Thanks to hip-hop and Hollywood, the United States is still the world’s leading cultural exporter. But, in recent years, American culture has increasingly been following a playbook made in Japan. Consider the fascination with “the Japanese art of decluttering.” Its guru, Marie Kondo, lives in Japan. She generally relies on an interpreter, and it has been four years since she published a book in the U.S. While she has largely fallen off the radar in her home country, her popularity shows no signs of waning among Americans. One video of Kondo folding clothes, dubbed in English, has close to four million views on YouTube. On Valentine’s Day, Netflix sparked joy among fans with an announcement that it had greenlit a Kondo reality show.
Tristan Gooley has got me lost in the middle of London – which, I’ll admit, isn’t a terribly huge achievement. I’m routinely lost in the middle of London. My journeys tend to consist of a hard stare at a map app, 50 paces in the wrong direction and then a kind of abject sustained fumble until I arrive at wherever I’m supposed to be 10 minutes after I’m supposed to be there. And that’s me with Google Maps. Without Google Maps, I’m 80% sure I would have given up and moved into a ditch some years ago.
However, this time is different. Gooley, often known as the Natural Navigator, has got me lost on purpose. He’s covered my eyes and led me by the arm through the backstreets of central London, taking time to spin me around every now and again for maximum disorientation. And now, right in the middle of nowhere, he’s asked me to take him to one specific Oxford Street branch of Wasabi.
At the offices of Kensington Publishing Corporation, in Midtown Manhattan, I am greeted by a wall of gently cascading water and an African American receptionist who ushers me into a meeting room. Kensington, which styles itself as “America’s independent publisher,” has been churning out fiction and nonfiction since the family business was founded in 1974, and chugs along smoothly still. In 2017, the publisher turned out just over 700 books, with about 35% of them falling under the romance umbrella, which includes historical, contemporary, suspense, paranormal, and so on. It is also the home of Alyssa Cole’s Loyal League miniseries, a trio of historical romances set during the American Civil War, specifically telling the stories of black men and women.
Cole’s stories are striking because of their intensity. Her back catalog may be abundant in novellas, but the Kensington phase of her writing is marked by the Loyal League novels. For the dramatic backdrops to her love stories, she has chosen war and other political upheavals — the civil rights movement and the fight for suffrage, for example — as well as post-apocalyptic settings. While most of her heroines are black women, the cast of characters are ethnically diverse. She admits to having lofty hopes for her books. “Sometimes I hear romance authors say they’re not writing the Great American Novel, and I’m like, ‘Well, if you're not trying to, that's on you,’” she says, laughing. “I'm never going to say that just because there are people having sex and love in [my books].” As a testament to her skill, a Kirkus review called her work “masterful” and An Extraordinary Union was named as a top pick of 2017 by publications as varied as Vulture, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly.
Time is a commodity: ours to buy, spend, save, keep, mark or waste. Time has volition: it flies, drags, stands still. The verbs alone suggest that we have always understood time as subjective, something experienced according to individual circumstance.
But they also suggest we may be a little confused about the journey from then to now. We are right to be confused, according to Carlo Rovelli’s elegant and wonderfully brief summary of what we do and don’t know about time. “One after another,” he says “the characteristic features of time have proved to be approximations, mistakes determined by our perspective, just like the flatness of the Earth or the revolving of the sun.”