This series began as a conversation between Emmalea Russo, Lydia Sviatoslavsky, and me. I loved Vivienne, Emmalea’s first novel, but I liked her follow-up, The Moon Papers, even more, and I think Lydia felt the same way. It inhabits such a beautiful, visual world — it’s dreamy and moody, full of American summertime sadness and a strain of lunacy that also feels distinctly American. Lydia had the idea of capturing those moods in a photo series, and Emmalea and her husband delivered, shooting in and around their rural Pennsylvania home.
What follows are selected images from that shoot — interiors, landscapes, symbolic details, and the author herself — alongside a handful of paintings by famous Pennsylvanians Andrew & Jamie Wyeth. Consider them a visual companion to the novel.
“They are cinematic, these pieces, see: one, two, three. And bam, there’s the moon.”
The Moon Papers
He felt smaller than a human but bigger than a figurine, flat and shiny. Like he was inside one of her strange paintings about to slip off the side of the canvas into oblivion, eternity.
“Should I just fucking surrender?” she asked, pressing her finger into the top of her head.
“Oh. Definitely. Yes.”
“They zoomed down California Road, away from her house and toward the village under a thick canopy of trees as green neon shot into both eyes and her head flew back, driving faster as her chest and stomach swelled, intoxicated and delinquent. She loved the month of August best.”
“His body filled with text and image—inscribing his insides. Sad clown. Heart. Tears. Leaf. Nymphet. Rabbit. The messages kept coming…”
“He continued to stare at the silhouetted Pennsylvania trees outside her window. Faint sounds of animals fighting outside—cats, maybe. He was no longer waiting for her to come back for her phone or switch on the light to say good night. Instead, he was surrendering to the foreign darkness, his cum now totally dry.”
Emmalea Russo is the author of two novels, Vivenne (2024) and The Moon Papers (2026), and four books of poetry, G (2018), Wave Archive (2019), Confetti (2022), and Magenta (2023).
Michael Newton is a writer, investigator, and the executive director of Asbury Book Cooperative.
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