What is this?

THE FRONTLIST is a twice-monthly-ish newsletter dedicated to new and forthcoming books, video games, TV, and film, from the perspective of a culture journalist and critic.

You can subscribe to the newsletter for free — or you can subscribe at a monthly ($5) or yearly ($50) rate to help me keep every issue free for unpaid subscribers.

The hand-lettered wordmarks for The Frontlist were designed by Cristina Vanko.

Who am I?

I’m a culture journalist and critic who covers books, video games, TV, and film — usually for Esquire these days, but also for The Paris Review, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, Inverse, Polygon, BOMB magazine, and a bunch of other publications.

I’m the author A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls for Simon & Schuster’s One Signal imprint (a division of Atria Books). It’s a narrative biography of Margaret C. Anderson, the queer and forgotten literary pioneer who faced a criminal trial in New York City for being the first to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I founded the Chicago Review of Books in 2016, the Southern Review of Books in 2020, and the Chicago Literary Archive in 2021. More about me here.