At Merriam-Webster we know that words have the power to shape worlds both real and imagined. And we know that writing is hard work. To distill a story, its characters, and all the associated emotions into a single word is no small feat.
That’s why we’ve partnered with eleven of our favorite authors who have shared the story and significance behind their one-word-title books.
One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. “The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in modern English,” he says. “Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means ‘smoked salmon.’ It’s really cool that that word hasn’t changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish.”
Whether it was the physicist Niels Bohr or the baseball player Yogi Berra who said it – or, most likely, someone else – it is indeed hard to make predictions, especially about the future. This is certainly so regarding economic, social and political phenomena. If you don’t believe me, just ask the Nobel prizewinning economist Paul Krugman, who, writing in The New York Times on the night of Donald Trump’s election victory in November 2016, predicted an imminent global recession, from which global markets might ‘never’ recover. We’re still waiting. One is reminded of the quip by another Nobel prizewinning economist, Paul S Samuelson: ‘Wall Street indexes predicted nine of the past five recessions!’
Most sushi connoisseurs prize a pristine surf clam still wriggling when it hits the counter or a sweet shrimp dancing on the plate. There are different levels of freshness when it comes to sushi, including flash-frozen fish that is defrosted before service, and the stuff picked out at the fish market that morning. But fish that has been sitting in the fridge for weeks before service, that’s a hard sell for most Americans.
You can find some form of preserved or aged fish at Q in downtown L.A., and a couple pieces on menus around the city, but in the States, restaurants pride themselves on letting as little time pass as possible between the boat and your plate. Kimura takes pride in how long he can age his fish before it turns to a mushy pile of rot. You could classify his style of sushi as uniquely his own — a variant on edomae (raw fish with cooked rice seasoned with vinegar).
There is a tree on campus where all the lovers go. They deface this tree, carve their names into the wood and kill the tree slowly, for love. The other night, I dreamed that we were there, and that you were as you always are—sylvan and cool, a little stingy with your words—while I stood beside you filled with shanghuo, that inner heat which my grandmother blames for my acne, my temper, my sleepy, bloodshot eyes.
In the dream, we did not know what to do at the tree. It was as though we lacked the proper tools or the proper sense of each other to act. When I awoke, sticky and unresolved, it was already afternoon, and you had texted me an invitation to swim. I thought about my first day in this city, how the desert air had baked me dry and how my key would not turn in the door of a borrowed apartment. On that inaugural day, I had sat on the welcome mat beside a green scarab as bright and dead as a bauble, watching unknown neighbors doing laps in the pool. Maybe love is always having that someone on the inside, ready to let you in; or maybe it’s the doorframe that swells in the summer heat, catching a dead bolt fast. Maybe it’s neither and maybe it’s both. Either way, I remember buying a cold Fanta from the vending machine, putting the can to the keyhole, and waiting for something magic to happen: a contraction in the frame, an answer to my open sesame.
Deep into Kathleen Alcott’s epic, multigenerational novel, “America Was Hard to Find,” a young man tells the story of how he landed on the cover of Life magazine. In the picture, he’s a 12-year-old boy dropping chrysanthemums down the barrels of rifles carried by National Guard troops at a Vietnam War protest. But the image conceals a more complicated truth: When the picture was taken, this child was high on mushrooms, provided to him by a friend of his mother’s.
This gulf — between the iconic photograph and the actual human experience, between the public’s imagination of history and the way it feels to the person living through it — is the focus of this sprawling but absorbing novel.
As much as the story turns to individualized responses to tragedy, it also dissects a collective reckoning with the myth of the American dream. In this unrelenting Alaska, this once-determined family finds little comfort. In fact, they find little hope at all. Those surrounding them rarely even seem to notice the family. The father says, “They see only half of us.” And Gavin goes even further when pointing to his father’s failed choice to bring the family to the US: “He had brought us to a place we didn’t belong, and taken us from a place we did. Now we yearned for all places and found peace in none.” The deaths aren’t purely physical in The Unpassing.
The ending is surprising considering what comes before it, and, somehow, it feels true—earned even.
In his beautifully written, informative, and thought-provoking third book, Heart: A History, Sandeep Jauhar, a cardiologist, explores both the metaphorical and biological properties of the heart. He gives a fascinating account of how the heart’s circulatory and electrical system came to be understood over many centuries, ultimately leading to lifesaving innovations such as the heart transplant, the pacemaker, and the implantable defibrillator. He also tells the story of how our concept of the heart evolved from metaphor to machine, an evolution which is still not complete and which, Jauhar argues, probably never will be. Like The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s masterful “biography of cancer,” which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Heart is a work of both medical history and medical philosophy, one which invites us to look deeply not just at one organ system or category of disease but more broadly at the relationship of mind to body and art to science.
My therapist shakes her head.
It’s much more complex than that, she says.