Issue #54: For the Love of (Short) Stories

Plus recs from friends 👯‍♀️

Morning Person is a weekly newsletter packed with obsessively-curated recommendations and ideas—let’s get to it!

📚 Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo: “A few years ago, I read Lisa Taddeo’s short story ‘Lois and Varga’ in the literary journal Granta. She’d already come out with Three Women, but I was struck by her voice and stunned by her sentences. No one writes like Lisa, and Ghost Lover, her new collection of short stories, is my favorite book she’s come out with to date. While each story can stand alone, all of the stories touch on this theme of unrequited love, typically from the perspective of a forty to fifty year-old woman. It’s hard to pick favorites, but I’ve read ‘Beautiful People,’ ‘Air Supply,’ and ‘Maid Marian’ multiple times. In ‘Beautiful People,’ Jane, prop master, falls for the famous actor on set. In ‘Air Supply,’ the narrator looks back on a trip she took with her best friend to Puerto Rico. In ‘Maid Marian,’ Noni inherits a prized possession from her dead former lover. If you are a writer and you want a masterclass in voice and character, read this.” - Recommended by Maddie (my friend and writer based in L.A.!)*

📺 “The Premise” on Hulu: Each of the five episodes in this series directed by BJ Novak addresses a different contemporary moral quandary, like when a teenage pop star offers to sleep with the Valedictorian of a high school inspiring a unique academic competition. The storylines are a bit reductive, but I enjoyed an episode Novak co-wrote with one of my favorite cultural critics, Jia Tolentino (who wrote Trick Mirror). In it, an influencer becomes obsessed with a troll’s comments that she feels reveal darker truths about her. Some other anthology series worth checking out: “Black Mirror,” “The Romanoffs,” “Little America,” and “Room 104.”