By the early nineteen-eighties, a young person moving to New York in search of literary glory could reasonably expect to find debt, a modest job and a great many people with formidable opinions. Bonnie Garmus has made a novel out of all three.
Peck & Peck, her second book, takes place in 1982, when Batter Gray, a recent college graduate with an ear for poetry and little evidence that this will ever support him, is folding T-shirts at the Gap. His student loans are more dependable than his prospects. Then he lands a job at the celebrated poetry quarterly of the title, an institution that appears to take poetry much more seriously than it takes the well-being of its staff.
The journal is controlled by the Peck brothers, identical twins who seem united principally by their desire to defeat each other. Their editorial empire has thirty-nine editors, an elaborate culture of secrecy and a ruthless rule for submissions that fail to measure up: destroy them. The mailroom employs parolees. Garmus has chosen a workplace whose claim to moral refinement does not extend to ordinary human kindness.
The premise belongs to a substantial tradition of New York literary comedy. Publishing makes a convenient subject for satire because its practitioners tend to regard small differences of taste as questions of civilization. At a poetry journal, the stakes are even more wonderfully disproportionate. There is seldom much money to distribute, yet there is apparently an inexhaustible supply of resentment.
Batter is a particularly useful guide to this world. A talent for reading poems is not the same as the talent for negotiating offices full of suspicious and ambitious people. His new position promises both a vocation and an education in the gap between literary principle and institutional behavior. Garmus’s publisher describes an increasingly sinister struggle between the brothers, with Batter forced to decide whom, if anyone, to trust.
The author’s previous novel, Lessons in Chemistry, made an unexpected superstar of Elizabeth Zott, a chemist contending with the condescension of midcentury American institutions. It spent an extraordinary stretch on bestseller lists and became a television series. Once again, Garmus has chosen an intelligent outsider whose profession seems designed to thwart the very qualities it professes to admire.
This time, however, the chosen profession is literature itself. The book asks what happens when devotion to art becomes an excuse for vanity or cruelty, and whether a young enthusiast can preserve his affection for poems after spending every working day among their self-appointed guardians. Readers familiar with publishing may recognize the joke a little too quickly. That is part of the attraction.
Book details: Bonnie Garmus, Peck & Peck · Scribner · October 13, 2026 · 432 pages · Hardcover ISBN 9781668251065. Publisher and publication information.
