September 16, 2025, 11:33am

For the next eight weeks, Harper’s Bazaar will sponsor a new literary newsletter from Kaitlyn Greenidge.

Greenidge, the novelist behind Libertie and We Love You, Charlie Freeman and the excellent thinker behind pieces like these, isn’t new to the newsletter game. Her own Substack, “What It is I Think I’m Doing,” has been serving up “cultural criticism at the intersection of pop culture, the archives and Black womanhood” for the past five years.

Her Harper’s letter (yes, let this be a reclaiming) will go a little more local.

In every issue of “A Closer Read,” Greenidge will highlight a single book. Early pieces promise to look at “writing as embroidery with Joyce Carol Oates, the wonders of taxidermy with Susan Orlean, and Angela Flournoy’s modern classic of Black millennial angst, The Wilderness.”

As the Substack model continues to balloon, major publications like Harper’s Bazaar are going all in on newsletters. “A Closer Read” joins a raft of compadres, like The New Yorker’s sturdy “Books and Culture” vertical, or The Point’s philosophical “Forms of Life.”

The Cut re-launched a fun literary letter last October. “Book Gossip” aims to “track reading trends and controversies, highlight great works in translation,” and “point you to the writing making waves on the internet.” Edited by Jasmine Vojdani, it’s aimed at both publishing insiders and general readers.

Happily, Greenidge’s project is even more specific than all of these. “A Closer Read” will occupy a fresh intersection in newsletterland—at least as it’s been done so far by large publications. By focusing on a single book or idea, each letter can sit somewhere between a personal essay and a larger lit-world analysis. And as any librarian or bookseller can tell you, meeting new books through one specific voice has always been the best way to do it.

Greenidge puts her aims even more humbly. Describing an ill-fated attempt to imitate art, she instructs fans to “think of this newsletter as a toast to the curiosity and literary joys that might lead you to order a Scotch and milk, in a dark and musty bar, to try to get closer to what you read and loved on a page.”

Sounds pretty sweet to me.

Today you can read the very first edition of “A Closer Read,” featuring an interview with Arundhati Roy about her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. New installments will land every Tuesday.

The curious can sign up here.