Staff Picks returns this spring with selections from News Editor Drew Gillis, who just devoured Ben Lerner’s latest novel, and Games Editor Garrett Martin, who spotlights an indie game with a unique sense of humor.
Drew Gillis: Transcription by Ben Lerner
Transcription begins with a nightmare probably familiar to any journalist or critic. As the unnamed narrator is about to leave his hotel to interview his mentor and Brown University professor Thomas, he drops his phone in a full sink, turning his sole recording device, effectively, into a brick. Helpless and full of shame, he goes to the interview anyway with the guise that it will be a preliminary, off-the-record chat, and he’ll come back tomorrow (with a new iPhone) for the real thing. But at 90, Thomas is a bit cloudier and perhaps a bit more senile than our narrator last remembered him, and repeatedly checks to make sure he’s being recorded, so the narrator lies.
This kicks off Ben Lerner’s short but dense novel, which is a mediation and conversation on language, aging, fiction, and, obviously, transcription. Those who have read any of Lerner’s previous work—I really enjoyed 2014’s 10:04—will recognize some of his hallmarks in Transcription. Some of these themes are explored via pseudo-art criticism; that is, there are two characters talking about a work of art and what it means to them. Lerner is also known for writing autofiction, and though this narrator isn’t named Ben, both the alma mater and the interview give him away. (The New Yorker points to an interview he conducted with Alexander Kluge, while Vulture mentions an interview with Rosmarie Waldrop, as sources of inspiration for this latter element.) The real-world reference points not only make the book feel lived-in and authentic, but further serve the central question of the narrative: What is lost in transcription, and what can be gained via fictions?
Transcription is a genuine page-turner and a book that I found difficult to put down. The first section of the book comprises nearly half of the novel’s 130 pages and focuses on the primary interview that kicks off the story. The following two sections mostly focus on two following conversations that come from the fallout of the narrator’s false transcription. When I was reading it, I was glad to have gone into it with basically no foreknowledge of what was going to be discussed, so I’ll refrain from going into detail here about what to expect. What I will say is that I found the second section so shocking and disruptive that, when it ended, I had the thought: “Oh, I’m finishing this book right now.” I was immensely moved by the novel’s third section, and Lerner’s work has hardly left my brain in the days since I finished reading it.
Garrett Martin: Rubato
Any video game hall of fame worth its salt should have an entire wing devoted to frogs. Frogger, Frogs and Flies/Frog Bog, Battletoads, that annoying guy in Star Fox, Chrono Trigger‘s true hero, Frog Fractions‘ impeached president: The medium’s list of legendary amphibians runs deep, and will only grow in 2026. Polygon preemptively called this “the year of the frog game” because of games like Big Hops and Frog Sqwad. Despite naming five different titles, it didn’t even mention Rubato, a frog-starring platformer that came out on all major systems in March. Don’t overlook this one, though; it’s a slick old-school side-scroller with an absurd bent that makes it more than just a Super Nintendo-style retread.
Rubato takes the two things frogs are best known for—prehensile tongues and big jumps—and builds a Super Mario World-esque romp around them. You play as a frog who uses its tongue (and an expanding variety of other skills) to recreate our entire solar system. That tongue is an elastic tool, in more ways that one; it’s a weapon that can ensnare enemies and fling them to their deaths, a grappling hook that can swing Rubato Bionic Commando-style from ledge to ledge, or a glorified handcart that lets you move blocks and other obstacles from one play to another. That’s how Rubato starts, and with crafty enough level design that’d be enough to base an entire game on back in 1992.
Rubato quickly reveals that it’s much more than that, though. Even before you start playing, it establishes itself as a restlessly surreal comedy influenced by several different gaming eras and genres. It touches on early ’90s RPGs and cryptic indie horror during its prologue, and introduces a trio of bumbling characters who all vaguely look like several different faces from the 16-bit years at once. (The one who looks like Air Zonk as an Elite Beat Agent—bald head, angular sunglasses, black suit—blows up all the planets during a game of pool.) The art style shifts regularly during cut-scenes, sometimes jumping from pixels to the blocky contours of the early polygonal era to crayon markings during a single conversation. After completing the first stage—set in a bakery commandeered by evil dumplings—Rubato suddenly finds himself in an RPG-style overworld, complete with NPCs arbitrarily blocking access to parts of the map that haven’t been unlocked yet. All this visual cacophony comes off like a gaming stab at Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse‘s dizzying array of art styles; it isn’t nearly as seamless or considered as in that movie, but it’s still a more interesting approach than simply evoking the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis.
Rubato‘s 10-jokes-per-minute approach to Adult Swim-style humor could have a higher batting average—roughly 50% of those jokes don’t land—but it does give it a unique personality, something most retro homages lack. It might make you think of old shareware PC platformers you’d download from a local BBS in the days of dial-up modems, the ones that felt like some parallel universe’s version of Mario, often close enough but still broken in some fundamental way. Rubato leans into that kind of brokenness, makes it a key part of its identity, and succeeds because of that.
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