This review first appeared in the inaugural issue of Serpent Club Press, New Writing, Summer, 2023 edited by Matthew Gasda and Robert Gittings. You can purchase a copy here: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Summer-2023-Matthew-Gasda/dp/0997613491/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3I1QCNEECL7SO&keywords=serpent+club+new+writing&qid=1702860358&s=books&sprefix=serpent+club+new+writing%2Cstripbooks%2C118&sr=1-1 French author Patrick Modiano celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday this past July. His literary output, beginning in his early twenties, has been prodigious: he has written more than thirty works of fiction, as well as co-written the screenplay for the film Lacombe, Lucien (with director Louis Malle), children’s books, and memoirs.

Earlier this week, a very specific family Christmas card trend went viral: Mothers and daughters restrained with strings of holiday lights, mouths taped shut; fathers and sons free, smiling, holding signs that read, “Finally, peace on Earth!” Twitter user @mattxiv collected four of these photos (yes, multiple families did this!) under the caption, “Straight male humor is like ‘I regret getting married and I fucking hate my kids LOL right fellas?

Of all the world’s food trends, I’m an unapologetic supporter of butters—specifically, flavored butters. In culinary school, we called them “compound butters,” an overly complicated name for a very simple technique. Because flavored butters are just that: softened butter mixed with something, well, flavorful. And although they’ve long been associated with white-tablecloth restaurants, now, at last, these fanciful butters—savory, sweet, spicy, herbaceous—are finally taking their rightful place in the home kitchen.

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter. This week I wrapped up a bunch of pages for Phenomena Book 3 and begun working on the next chunk of script. We now have 69 fully finished pages of art and in a couple of weeks we’ll be at 83. If you add this to the already fully finished Book 2, there are already more than 200 pages of comics that I’ve done in the last year that almost no one has seen yet.

Bukky Adeyokunnu is a self-taught portrait photographer and filmmaker. Born in Lagos, Nigeria and bred in Prince George’s County, Maryland, Bukky tells visual stories of women, health, and the immigrant experience. She began her journey in 2015 and has since become a Dean’s Collection artist, been featured in xoNecole for The Warrior Series, a photo series which captures how three strong women triumph over sickle cell disease, and local exhibitions including Washington D.