“A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic,” the cosmologist Carl Sagan once said. “It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years.”
As a physical object and a feat of technology, the printed book is hard to improve upon. Apart from minor cosmetic tweaks, the form has barely evolved since the codex first arose as an appealing alternative to scrolls around 2,000 years ago.
So when Julie Strauss-Gabel, the president and publisher of Dutton Books for Young Readers, discovered “dwarsliggers” — tiny, pocket-size, horizontal flipbacks that have become a wildly popular print format in the Netherlands — it felt like a revelation.
Buy hardcover copy of “Infinite Jest” at brick-and-mortar bookstore. Touch paper and feel connected to hundreds of years of printed language. Flash cashier knowing, learned smile. Commend self for protecting bookstores from onslaught of crass digital commercialism.
For 30 years, Charles Band has been the master of a universe. Not the universe. His powers are much more modest. But since 1988, Band has headed the company now known as Full Moon Features. That’s meant overseeing an empire built on killer puppets, possessed playthings, malevolent bongs, a giant psychic head, and other unusual elements while working outside the mainstream — sometimes way outside the mainstream. It’s also meant directing dozens of films and producing hundreds more, sometimes operating out of L.A., other times out of Italy, and still others in Romania, where he became the first American producer to open a production facility in the country after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
It’s also meant working constantly and for many years to diminishing returns—pressing on when the profits dropped and the outlets dried up and the audience seemed to dwindle, convinced that the world needed Demonic Toys: Personal Demons and Puppet Master: Axis of Evil and making sure the films reached everyone who wanted to see them. Band ensured that the universe he created kept expanding, however slowly and however inhibited by the limitations of a modest budget, year after year and movie after movie. John Carpenter, who edited a now-lost early Band movie, once told an interviewer “When the atomic bomb goes off, all that will be left will be cockroaches, and I think the other survivor will be Charlie Band.” He seems to have meant it as a compliment.
Here at the bottom of the world, a place all but free of human settlement, humanity is scrambling one of the ocean’s richest wildernesses. Fossil-fuel burning thousands of miles away is heating up the western peninsula faster than almost anywhere else. (Only the Arctic compares.) The warming is yanking apart the gears of a complex ecological machine, changing what animals eat, where they rest, how they raise their young, even how they interact. At the same time, the shrimplike krill upon which almost all animals here depend for food are being swept up by trawlers from distant nations. They’re being processed into dietary supplements and pharmaceuticals, and fed to salmon in Norwegian fjords and to tropical fish in aquariums.
So much here is changing so fast that scientists can’t predict where it’s all headed. “Something dramatic is under way,” says Heather Lynch, a penguin biologist at Stony Brook University. “It should bother us that we don’t really know what’s going on.”
If you were to build your own time capsule, what would you want people—or alien beings—a million years from now to know about us? That we were loving, or warmongering, or dopes strung out on memes and viral videos? That we flew to the moon and made great art, ate Cinnabons (that we measured at 880 astonishing calories), and committed atrocities? How could you begin to represent these times, as lived by nearly 8 billion people? And what would give you, of all people, the right to tell the story?
After these questions would come another wave of more logistical ones. Assuming the capsule was found, how would it be translated into the language of the future, whatever that language might be? And what materials could be employed that might last that long? And how could you lead a future race of beings to the capsule itself, assuming our planet might be buried under ice or oceans of red sand by then?
It's this very vision of an earth one million years from now that changed Martin Kunze's life forever. About ten years ago, he read a book called The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, a thought experiment in how quickly things on our planet will deteriorate once humans have been eradicated. Weisman imagines New York City's Lexington Avenue as a sudden river, unmanaged petrochemical plants spewing toxins like Roman candles, then with the passage of real time, neighborhoods becoming overgrown wildlands and houses moldering beam by beam until eventually there's nothing but the incoherent ruin of us left behind: the flooded Chunnel, the slow erosion of Mount Rushmore, all of our horrific plastic nurdles swimming the seas. Most importantly, the book points out that ceramics, which are not unlike fossils, stand the greatest chance of living on as they already have from previous ancient civilizations.
Between February 18, 1960, and February 4, 1963, a week before Sylvia Plath committed suicide, at the age of thirty, she sent a series of candid letters to her close friend and former psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher. What has happened to these documents in the intervening years is a case study in Plath’s legacy. In the nineteen-seventies, fourteen letters, which cover in detail Plath’s estrangement from her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes, were passed from Beuscher to Harriet Rosenstein, a feminist scholar who was working on a biography of Plath. Stymied by the Plath estate, Rosenstein never published the book, and the letters, unknown to the public, remained in her files. In 2017, they were put up for sale by an American book dealer. Images of the letters, with passages clearly legible, were posted online; as rumors about their contents spread, Smith College, Plath’s alma mater and home to a collection of her papers, filed a lawsuit. The case was settled, the letters went to Smith, and Frieda Hughes, Plath’s daughter and literary executor, who had only recently learned of their existence, reviewed them for possible publication.
Plath used letters, often brilliantly, to master appearances. “I am the girl that Things Happen To,” she wrote to her mother, when she was twenty. “I have spent the morning writing a flurry of letters: all sorts, all sizes: contrite, gay, loving, consolatory.” The fact that she could toggle among these conflicting moods, then boast about it, all in a single morning, suggests how important letters were to her sense of herself as adaptable and presentable, whatever the occasion. The hundreds of missives that she sent home to her mother, almost invariably peppy, beginning when she was a seven-year-old away at her grandparents’ house and ending just a week before her death, are the most continuous thread running through “The Letters of Sylvia Plath” (Harper), which has been published in two volumes: the first in 2017, the second this November. But the Beuscher letters, included in the new volume, are different; they are among the most revealing pieces of prose that Plath ever wrote, in any genre. In them, she alleges that Hughes “beat me up physically” a couple of days before a miscarriage, “seems to want to kill me,” and “told me openly he wished me dead.” In a foreword to this volume, Frieda, who was not yet three when Plath killed herself, maintains, “My father was not the wife-beater that some would wish to imagine he was”.
But Ellis writes with insight and acuity in the present tense, just as he always has in the past tense, and in “American Dialogue” he draws connections between our history and our present reality with an authority that few other authors can muster. It may cost him some of his readership on the right, but Ellis, clearly, has reached the limit of his tolerance for the mythical, indeed farcical, notion that the anti-Federalists won the argument in the late 18th century, or that the founders, to a man, stood for small and weak government, unrestrained market capitalism, unfettered gun ownership and the unlimited infusion of money into the political sphere. There is a healthy argument to be had about the legacy of the founders, but as this book makes clear, it has to start with the facts.
Berlin (1936-2004) was a writer of tender, chaotic and careworn short stories. Her work can remind you of Raymond Carver’s or Grace Paley’s or Denis Johnson’s; her stories mine a blue-collar vein even when she’s writing about men who went to Harvard and drive Porsches. With their bed-head and heartsickness, her characters can also seem to have fallen out of Dusty Springfield’s “Dusty in Memphis” album.