“Who wouldn’t decide to be their most expansive and radiant self?” Ah, but would you pursue that self through a sheet of tempered glass? In this literal tour de force, Katherine Cusumano shadows wrestlers navigating the independent promoters of the Pacific Northwest, granting sensational access to the lives and ambitions behind elaborate personas you’ve never heard of and will almost certainly search YouTube for. Cusumano is note-perfect on the details, taking obvious delight in the gimmicks of each wrestler’s beloved character and relishing the complexity of the choreography, rehearsed in elaborate code. (“Clothesline, crossbody in the corner, clothesline, Superman, Superman, I’m fired up, whoop, sliced bread, Ricky catches, oh shit, real fast.”) Spectacle abounds, but Cusumano rises above it, way up on the turnbuckle, with a heartening consideration of how we understand our own stories, and what we devote to realizing them.

I found myself drawn to this world, to its freakish feats of acrobatics, to its relentless and obsessive blurring of the boundary between reality and story, and, more than anything, to the supreme, sometimes monastic devotion of its competitors. I had been trying for ages to understand competition, ambition, the scaffolding that holds up good-bad, win-lose, and wrestling confounded these binaries. I started talking to Drexl, an old-timer with one foot out the door of his career, who eventually referred me to Amira, an emerging wrestler with an already impressive résumé, and I thought that was so like wrestling, to proffer such perfect narrative symmetry. They agreed—more readily than I’d expected, given how fiercely professional wrestlers have historically protected the secrets of their work—to let me follow them around. Which is how I ended up behind the curtain.

Beryl Gilothwest’s grandmother, Sandy “Moose” West, passed away at age 108 in 2021. For The Bitter Southerner, Gilothwest profiles a diminutive woman whose love for Ossabaw, an island off the coast of Georgia, was larger than life. In a world striving for “progress,” West was a staunch advocate for thoughtful preservation; she was a fierce conservationist and environmentalist who embraced the unknown and took pleasure in learning from it.

“Sandy believed that embracing what we cannot understand is the pathway to enlightenment. In her mind, spending time in the uncharted wilds of Ossabaw is the best way to learn that lesson. Separated from the mainland by a 30-minute boat ride, the island is deeply remote. Cell service is scant, and there is no wi-fi. You have to fend for yourself out there in a way that is uncommon in contemporary culture, where we always seem to have an escape hatch. Sandy knew that welcoming people into that kind of environment, where they have to relinquish control to the island, would force them to reckon with the unknown.”