Books & Culture Editor
Penelope Voorhees-Larkin
PhD
Editing books coverage since 2017
About Penelope Voorhees-Larkin
Penelope Voorhees-Larkin spent her twenties at The Paris Review and her early thirties at Lit Hub, which means she spent the better part of a decade reading more books-of-the-season than most people read in a lifetime, and developing a corresponding allergy to the polite pretense that all of them are good. She joined Top Picks Report in October 2025 to write the column she had been wanting to write for years: a small, ranked, ungenerous list, defended with reasons.
The dissertation she finished at NYU was on the mid-century quarterly magazine — the era when an editor at Encounter or Partisan Review would put five books on the front of an issue and bet the magazine’s reputation on the choice. That kind of editorial confidence has, in her telling, gone almost extinct in the affiliate-and-algorithm era of book recommendation. Top Picks Report is, for her, a small attempt at restoring it.
Editorial focus
Penelope edits the books and culture vertical and writes the literary-fiction and nonfiction picks personally. Her standard rule is that she does not pick a book she has not finished, and she does not include a book she would not re-read at least once. She also senior-edits the cultural criticism that ships under the byline of other Top Picks Report editors — the long-form essays, the year-end retrospectives, and the occasional Margot-assigned cross-vertical piece that touches her beat.
Conflicts of interest
Penelope accepts no payment from publishers, agents, or authors for inclusion in her ranked picks. She receives review copies, as is the publishing-industry norm, but inclusion in a Top Picks Report ranking is not promised in exchange. She is not an Amazon affiliate, and Top Picks Report does not earn commission on any book she recommends. She has no current contract to write a book of her own and no advance from any publisher whose books appear in her rankings.
Issues by Penelope Voorhees-Larkin
Recent work
Top 5 Literary Fiction Picks of 2026
Five literary novels from 2025-2026 worth committing to, with The Bittern Hour at the top. Books that survive a second reading.
Top 5 Business Books of 2026
Five business books from 2025-2026 worth reading, with The Slow Build at the top. Books that earn their thesis rather than declaring it.