A book that earns the title of “cult classic” is one that combines two seemingly contradictory qualities: It has a passionate following of people who swear it’s the best thing they’ve ever read, but also, outside this intense fan base, it’s largely unknown. As word of mouth about such a book spreads, and the title’s partisans become evangelists, it begins to spark with a distinct kind of electricity. Even if the book never goes mainstream, its reputation can be buoyed for years or decades by devotees.

But is there a specific kind of book that most often finds itself in this category? I’d argue that these titles are also frequently subversive, strange, and experimental—and that something about this eccentric quality resonates for members of a subculture, especially one that, willingly or not, remains unseen by the mainstream.

Of the six books below, one was assigned to me by a writing teacher; another I discovered while researching lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s; yet another I read for a paper on Weimar-era Germany. Each is considered special by a very particular subset of readers. Each is also outstanding, so I am virtually thrusting them into your hands in hopes that I’ll finally have someone to talk to about them.

Vintage

Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany

This massive novel by the science-fiction luminary Delany was a commercial success when it came out in 1975, and even though it has sold more than 1 million copies in the nearly five decades since, it’s the sort of book that people may own for years without reading. The narrative shifts between first and third person, and Delaney’s ecstatic love of language’s many sounds, contours, and combinations can make the experience intimidating—but once you allow the rhythm to wash over you, it is so worth your dedicated time. Its protagonist, The Kid (also known as Kid or Kidd), is a bisexual man of indeterminate age who arrives alone at the fictional midwestern city of Bellona and tries to make a life there. The city was once densely inhabited, but after an undisclosed cataclysmic event that cut it off from the rest of the world, most of its population fled. This unique, uncanny setting serves as a kind of second protagonist; Bellona’s streets occasionally reconfigure themselves, steam and smoke arise from unknown sources, and a second moon appears in the sky. The Kid finds lust, love, and intellectual fulfillment, but also witnesses and participates in violence, madness, and chaos—and Bellona encourages all of it.

[Read: The cult classic that captures the stress of social alienation]

Feminist Press

Women’s Barracks, by Tereska Torrès

Considered not only the first lesbian pulp novel but the first paperback-original best seller in the United States, Women’s Barracks, like Robinson Crusoe and Pamela, bills itself as a true account but is actually fictional. Based on the author’s experiences serving in the U.K.-based Corps of French Female Volunteers during World War II, the story depicts the lives of a group of women living together in their assigned barracks in London during the Blitz. Torrès’s narrator acts primarily as an observer, describing the various dramas, personality clashes, and intra-corps romances taking place around her. While few of the women consider themselves lesbians or bisexuals, and the book does not seem to have been widely read among contemporary queer women, it is a foundational text within the genre of lesbian pulp fiction. Still, the novel is thoroughly enjoyable even without knowing its historical context. Its cast of characters is fascinating: The women come from all classes and life circumstances. Some are patriotic volunteers; others are just trying to survive. Though they take their jobs as secretaries, telephone operators, and typists seriously, they also find ways to relieve the stress of life during wartime. They throw parties and share their escapades with one another. Despite the narrator’s occasional moralizing (added in at the insistence of the book’s original publisher, the author has explained), the novel’s relationships feel true to the complexity of both its characters and its era.

Grove

Blood and Guts in High School, by Kathy Acker

I confess—when I first started reading Blood and Guts, I was nearly certain I wouldn’t finish it, because I was disturbed beyond measure. The opening pages depict a 10-year-old girl named Janey begging her father for love, affection, and sex. Even with this alarming premise, Acker’s novel is widely beloved by artists, counterculture devotees, and avant-gardists; the author Lidia Yuknavitch has said that it saved her life, and notes that despite her early powerlessness, Janey “had more agency and voice than any girl I’d ever read or would read in my entire life.” Questions of power, propriety, and respectability permeate the novel, and I began to consider Janey’s relationship with her father as allegorical to some extent, Acker’s way of—shockingly, yes—providing commentary on the sexual dynamics between men and women. The plot, such as it is, follows Janey through further trials and tribulations, and is interrupted by poems, illustrations, digressions into sexual fantasies and critiques of the U.S. government, unexplained drawings of genitalia, and sudden descriptions of places and scenes that have nothing to do with Janey or any of the characters she comes into contact with. It feels like a fever dream, maybe even a nightmare, but it’s one you want to stick with.

[Read: One of the best fantasy novels ever is nothing like ]The Lord of the Rings

Penguin Books

Multiple Choice, by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell

If you’ve ever taken a standardized test in your life, you’ll recognize the format of the Chilean writer Zambra’s book immediately. The author grew up under the Pinochet dictatorship, and in this work, based on the structure of the Chilean Academic Aptitude Test, he uses multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blanks, and long sample texts to confront the authoritarian instincts that underlay his own education and that continue in many rigid, exam-based educational systems today. Its many questions begin to create a creeping sense of dread and nihilism, and that mood comes to a head in the last section, which is made up of three short stories and a series of questions about each. Yet even with these dark undertones, the book is both a quick read and hilarious. You may have thought that you never wanted to encounter fill-in-the-bubble-type tests again, but rest assured, Multiple Choice does all the work for you; it’s brilliant, and well worth your time.

Melville House

Little Man, What Now?, by Hans Fallada, translated by Susan Bennett

A product of Weimar Germany, Fallada’s social realist novel focuses on a young couple, Johannes Pinneberg and Emma “Bunny” Mörschel, who decide to marry when they learn that Bunny is pregnant. Although it starts about a year after the 1929 financial crash, Johannes and Bunny might as well be young Millennials struggling in a tanked economy: They move in and out of a series of apartments and their parents’ homes, trying to afford basic necessities while working dull, unfulfilling jobs at companies newly obsessed with optimization. (A store called Mandel’s even hires an “efficiency engineer” to help cut costs.) Depictions of Nazism in the book—published in 1932—feel painfully relevant as well; Fallada portrays Hitler’s followers as laughably jingoistic and uses them as punch lines, and that sort of mockery echoes early American reactions to Donald Trump’s resistance to a peaceful transfer of power or his conspiracy-mongering—before both proved to be deadly serious. Funny, heartbreaking, and somewhat Dickensian, Fallada’s novel is truly a pleasure, and deserves to be more widely read.

[Read: ]Nevada is the great bookseller novel

University of California Press

Dictee, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Dictee is a genre-bending work that in my experience seems to be relatively known among poets but otherwise somewhat obscure to everyone else. It has no linear narrative, no obvious main characters, and is made up of poetry and fragmented prose, quoted or uncited works of history, untitled images, multiple languages—French, English, and occasionally Chinese and Korean—and even printed reproductions of handwritten drafts. Much of its content dwells on language: how it may be taken away and made illegal in one nation, forced upon migrants in another, coupled with restrictive religious practices, used to shape official histories. The book also plays with the audience’s assumptions. Its epigraph is attributed to Sappho: “May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.” Most readers would expect to find this quote somewhere in that famed poet’s body of work. Yet Sappho apparently never wrote these lines; they were invented by Cha. You can take little for granted in a text like Dictee; no path through the book allows for complete comprehension.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

“I wish I knew some young men!” the writer Eliza Orne White declared in The Atlantic’s July 1888 issue. “I am fully aware how heterodox this sentiment is considered, but I repeat it boldly, and even underline it—I should like to know some interesting men!”

White, a fiction author, was writing in the voice of her 20-year-old protagonist May, but her story had plenty to do with the romantic truths of the day. A 19th-century woman couldn’t just make a Tinder account and message a strapping stonemason two towns over. If she wanted a suitor, she had to choose one from a limited supply of options and then charm him—just enough to encourage interest but not so much that she’d seem like she was trying. When I spoke with Beth Bailey, the author of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America, she told me that this had long been the classic tale of American courtship: Because women couldn’t conventionally initiate or steer a relationship themselves, all they could hope for was to subtly influence men to act in a certain way. (Even if they weren’t straight, they probably had few options besides marrying a man.) Poor May had to pretend she enjoyed reading Robert Browning’s poetry to catch the attention of her crush, who was leading a club on the poet’s oeuvre; after going through all that trouble, she was deemed a “flirt” by the haughty ladies of the neighborhood.

When you’re struggling in love, it’s easy to feel like you were simply born at the wrong time. Today, media outlets have amply covered “dating-app fatigue”; some polls have found that the majority of online daters say they experience “burnout” from all that swiping. But courtship has always been hard. Moira Weigel, the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, told me that for much of early American history, your relatives likely arranged or at least surveilled your budding relationships. Before the Industrial Revolution, the point of marriage was often to unite families so they could share agricultural work, so your dating life was, in fact, their business. That meant little freedom for your own personal canoodling.

Once young people started living and working in cities, it became more common for them to pair up on their own. But that presented its own challenges. As marriage became, more and more, an arrangement of love rather than of logistics, the pressure to find the perfect mate was cranked up and up. “Marriage was not designed as a mechanism for providing friendship, erotic experience, romantic love, personal fulfillment, continuous lay psychotherapy, or recreation,” the sociologist Mervyn Cadwallader argued in a 1966 Atlantic article titled “Marriage as a Wretched Institution.” (Please, Cadwallader, tell us how you really feel.) Perhaps a mere practical contract was enough when people could lean on their family and their neighbors. But in a fractured, urbanized nation, the stakes were higher. “Cut off from the support and satisfactions that flow from community,” Cadwallader wrote, “the confused and searching young American can do little but place all of his bets on creating a community in microcosm, his own marriage.”

For decades, it was hard to know where to even start looking for such a bond. Once more women began attending college in the early 20th century, one clear answer emerged: Young couples more commonly met in school. (Perhaps if May had had that opportunity, she wouldn’t have been so afraid of becoming one of the dreaded “maiden ladies”—single women—in her town, left wandering around with a “resigned expression” and meddling in the affairs of eligible bachelorettes like herself.) But academia wasn’t possible for everyone, nor did it grant all who took part a soulmate. And as the world kept changing, courtship, and its inevitable frustrations, shifted yet again.

In her book, Why There Are No Good Men Left, the historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote that as women were encouraged more and more to develop their own career, many of them sought to settle down at a later age. But it was harder, by then, to find a partner. “The large pool of eligible young men to which they had access in college—with backgrounds and ambitions similar to their own—has disappeared,” Sage Stossel wrote in a 2002 review of the book. Where were people meant to meet anymore?

In the years that followed, dating apps provided a solution to that problem and created another: the issue of too many options. It’s fair that people feel exhausted by the labor of scrolling and swiping on repeat; I do too. But, of course, we’re also lucky to have a way to access new possibilities—and the agency to pursue them at all.

Love is trying not just because of historical circumstance but also because of human nature. People are complex; finding someone who brings out the best in you couldn’t possibly be simple. In that sense, as much as times have changed, they’ve also stayed quite the same. We keep searching and hoping and failing, pleading and misreading, getting obsessed and getting hurt and getting the ick—and, eventually, starting all over again. Until, if we’re very lucky, we don’t have to.

The former American football star was cleared of two counts of murder in the "trial of the century" in 1995.

The former American footballer was controversially cleared of double murder in 1995.

War in the Middle East. War in Ukraine. Rising oil prices. Inflation still hovering above 3 percent, and mortgage rates above 6 percent. The possible reelection of Donald Trump, with the prospect of a trade war with China to follow. Investors in the stock market seemingly have plenty to worry about. But so far this year, they have shrugged off anxiety: The S&P 500 index had its best first-quarter performance since 2019, up more than 10 percent. And that’s on the heels of a strong 2023, when the S&P rose 24 percent.

Not surprisingly, this bull run has some market observers fretting. Jeremy Grantham—a perma-bear who seems never to have met a market rally he did not distrust—has warned that the market is at “illogical and dangerous” levels. Because a good chunk of the recent boom has been driven by tech stocks, particularly AI-connected stocks, some commentators have drawn parallels to the stock-market bubble of the late 1990s, dubbed the dot-com boom. Even the more restrained critics have argued that because the S&P’s performance has been driven by big gains in a relatively small number of highly valued stocks, the market is at risk of tumbling if those stocks hit a speed bump. As an investment strategist at J.P. Morgan put it recently, extreme market concentration presents “a clear and present risk to equity markets in 2024.”

The skepticism about the sustainability of this rally is unsurprising, given how much stocks have risen in just the past six months. And predictions about bubbles bursting are exciting and headline-grabbing. Understandably, too, when the stock market surges based seemingly on the good fortune of a few high-profile stocks, a lot of people get very nervous. But sometimes, stocks surge for a reason. The trick is to separate the signal from the noise.

The underlying reality is that this rally has been driven mainly by economic fundamentals, including the continued strength of the U.S. economy and corporate profit margins and profit growth, as well as some optimism about future interest-rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. Investors certainly have a good deal of uncertainty to wrestle with, but using the word bubble to describe this market is just a misnomer.

[James Surowiecki: Don’t read his lips]

Take the concentration issue. True, much of the market’s gains last year were driven by the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks: Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, and Tesla. And, depending on what standard you use, the concentration at the top of the market is high by historical standards. (The collective market capitalization of the leading 10 companies in the S&P 500, for instance, accounts for about a third of the total value of the index.) Compared with other major stock markets, however, America’s is actually now less top-heavy than that of every country but Japan. In addition, concentration is more the norm than the exception in bull runs, as Ben Snider, a senior strategist at Goldman Sachs Research, noted in a recent report. Although a couple of those rallies—1973 and 2000—ended very badly, most did not.

The concentration in the market also reflects the concentration in the U.S. economy, which, particularly in the tech industry, is more and more a winner-take-most competition, in which the dominant players can earn enormously outsize profits and enjoy very high returns on invested capital. The chip maker Nvidia, for example, controls more than 95 percent of the market for specialized AI chips, which helps explain why it earned $33 billion in operating profit in its most recent fiscal year, up 681 percent from the year before. Likewise, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together vacuum up more than two-thirds of global digital-ad spending.

These companies’ hefty valuations reflect, in other words, their hefty profits, as well as their continued prospects for earnings growth. Again, look at Nvidia. Its stock is up a remarkable 214 percent over the past year. But during that same period, its forward price-to-earnings ratio (a simple measure of valuation) has actually fallen, because its earnings growth has outpaced the increase in its stock price. Snider calculates that the S&P 500’s top-10 stocks have a combined forward price-to-earnings ratio of about 25. That’s relatively expensive but hardly in bubble territory. As Snider points out, stocks in the top 10 today have much lower price-to-earnings multiples than the top-10 stocks did in 2000, and the companies are far more profitable as well.  

Beyond that, not all of the Magnificent Seven are so magnificent. Alphabet’s stock has performed roughly on par with the market this year. Apple’s stock, meanwhile, is down more than 10 percent year-to-date on concerns about stagnant earnings and the U.S. government’s antitrust suit against the company. And Tesla’s stock has been a big loser, with investor worry about slowing sales growth and increased competition from China sending it down more than 30 percent. The Mag Seven have become the Big Four. Even so, the stock market has continued to do well. This suggests that fears about the dangers of market concentration have been overblown.

[Rogé Karma: The great normalization]

On top of which, the stock-market rally has broadened this year. In the first quarter, every sector of the market but real estate rose. In fact, if you look at all of the stocks in the S&P 500 except the Magnificent Seven, they were up 8 percent on average in the first quarter, a more than respectable return.

As the drops in Apple and Tesla shares show, investors are not simply buying across the board. They’re actually distinguishing among companies based on their earnings prospects, a behavior that’s generally not characteristic of bubbles. And few of the other signs of bubbles are present, either: American retail and institutional investors still have trillions of dollars in money-market funds (thanks to the high interest rates such funds now offer) rather than in the stock market. And instead of trying to cash in on their stock prices by issuing more stock, companies are continuing to buy it back.

Another indicator is that the market for initial public offerings has stayed relatively mellow, despite a few high-profile offerings such as Reddit and, of course, Donald Trump’s meme-stock company. That’s radically different from what you usually see in a bubblicious market. In 1999, for instance, there were 476 IPOs. This year, we’re on track for about 120.

No question, current stock-market valuations are rich. And plenty of factors could derail the rally, including high oil prices and weaker-than-expected earnings. The most obvious source of concern is that investors have been assuming that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates this year, which may be too optimistic with inflation continuing to rise at more than 3 percent, still well above the Fed’s 2 percent target. If those rate cuts don’t materialize, stock prices could take a hit (as we saw yesterday, when the market fell after the government reported that inflation was hotter than expected last month). But it won’t be a bubble bursting—because there is no bubble to burst. Ignore the perma-bear noise, because the signal is in the fundamentals.

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Yes, the American tax code is complicated. But a web of other forces makes the country’s tax-filing system much trickier than it needs to be.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Clash of the patriarchs Israeli rage reaches new levels. In MAGA world, everything happens for a reason. The parents being scapegoated for America’s gun failures

Difficult and Expensive

Doing taxes isn’t many people’s idea of a good time—especially right now, in the crunch of filing season. (For those of you still in the process, my apologies for reminding you of the impending deadline.) America has a complicated tax code, but that’s not the only reason tax filing online is so stressful: Companies have lobbied hard over the years to keep the experience difficult and expensive.

Americans who have an income below a certain level are entitled to free federal tax filing. But millions of people who should qualify for free filing have ended up paying to file in recent years. In the early 2000s, after the government started talking about providing free tax filing to the public, a group of companies led by TurboTax, with the help of high-powered lobbyists, told the government that they would provide free federal tax filing for a swath of Americans through the IRS’s Free File program. In exchange, the government agreed to back off. The companies kept their end of the deal, partnering with the IRS, and they later turned to creating additional free services on their own websites. (TurboTax and H&R Block remained affiliated with the IRS’s Free File program until a few years ago.)

But free tax filing did not turn into an idyllic public resource. For one, TurboTax marketed as “free” products that ended up involving fees for some users—earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission told TurboTax that it needs to stop claiming that its services are free unless they are free to everyone or exceptions are disclosed. (Intuit has appealed.) And ProPublica reporting in 2019 found that TurboTax deliberately suppressed links to its IRS Free File service in Google searches, in order to divert people to one of their paid products. (A spokesperson for Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, told me that it has helped more than 124 million people file for free over the past decade, and ProPublica reported that TurboTax changed the code on its Free File option page after the publication of the ProPublica report in 2019 so that the option was no longer suppressed from search engines.)

Many tax-filing systems aren’t just expensive; they’re also confusing to use. Some companies have employed design choices to make certain steps of the process feel more laborious. In 2017, Kaveh Waddell wrote for The Atlantic about how TurboTax showed users fake progress bars—illustrations that seemed to show the site checking every detail of a return but that turned out to be generic. Waddell described the fake progress bar as an example of the concept of “benevolent deception”; as a spokesperson for Intuit put it at the time, the animations were used to assure customers “that their returns are accurate and they are getting all the money they deserve.” Still, although an illustrated progress bar might be reassuring, it also highlights the apparent complexity of the process. Look how hard we’re working to file your taxes, the bar seems to say.

Does tax filing need to be this complicated? A new government pilot program is trying to prove that it doesn’t: Earlier this year, the IRS, which is not exactly known for its technological prowess, released a version of its own free online-filing service. As my colleague Saahil Desai reported last month, “That Direct File exists at all is shocking. That it’s pretty good is borderline miraculous.” Right now the service is available in just 12 states and only works for simple federal returns—and it has guaranteed funding for just this year. Still, Saahil writes, “it’s a glimpse of a world where government tech benefits millions of Americans. In turn, it is also an agonizing realization of how far we are from that reality.”

A free and easy way to file returns seems like a real public benefit. But the program’s haters have been loud (already, TurboTax and H&R Block, which make billions of dollars from filers every year, have reportedly spent millions lobbying against it and other matters). Some critics of an IRS-backed filing alternative are skeptical of what they describe as its conflict of interest: If the IRS is the institution that collects money from you, will they have the taxpayers’ interests in mind, or their own? The IRS has said that its goal is simply to apply the tax code; still, private companies’ promise to get users the best refund possible sounds, on its face, more consumer friendly. Skeptics are also focusing on the question of funding: TurboTax pointed me to a recent Government Accountability Office report calling into question how much taxpayer money would be spent on the program—and a spokesperson for Intuit told me in an email that “IRS Direct File is a solution in search of a non-existent problem.”

One day, perhaps, tax filing will be affordable and transparent for all. But if your immediate future involves parsing W-2s and rustling up receipts, I wish you the best of luck.

Related:

The IRS finally has an answer to TurboTax. Why some apps use fake progress bars

Today’s News

When asked about Arizona’s recent abortion-ban ruling, Donald Trump said that the state’s supreme court went too far, but added that the law would likely be reined in by Arizona’s governor and others. He also said that he would not sign a federal abortion ban. Allen Weisselberg, the former CFO of the Trump Organization, was sentenced to five months in a Rikers Island jail for perjury during Trump’s New York civil fraud trial. The six former Mississippi law-enforcement officers who assaulted and tortured two Black men were sentenced in state court to 15 to 45 years in prison, to be served concurrently with the federal sentences they had already received.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: The numbers are in, and they show that married couples are working as much as ever, Derek Thompson writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Sober-Curious Movement Has Reached an Impasse

By Haley Weiss

At Hopscotch, Daryl Collins’s bottle shop in Baltimore, he happily sells wine to 18-year-olds. If a customer isn’t sure what variety they like (and who is, at that age?), Collins might even pull a few bottles off the shelves and pop the corks for an impromptu tasting. No Maryland law keeps these teens away from the Tempranillo, because at this shop, none of the drinks contains alcohol …

In theory, these are teen-friendly drinks. But not every bar or shop owner will sell to under-21s … As nonalcoholic adult beverages become more mainstream, they’re forcing a reckoning over what makes a drink “adult” if not the alcohol, and testing whether drinking culture can truly be separated from booze.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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