Will and Attention by Meghan O’Gieblyn. Doubleday, 288 pages. 2026.

The human soul : an old-fashioned term, sworling with the patina and shine of an antique. To take such a thing seriously in this age of nihilism and disenchantment betrays a person as potentially unserious, someone committed to abstraction, to feeling over logic and material reality. And this is an era of binaries, in which the very instruments of our daily lives—the computers we type on, the phones on which we scroll—are reliant on a series of zeroes and ones.

But in the American writer Meghan O’Gieblyn’s latest book, the memoir Will and Attention , the soul, and the vast human consciousness and humanistic intellectual tradition for which this word functions as a shorthand, is not something so easily dismissed.…