On the 22nd of that month, Plath wrote to Olive Prouty again, mentioning that she’d been prescribed “sleeping pills & tonics to help me eat.” She had, finally, found someone to watch the children six mornings and one evening a week. Still, she wrote, there was the novel, which she had “not dared to touch […] until I saw ahead I could sit to it every morning and fear no interruption.”
She repeated her plan to write a novel that would help her buy a house so she could earn income from renting out the rooms.
“I must just resolutely write mornings for the next years, through cyclones, water freezeups, children’s illnesses & the aloneness. Having been so deeply and spiritually and physically happy with my dear, beautiful husband makes this harder than if I had never known love at all.”
Three weeks later, on February 11th, Sylvia Plath killed herself at the age of 30.
If books have design eras, we’re in an age of statement wallpaper and fatty text. We have the internet to thank — and not just the interface but the economy that’s evolved around it. From the leather-bound volumes of old to lurid mass-market paperbacks, book covers were never designed in a vacuum. Their presentation had everything to do with the way books were made, where and how and to whom they were sold. And when you look at book covers right now, what you’ll see blaring back at you, bold and dazzling, is a highly competitive marketing landscape dominated by online retail, social media, and their curiously symbiotic rival, the resurgent independent bookstore.
Having ignored questions of economic inequality for decades, economists and other scholars have recently discovered a panoply of effects that go well beyond the fact that some people have too much money and many don’t have enough. Inequality affects our physical and mental health, our ability to get along with one another and to make our voices heard and our political system accountable, and, of course, the futures that we can offer our children. Lately, I’ve noticed a feature of economic inequality that has not received the attention it deserves. I call it “intellectual inequality.”
I do not refer to the obvious and ineluctable fact that some people are smarter than others but, rather, to the fact that some people have the resources to try to understand our society while most do not. Late last year, Benjamin M. Schmidt, a professor of history at Northeastern University, published a study demonstrating that, for the past decade, history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, even as more and more students attend college. With slightly more than twenty-four thousand current history majors, it accounts for between one and two per cent of bachelor’s degrees, a drop of about a third since 2011. The decline can be found in almost all ethnic and racial groups, and among both men and women. Geographically, it is most pronounced in the Midwest, but it is present virtually everywhere.
Chop Suey Nation is an astonishing cultural and important personal history. It is a complex melange of invigorating stories, sympathetic real-life characters and nuanced reportage. Hui intricately weaves the real-life sacrifices of many Chinese immigrants into a deeply felt and resonating anthropological tapestry.
In using nonsensical jargon to expose the hollow core of the global Big Ideas industry, Mendelsund has produced — or perhaps reproduced — something entirely satisfying. “Same Same” is a substantial book about emptiness. It reminds us that there’s no here here unless we create it ourselves.
Where Reasons End is the rarest of things: a perfect book, a masterpiece of American fiction, and it proves beyond a doubt that Li is one of this country's greatest writers. It's a beautiful look at what happens when language disappears, betrays us, lets us down: "Words provided to me — loss, grief, sorrow, bereavement, trauma — never seemed to be able to speak precisely of what was plaguing me," the narrator thinks. "One can and must live with loss and grief and sorrow and bereavement. Together they frame this life, as solid as the ceiling and the floor and the walls and the doors."