Monday, November 17, 2025 |
Where editors share their weekly musings on pop culture—and recommend what to watch, read, and listen to right now. This week, we discuss fall books and Charli XCX's next project. |
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| Erica Gonzales, deputy editor, culture: Now that fall is in full swing, there's no better time to curl up on the couch with a new book. With the days getting darker and colder, I'm becoming less inclined to leave the house anyway. Lauren, do you have any recommendations for me and our readers? |
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| Lauren Puckett-Pope, culture writer: The answer to that question is "always." But autumn, in particular, is such a major season in publishing. So I find the process of whittling down our "best books of fall" recommendations…agonizing, but in a fun way? Still, our colleagues and I managed to put together a list of 29 picks, and there's something for everyone there. I personally loved Lily King's Heart the Lover, and Angela Flournoy's The Wilderness has been near-impossible to miss if you're a literary fiction reader. What do you tend to gravitate toward? |
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Erica: I'll add those to my list! I'm all over the place with books. Whenever I squeeze in time to read amid the neverending TV, film, and album cycles, I'll pick up a buzzy piece of literary fiction, a gothic romance, or even a collection of short stories or essays.
Lauren: If you're looking for something gothic, we did just publish a trend piece about the popularity of feminist horror novels and their real-life parallels. But if you want a more uplifting read about being a woman in 2025, I'd personally suggest ELLE's Women in Hollywood portfolio, which made its long-awaited debut last week. You can read interviews with our exciting slate of cover stars, from Jennifer Aniston to the cast of Sinners, below. |
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Renate Reinsve, one of our ELLE Women in Hollywood honorees, gives a truly remarkable performance as theater actress Nora in writer-director Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value. When her estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a celebrated film director, offers Nora a role in his supposed comeback project, she turns it down—there's too much baggage between them. He then decides to offer the part to a Hollywood starlet named Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning). Yet it's only a matter of time before Gustav, Nora, and Nora's sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) have their long-due reckoning. A nuanced family drama and a meditation on storytelling and pain, Sentimental Value is beautifully shot, beautifully acted, and beautifully told.—LPP |
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Anyone who loved political dramas in the 2010s might be delighted to see Claire Danes (Homeland) and Matthew Rhys (The Americans) finally share the screen. Although their new series, Netflix's The Beast in Me, isn't so much about espionage and foreign affairs, it's an equally juicy and twisty story about an author who begins investigating her wealthy new neighbor with a suspicious past. Danes is captivating here, and Rhys plays the perfect balance of charming and menacing.—EG |
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Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister, the Serial Killer made quite the stir when it was released in 2018, and this year the author returned with one of ELLE's best-of-fall picks, Cursed Daughters. It's much less of a thriller than Serial Killer, but it does pulse with tension as its heroines—the women of the Falodun family—confront the supposed curse that has haunted generations of their mothers and daughters, each of them doomed to lose the men they love. As much a story about generational trauma as it is about superstition, it's an engaging read, and I'm glad to see Braithwaite refusing to be boxed in—whether by publishers, by genre conventions, or by her own fans.—LPP |
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WHAT YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO: |
Who would have guessed that Charli XCX's follow-up to her culture-defining album, Brat, would be inspired by a literary classic? The British pop star composed the soundtrack of Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights (starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi) and our first taste is this single featuring John Cale of The Velvet Underground. It's more of a spoken-word poem than a song, but Cale's gravely voice, paired with Charli's moody melody and electronic production, make it feel haunting nonetheless. I feel like Fennell's Wuthering Heights is shaping up to be a bit like Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette with its anachronistic aesthetic and sound, and I can't wait to hear (and see) more when both the album and film drop in February.—EG |
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The Devil Wears Prada 2 teaser dropped last week, showing Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly and Anne Hathaway's Andy Sachs running into each other in the elevator. They only exchange five words total, but it's enough to give me hope that this sequel will deliver plenty more Miranda one-liners, continuing the tradition of "That's all," "Why is no one ready?" and "Groundbreaking."—EG |
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