I can see the future: The Retro Report, vol. 36

BIG BOOK NEWS: Retro has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize!

Here is some context for this incredible honor, via CFF:

This year, we received over 180 submitted titles with U.S. publication dates between January 1 and December 31, 2026. More than 500 participants in The Center’s First Novel Prize Readership—including writers, librarians, booksellers, and other devoted readers—reviewed the submissions to help determine the 19 debut novels below.

Inaugurated in 2006, the First Novel Prize honors the best debut novel of the year and supports emerging voices in fiction. Each year, the winning author receives a $15,000 prize in recognition of their contribution to contemporary literature and in support of their ongoing creative career. Past winners of the Prize include Marisha Pessl, Junot Díaz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tommy Orange, Raven Leilani, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow. In the fall, our judging panel of four distinguished authors will select the 2026 First Novel Prize Shortlist and winner.

A major theme in Retro is the tug-of-war between the kind of people who care about fiction—who think that the time spent enriching your intellectual and emotional life; putting your head and your heart into the experiences of characters whose lives are, at least superficially, completely unlike your own; nourishing your imagination and escaping from your daily whatever to some magnificent elsewhere; is SUPREMELY important time despite not being (in fact because it is not) “productive” in the capitalist/spreadsheet-brained/optimization-sicko sense of the word—and people who don’t read fiction at all because they don’t think it is “useful.” Gross!!!!!!

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Ash, Retro’s main character, is a struggling actress who doesn’t just doubt her own talents but if the end to which she is putting all her efforts is one worth attaining. Does anyone care about art, even? But deep down she is a true believer. And so am I!!!! So it is a real thrill to be recognized by the Center for Fiction, an organization that GETS it and has been around for 200+ years.1

Okay but Jessica I thought you said the only real award is bragging rights. I DID say that and I meant it! That is why I am here, bragging about this :)

The only real award is bragging rights: The Retro Report, vol. 19

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Mar 13

I have spent the past couple of weeks reporting and writing a story I am very excited to share with all of you, and because I was totally in the weeds working on it I was not able to write a newsletter last week. Tragic! I hope all of you were able to enjoy your weekends anyway, and that you used that time wisely, basking in the first stretch of false s…

See what all the fuss is about and get YOUR copy of Retro wherever books are sold!!!

Buy RETRO today!

As I predicted (see: footnote no. 1 of TRR vol. 35), I set off a bit of a discourse with my Washington Post story on how cigarettes are cool again. We got a top of the “letters to the editor” response demanding the Post “stop glamorizing cigarettes.” I maintain that it is not glamorizing something to merely report that it has already been glamorized. I am simply documenting reality!

I had the best time at Thunder Road Books in Spring Lake, NJ, talking about Retro with bookstore manager/buyer/events coordinator extraordinaire Kate Czyzewski, whose arms are decked out with tattoos from all the best children’s classics. (She even has the peddler from Caps For Sale! A woman after my own heart!) I also met Martha, the bookstore mascot and a friend to readers everywhere:

If YOU are heading down the Jersey Shore this summer (1) please eat some funnel cake for me and (2) make sure to pop by this wonderful shop, where signed copies of Retro are waiting for you!

And then I made my NYC debut at Books Are Magic on Montague Street with one of Retro’s most ardent champions, Spruceton Inn owner and The Fountain author Casey Scieszka. If you couldn’t make it there in person, FRET NOT: You can watch our conversation on the Books Are Magic YouTube channel.

Really thoughtful and intriguing Qs from my A+ conversation partner and the audience here, plus you can listen to me read an excerpt from the novel—a bachelor party at Woodstock!—and hear my best frat bro impression. (If you would prefer to hear a professional voice actor’s take on the frat bros, you simply MUST get yourself a copy of the Retro audiobook, read by Allyson Ryan!)

Of course I left a stack of signed books behind for you so make sure to swing by and get yours before they sell out!

• ALEXANDRIA, VA: Retro is Old Town Books Good Yarn Book Club pick for July! Book Club meets from 7:00 - 8:00 p.m. on Monday, July 27 at Old Town Books (which is the site of RetroLiving housing in the novel! OoooOOooh!). I visited last month’s book club to chat about Retro on publication-day-eve and the atmosphere is just perfect. So cozy and intimate; you sit in a circle and can bring whatever craft you’re crafting or just hang and talk books while people around you are knitting.

• WASHINGTON, DC: Retro is the Sundeck Summer Reads giveaway for next week! Register here to snag your free book and come out to the Yards at 6:00 on Wednesday, July 29 to say hi and get it signed!

• REHOBOTH BEACH, DE: Find me on the boardwalk outside Browseabout Books from 1:30 - 3:30 pm on Monday, August 24 selling and signing Retro for everybody soaking up the last of the summer shore days!

RETRO RETRO RETRO

In honor of being honored by the CFF for my debut, the theme of this week’s recs is debuts that make you go WHOA!2

The speed with which Lena Dunham went from writer-director of this scrappy small feature to star and showrunner of Girls is frankly insane—can you get the bends, psychologically, from rising too quickly in showbiz? I think so!—but when I watched this for the first time not too long ago, I understood why the people who saw this premiere had that thrilling premonition that they were seeing a creative star being born. Everything that would go on to make Girls so singular was already here, in remarkably-fully-realized form. (You can read the whole behind-the-scenes story in her memoir, Famesick.)

Dunham plays the failing-to-launch and recently-dumped film school grad, Aura, who moves back into her parents’ (stunning, like I get why it would be hard to move out!!) Tribeca loft, from which she awkwardly attempts to both fling herself into adulthood and cling to the carelessness of childhood. Her little sister, Nadine (Dunham’s younger sibling, Cyrus Grace Dunham) resents the encroachment of Aura into space she should’ve already vacated. Her mom, Siri (played by Dunham’s mom, Laurie Simmons) is a photographer who takes pictures of the titular tiny furniture. Tasked with finding a lightbulb for her mom, Aura instead stumbles on her mom’s journals from her own early-twenties what-am-I-even-doing-with-my-life years, and devours them in secret.

The movie is quiet but never boring, semi-stakesless but in a totally believable way. Aura finds herself—occasionally shoves herself—into some of your classic ill-advised coming-of-age dynamics: She reunites with a childhood friend who is soooo cool and obviously a “bad influence” (Jemima Kirke aka future Jessa, radiant); lusts after an emotionally-unavailable chef who works at the restaurant where she tries, and fails, to keep a hostessing job, and who only shows an interest in Aura when he finds out she can hook him up with prescription drugs; entertains an oddly-chaste flirtation with a YouTube-famous filmmaker, Jed (Alex Karpovsky, RAY!!!, annoying but he’s supposed to be) who is basically just using Aura for a free, decadent place to crash rent-free.

She behaves like someone who is begging to be ripped to pieces in an AITA on Reddit—for instance: she bails unceremoniously on her school friend Frankie (Merritt Weaver, giver of one of the greatest awards acceptance speech of all time) who was planning to be her roommate in the city, for some bogus excuse she cannot even justify to herself—but in an entirely believable, innocent-ish manner. It’s also a cool 98 minutes. Do a double feature with Frances Ha!3

I feel like tonally this is in the same territory as last week’s rec of the 1995 Baby-Sitters Club movie and perhaps the boys reading this newsletter are feeling left out. But gender is a construct and if you were blown away by the technical feat of doubling Michael B. Jordan in Sinners4 then maybe you will get a lot of out Nancy Meyers’ directorial debut: The Lindsay Lohan Parent Trap!

For the somehow-still uninitiated, this film—a remake of the 1961 Hayley Mills-starring movie of the same name, which in turn was based on a German children’s book from 1949 called Lisa and Lottie—is about a custody arrangement that will make you go, huh, okay, I feel like that shouldn’t be allowed? Identical twins Hallie (Lindsay Lohan, American) and Annie (Lindsay Lohan, British) are separated in infancy because their parents, Californian wine guy Nick (Dennis Quaid) and London gal/wedding-dress designer mom (Natasha Richardson) split up, and I guess both of these psychopaths were just totally fine with literally never seeing one of their children ever again???

This is one of those movies where if you think about it too hard you’ll realize it is actually a horror film. Instead you have to think about it the just-right amount: Roll with it when these freckle-faced youths are sent to the same summer camp in Maine and it takes them MULTIPLE days to figure out that they have the exact same face (their hair is different lengths, okay?) and only piece together the mystery of their identical features when they find out that the only photograph each of them has of their other parent (?!? again WHAT) is “ripped right down the middle” and they put the picture together like broken halves of a best friends forever necklace.

The girls decide that their parents need to get back together and, to that end, trade places. “Would my mom still know me if I was swapped out for my physically-identical double?” is, again, the stuff of horror, but in Meyers’ hands the whole thing is champagne-fizzy. It’s very fun to see what we know now will become her go-to offerings—dreamy kitchens, believably beautiful yet casual outfits, a familial coziness that is so warm and enveloping you will actually forget that neither Mom nor Dad is fit to parent—in their earliest form.

Of course this movie also stars the once-maligned-but-now-celebrated “bad” girlfriend, 26-year-old Meredith (Elaine Hendrix), who is just trying to marry a rich guy with a vineyard in Napa while wearing cute outfits and not getting bug bites, and Chessy (Abbott Elementary’s Lisa Ann Walter5), the nanny who knows the kids better than their own parents, in the Nurse-from-Romeo-and-Juliet tradition. SHE would never have agreed to let them be torn asunder in the first place!

This is a double-debut because it was also the feature film debut of Lindsay Lohan. One day I will get deeper in the newsletter on how I don’t think children should have jobs and I find it really unsettling whenever kids are on screen, especially in load-bearing roles like these. But for NOW I will just say despite all of those misgivings (which stand!): She is really great in this, x 2.

Longtime readers of TRR already know about this but we’ve got lots of new people in the mix so I would be remiss if I did not point you to my Entertainment Weekly oral history of “…Baby One More Time,” one of THE great debut singles (and just pop songs in general) of all time.

A very important entry in this category AND one of the best examples of SONIC SENSE, a concept all TRR readers need in your lives!

Leave logic behind and make SONIC SENSE: The Retro Report, vol. 11

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Jan 9

Happy New Year to my longtime Retro Report readers and welcome to all you new subscribers who found your way here through my Emily in Paris recaps and beyond! If you want to know the vision/manifesto/etc. of the letter—it is only rarely about Emily—you can find it in

I was a guest not too long ago on the Creative Inspired Alive Podcast and at the end I was asked a bunch of rapid-fire this-or-thats. The first one was “Britney or Taylor?” and I shouted BRITNEY so fast I thought an army of Swifties was going to assemble at my door to yank my tongue out of my mouth with their bare hands. To make amends, I will note that Taylor’s debut single, “Tim McGraw,” is excellent, and has a perfect first line6, and that if you want the full scoop on how she changed Nashville and the country music industry forever, preorder all-star Emily Yahr’s debut (!): Taylor Swift: The Debut Years, out Oct. 6!!!