NEVER THOUGHT I’D BE READING CHICK LIT

but Jessica Gigi’s “How to Judge a Book by its Lover” drew me in. It manages to construct stanchions of romance and its vagaries to support a tautly barbed satire of today’s publishing, literature, and media eosystems–as adroitly as Percival Everett’s “Erasure” and R.F. Kuang’s “Yellowface.”