshit

I know just about every big corporation is deeply flawed at best and that a lot of us are making tradeoffs. I won't buy books from Amazon but I do watch their television shows. I'm off Twitter but I'm on Bluesky, which has problems of its own. I left Substack because I hated their politics, but I published a book with HarperCollins, which is owned by News Corp.

I recently read a great book about how Spotify has sucked the lifeblood out of the music industry, and I quit when they gave Joe Rogan millions of dollars to podcast. But I've been paying attention to Spotify's foray into audiobooks, and I've read a lot of pieces about whether publishers and authors are actually making money or not and I don't quite have a sense. It depends on who you ask.

But now the company has hit new lows. It apparently is not the only big platform to advertise for America's own version of the gestapo, but after lots of musicians expressed dismay, Spotify said it stands by its ICE ads.

I know there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, etc etc, but some businesses are certainly trying harder than others. I promise you that Libro.fm, the platform that I use to buy audiobooks, has never ever run an ad for ICE and never will.