A world without dogs is impossible to imagine. Our relationship with them predates the written word, agriculture and civilization. They were our hunting buddies, bed warmers and, sometimes, if not much else was around, our dinner. As dogs crept into our homes, surfing kitchen counters and sleeping on the sofa, our focus was practical: managing the animal with which 60 million American households share space. (That’s about 13 million more households than the number cohabitating with the next most popular pet — cats.) Until surprisingly recently, most dog books were assiduously pragmatic: how to choose them, train them and care for them.
But the new millennium is different. “Marley & Me,” the 2005 mega-best seller by John Grogan, marked a subtle but important shift in how we think about dogs. It begins as a hilarious account of dog ownership in the 1990s. How do you get a large, muscled carnivore to sit nicely at a restaurant, remain tranquil during thunderstorms and not poop on the beach? But by the end of the book, Grogan is almost entirely concerned with his Labrador Marley’s interior life — the way he thinks, feels and apprehends the world. “I dropped my forehead against his and sat there for a long time, as if I could telegraph a message through our two skulls, from my brain to his.”
I talked to a Girl Scout troop about math earlier this month, and one of our topics was the intersection of math and music. I chose to focus on the way we perceive ratios of sound wave frequencies as intervals. We interpret frequencies that have the ratio 2:1 as octaves. (Larger frequencies sound higher.) We interpret frequencies that have the ratio 3:2 as perfect fifths. And sadly, I had to break it to the girls that these two facts mean that no piano is in tune. In other words, you can tuna fish, but you can't tune a piano.
With Princess Bari, Hwang challenges the hegemony of Western norms and myths in world literature, which rarely uses Eastern myth in its storytelling. Anglophone novels and poems default mostly to Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the Bible for symbols, metaphors, and allusions, and novels such as Princess Bari can usher in a more balanced representation of the world. In Hwang’s probing, compassionate work, Western readers unfamiliar with Eastern philosophy and culture will experience new takes on folkloric wisdom born of the enduring collective imagination.
Consider the atlas — what it lends a reader, and what it withholds. The atlas has none of the quiet hubris of the standalone map; it doesn’t ally itself with one fixed perspective, doesn’t emphasize one facet of reality over another. More suggestive than assertive, the atlas is a collection of takes on a place, an anthology of ways to see a world.
If there’s a narrative analogue to the atlas, the debut memoir of T Kira Madden is a luminous example. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Madden’s lyrical portrait of her Florida childhood, is nothing short of astonishing. The book spoils us with stylistic and structural novelty from start to finish. It’s a song of self at once stunningly variegated and yet somehow powerfully unified.