Each month Chris McCaffery—founder of the Washington Review of Books—and Celeste Marcus—managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics—host a conversation with dozens of friends considering a question of pressing concern to us all. This is a community of kind, curious, and intelligent discourse. Join us!

These conversations are recorded and available as a podcast from Liberties and the WRB. You can listen to October’s conversation, on whether art is more beautiful than nature, here or on any major podcast app:

If you are living in or visiting Washington, D.C., and would like to attend one of these monthly salons, please email Chris for more information.

Sign Up Here

The WRB Presents the next in a regular series of readings attracting and spotlighting literary talent in Washington, D.C., hosted by Michael Barron, Lauren Cerand, and Chris McCaffery. On the evening of October 15, these four writers will read from their work:

• Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian, writing a book on American democracy called The Right of the People.

• Lewis Page, is a writer and editor from Seattle. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, the Columbia Journalism Review, and The Caravan magazine in India, among other publications. He lives and works in Washington, D.C.

• Lyle Jeremy Rubin, the author of Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine’s Unbecoming, who has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, and n+1. 

• Tonya Riley is a writer and journalist based in Washington, D.C. She is currently a reporter at Bloomberg Law. Her cultural essays and criticism have appeared in Esquire, Slate, and Buzzfeed (RIP.) Her short fiction has appeared in Maudlin House, The Cry Lounge, and fauxmoir. She is currently working on her first novel.

Get on the List Here

Each month Chris McCaffery—founder of the Washington Review of Books—and Celeste Marcus—managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics—host a conversation with dozens of friends considering a question of pressing concern to us all. This is a community of kind, curious, and intelligent discourse. Join us!

These conversations are recorded and available as a podcast from Liberties and the WRB. You can listen to September’s conversation, on changing our beliefs, here or on any major podcast app:

If you are living in or visiting Washington, D.C., and would like to attend one of these monthly salons, please email Chris for more information.

Sign Up Here

The WRB Presents the next in a regular series of readings attracting and spotlighting literary talent in Washington, D.C., hosted by Michael Barron, Lauren Cerand, and . On the evening of September 17, these four writers will read from their work:

• Helen Chandler, an Irish writer based in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia and currently teaches creative writing. Helen’s stories and essays have appeared in The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Literary Hub and other outlets. She is at work on a novel as well as a nonfiction book about aunts and a long-ago murder;

• K. T. Mills, who lives in Washington, D.C., and whose work has appeared in The Rialto, The Meadow, and Poetry Archive Now;

• Samuel Kimbriel, who currently directs the Philosophy and Society Initiative at the Aspen Institute and serves as editor-at-large for . Sam is the author of Friendship as Sacred Knowing. He lives in Washington, D.C., and holds MPhil and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge; and

• Kayla Jean, a writer from South Central Pennsylvania. Cheap Seats, her debut chapbook, was published by Blue Arrangements in 2023. Her fiction has appeared in Joyland, Blue Arrangements, New World Writing, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Virginia Tech.

Get On The List Here

Work from our guests:

Helen Chandler

from “A Surge” (Dublin Review, Spring 2024)

“I knew I’d never meet anyone as fun as him again,” she repeated, but in a slightly different cadence this time, which I understood to mean that in all the years that followed and to this day she never had. She never had met anyone as fun as him again.

My face, minimized in a thumbnail at the bottom right of the screen, was fashioned into an expression that I hoped conveyed the sincere sadness I felt at hearing her speak in this way, as well as sympathy for what she had been through and, more importantly, recognition. I was able, with very little effort, to summon the particular loneliness of having been left in London by someone important to the narrative, without whom life felt shapeless and dull.

K. T. Mills

“The Archetype” (The Rialto, Issue 98)

And my predictions come true—
suddenly you’re as familiar to me as the contours of my back teeth.

This engagement is an acquisitive experiment,
textured like the American aesthetic;

ghost mouth; the smell of the river bed;
to hear the only beautiful story. Here is the only
beautiful story:

my best friend’s cousin overdosed on Fentanyl
the week before I arrived. He survived.

We were the same height for too long,
in the context of puerile competition between a boy and a girl.

As a child, he could fling himself from the treehouse,
never raising an arm,

absorbing the half-storey in his chest.

Samuel Kimbriel

from “Remember to Live” (The Point, 2022)

The original memento mori tradition was aimed at reminding the proud of the fleeting nature of life. The ancient sculptors and mosaicists sought to take the heat of youth and channel it into the kind of sobriety needed to build a good life in the face of finitude.

Perhaps today we need something like the inverse of that tradition. We have plenty of sobriety—class and power are obviously hollow; not only human beings but the whole world can die. If having security and consumer goods to hand has ended up being enough to build a lifestyle, it has never quite been enough to build a life.

What we lack is a sense of what it means to be alive when the stakes truly are existential. How can it be possible to have force and vitality and innocence when the whole world has become not just finite but fragile? How is it possible to be young in this ongoing age of existential stakes?

Kayla Jean

from “Diner” (R&R)

Once I came home from work and thought the dog had eaten Steve. The dog sat beneath the weeping cherry tree, chewing. It was a long body with brown gray fur. I called my mom, crying. She sent my father over to the house. I stood at the back window, having searched the whole house for Steve, who was nowhere. 

My father shooed the dog back, pinched the groundhog by a spot of still-dry fur. 

Steve was tucked behind the dryer, my mom discovered when she went looking. His body was warm from the machine’s running. I pressed my face to his purring belly. 

I cried still, for the senselessness of so many things and how I couldn’t get a handle on a single corner of the world. 

In the community college cafeteria I couldn’t stomach anything except grilled cheese. My astronomy professor wore Hawaiian shirts all through the winter. My plant identification notebooks slanted at a steep angle, broken bits of cypress spilled into my backpack. 

Sign Up Here

Each month Chris McCaffery—founder of the Washington Review of Books—and Celeste Marcus—managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics—host a conversation with dozens of friends considering a question of pressing concern to us all. This is a community of kind, curious, and intelligent discourse. Join us!

These conversations are recorded and available as a podcast from Liberties and the WRB. You can listen to August’s conversation, on despair, here or on any major podcast app:

If you are living in or visiting Washington, D.C., and would like to attend one of these monthly salons, please email Chris for more information.

Each month Chris McCaffery—founder of the Washington Review of Books—and Celeste Marcus—managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics—host a conversation with dozens of friends considering a question of pressing concern to us all. This is a community of kind, curious, and intelligent discourse. Join us!

These conversations are recorded and available as a podcast from Liberties and the WRB. You can listen to July’s conversation, on prayer, here or on any major podcast app:

If you are living in or visiting Washington, D.C., and would like to attend one of these monthly salons, please email Chris for more information.

Each month Chris McCaffery—founder of the Washington Review of Books—and Celeste Marcus—managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics—host a conversation with dozens of friends considering a question of pressing concern to us all. This is a community of kind, curious, and intelligent discourse. Join us!

These conversations are recorded and available as a podcast from Liberties and the WRB. You can listen to June’s conversation, on propaganda, here or on any major podcast app:

If you are living in or visiting Washington, D.C., and would like to attend one of these monthly salons, please email Chris for more information.

Each month Chris McCaffery—founder of the Washington Review of Books—and Celeste Marcus—managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics—host a conversation with dozens of friends considering a question of pressing concern to us all. This is a community of kind, curious, and intelligent discourse. Join us!

These conversations are recorded and available as a podcast from Liberties and the WRB. You can listen to May’s conversation, on friendship, here or on any major podcast app:

If you are living in or visiting Washington, D.C., and would like to attend one of these monthly salons, please email Chris for more information.

Sign Up Here

The WRB Presents the next in a regular series of readings attracting and spotlighting literary talent in Washington, D.C., hosted by Michael Barron, Lauren Cerand, and Chris McCaffery. On May 14, these writers will read their work in an evening co-presented by the Cleveland Review of Books:

• Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials, Shit is Fucked Up, and Bullshit: History Since the End of History;

• Joseph Grantham, author of two books of poetry, Raking Leaves (Holler Presents), and Tom Sawyer, “written while working at a bookstore in lower Manhattan.” His fiction has appeared in Bennington Review, New York Tyrant, and Southwest Review, and he is the editor of new lit mag, R&R;

• Margarita Diaz, who lives in Washington, D.C. and whose writing appears in different corners of the internet, including the Cleveland Review of Books; and

• Nick Gardner, who holds an MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and has written for places such as Epiphany, Atticus Review, and Ocean State Review. His book of sonnets about opioid addiction and recovery, So Marvelously Far, is available through Crisis Chronicles Press. He’s an Ohio native and a Rust Belt die-hard.

Following a summer break, WRB Presents will resume in the fall.

Sign Up Here

Each month Chris McCaffery—founder of the Washington Review of Books—and Celeste Marcus—managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics—host a conversation with dozens of friends considering a question of pressing concern to us all. This is a community of kind, curious, and intelligent discourse. Join us!

These conversations are recorded and available as a podcast from Liberties and the WRB. You can listen to April’s conversation, on nationalism, here or on any major podcast app:

If you are living in or visiting Washington, D.C., and would like to attend one of these monthly salons, please email Chris for more information.

Sign Up Here

The WRB Presents the first in a regular series of readings featuring authors from without and within Washington, D.C., hosted by Michael Barron, Lauren Cerand, and Chris McCaffery. On April 10, these four writers will read their work:

• Ryan Ruby, a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Bookforum, the New Left Review and elsewhere;

• Zain Khalid, an American writer and novelist from New York. His debut novel, Brother Alive, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre, and was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. Khalid is also the recipient of the 2024 Bard Fiction Prize. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, n+1, The Believer, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. He is a contributing editor at The Drift;

• Austyn Wohlers, who is from Atlanta and lives in Baltimore, where she runs the Near Future reading series and plays in the band Tomato Flower. Her writing has previously appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Guernica, Asymptote, the Cincinnati Review, the Kenyon Review, R&R and elsewhere, and has been supported by Tin House and Sewanee. In 2022, she was the winner of the University of Notre Dame’s Sparks Prize Fellowship, selected by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint. Hub City Press will publish Hothouse Bloom, her first novel, in Spring 2026; and

• , who writes and posts from Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.

Sign Up Here

Each month Chris McCaffery—founder of the Washington Review of Books—and Celeste Marcus—managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics—host a conversation with dozens of friends considering a question of pressing concern to us all. This is a community of kind, curious, and intelligent discourse. Join us!

These conversations are recorded and available as a podcast from Liberties and the WRB. You can listen to March’s conversation, on art, here or on any major podcast app:

If you are living in or visiting Washington, D.C., and would like to attend one of these monthly salons, please email Chris for more information.

Each month Chris McCaffery—founder of the Washington Review of Books—and Celeste Marcus—managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics—host a conversation with dozens of friends considering a question of pressing concern to us all. This is a community of kind, curious, and intelligent discourse. Join us!

These conversations are recorded and available as a podcast from Liberties and the WRB. You can listen to February’s conversation, on love, here or on any major podcast app:

If you are living in or visiting Washington, D.C., and would like to attend one of these monthly salons, please email Chris for more information.

Each month Chris McCaffery—founder of the Washington Review of Books—and Celeste Marcus—managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics—host a conversation with dozens of friends considering a question of pressing concern to us all. This is a community of kind, curious, and intelligent discourse. Join us!

These conversations are recorded and available as a podcast from Liberties and the WRB. You can listen to January’s conversation, on forgiveness, here or on any major podcast app:

If you are living in or visiting Washington, D.C., and would like to attend one of these monthly salons, please email Chris for more information.

Each month Chris McCaffery—founder of the Washington Review of Books—and Celeste Marcus—managing editor of Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics—host a conversation with dozens of friends considering a question of pressing concern to us all. This is a community of kind, curious, and intelligent discourse. Join us!

These conversations are recorded and available as a podcast from Liberties and the WRB. You can listen to December’s conversation, on books, here or on any major podcast app:

If you are living in or visiting Washington, D.C., and would like to attend one of these monthly salons, please email Chris for more information.