Reader's Digest: June 13, 2026

My first piece of public writing for a while is a book review for the TLS, about Joanna Stalnaker’s superb study of eighteenth-century philosophers facing death, The Rest Is Silence. I’ve been working for as long as I remember on a book about philosophy as learning how to die—the plan is to publish it as soon as I find the answer—and this was a welcome opportunity to check in.

To offset the self-promotion: here’s a lovely piece by Tristram Fane Saunders about one of my favourite, neglected genres, the poetry pamphlet, which opens with a sentence worthy of a stand-up comic:

Spineless, largely ignored by the reading public, unwelcome in most bookshops and unlikely to make much money, the average poetry pamphlet and the average literary critic have much in common, so it’s curious that the latter only rarely acknowledges the former’s existence.

About one of the pamphlets, Saunders writes, with appreciation:

I haven’t yet mulched mine, but won’t hesitate to do so.