Read the room
Introducing the TANK Summer Reader 2026
On Thursday, 21 January 1926, Vita Sackville-West wrote to Virginia Woolf: “You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences.” Her letters describe love as an involuntary rupture that makes nonsense of the critical faculties we spend lifetimes constructing, a form of ego death. Recently, we have been thinking about that sentence in relation to a rather different object of affection: the romance novel.
The form has always had its detractors. When Samuel Richardson published Pamela in 1740, generally regarded as an English-language archetype of the genre, Henry Fielding responded with Shamela, a parody designed to expose the novel’s romantic wish-fulfilment as a form of moral fraud within a year. In his book The Western Canon, Harold Bloom famously made no room for genre fiction in the literary canon, deeming it unworthy of his engagement. Critique of romance literature has often been intertwined with an implicitly gendered condescension: in her feature on bonkbusters, TANK’s own Amelia McGarvey recounts how a Daily Mail columnist described Jilly Cooper’s books as smelling like “fag smoke and hairspray, wet dogs and sex.”
And yet, romance literature remains the bulwark of the publishing industry: the genre accounts for nearly a quarter of global fiction sales; by 2033, the global market is expected to hit $28 billion. Irrespective of whether charges of purple prose and paper-thin plotting are correct, what people are purchasing is revealing. In this year’s Summer Reader, we explore why, in an era of post-ironic detachment, so many of us are reaching for stories that want us to mean it.
Like any romance novel worth its salt, this issue aims to transport and seduce in equal measure. Wayne Koestenbaum and Nate Lippens discuss rabbinic fantasies, we ask a dozen or so friends about the sexiest book they’ve ever read and New Directions Publishing president Barbara Epler gives us this Summer’s most essential reads. We publish extracts from Yang Shuang-zi’s Booker Prize-winning Taiwan Travelogue and Jennifer Gibbons’ Discomania, discuss improvisation and Tottenham Hotspur FC with Daniel Blumberg and discover Hélène Cixous’ Angst. Plus, we speak to Fcukers on the joys of ecstasy, Cristine Brache on Playboy bunnies, Rosie Wylie on omelettes and Anton Jäger on our age of hyperpolitics.
You can buy the issue in all good newsagents and at our online store now!
Matteo Pini
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Caroline Issa reads from the editor’s letter, which discusses the displacement of global power within recent years, from the insidious movement of the tech moguls into the arts to the manufactured Zionist bias against Palestine in mainstream media.
