“I’ll read to you,” said Anthony, my long-distance walking companion. “That’ll fix you up.”
I was too tired to protest. Anthony hadn’t read aloud to me before – well, not more than a paragraph or two, which I’d always felt as an imposition. I was too impatient for the slow pace of reading aloud.
He pulled out his phone and started reading Salman Rushdie’s Anton Joseph. Rushdie’s memoir of the fatwa, the years of separation, hiding, boredom and danger, was the only book he had downloaded before we left. I listened at first with the usual impatience – it’s so much faster to read silently on the page – but after several minutes, I suddenly noticed the flatness had lifted. My feet were still sore, but I could feel my energy and resilience return. I was ready to go on.
Lean Cuisines, obviously, are bad. Lean Cuisines are diet culture, insisting that 250 calories is enough for a dinner, and the name “Lean Cuisine” is understood by the Food and Drug Administration as a “nutrient content claim,” so Lean Cuisines are required by the government to be “lean” (less than 10 grams of fat, 4.5 grams or less of saturated fat). But that leanness doesn’t even translate to health, especially in the way we think of it now; as nutritionist Laura Silver explains, Lean Cuisines are mostly white pasta or meat, with potatoes and without nearly enough vegetables. At the very least, Lean Cuisine parent company Nestlé is bad — known for looking for loopholes in water laws in economically-depressed cities, a scam most of us probably could not even have come up with in a horrible crimes MadLib.
"Lean Cuisine has more or less successfully pivoted to “wellness,” but the product remains Lean Cuisine."
I was sitting on a long wooden bench in the Shelby County Probate Court hallway when I heard my name called for the very last time.
Next to me was a woman roughly in her 30s holding a stack of papers in her lap, beside her a girl of about four. The woman, who had an unusual name, had decided to name her daughter after her, a poignant idea that ended up being a much bigger headache than she expected. She was there to change the spelling of their names to alleviate some confusion. The benches filled up with others like us, all waiting to be called into chambers to explain why we were there.
If you want to write a dystopian novel in these quasi-dystopian times, you need to go dark. Really dark. And the premise of Juli Zeh’s bracing, furious novel, “Empty Hearts,” is so dark that I laughed out loud when I read it on the book’s back cover. Britta, “a wife, mother and successful businesswoman,” runs a start-up called, innocuously, The Bridge, which algorithmically scours the internet in search of despondent people, then matches them up with terrorist organizations to act as suicide bombers. There’s your dystopian cocktail, served chilled: the internet as universal despair enabler, a global climate of societal chaos and a data-harvesting company well positioned to exploit both. As I said — go dark or go home.
People who scoff at “Pride and Prejudice” and “Jane Eyre” may belittle “The Doll Factory,” with its strong whiff of fairy-tale romanticism. Ignore them. Iris is a dreamer, and dreamers are inherently romantic. “If men can make this, if they can encase elm trees and conquer nature on this scale,” she thinks of the Great Exhibition, “then what might she be capable of?” Finding out the answer is both a harrowing and a bewitching adventure.
Ada and her father avoid graveyards, for fear their presence will drag the dead right out of the ground. “All their heads will come up over the soil, all asking to be the first saved.” This seethingly assured Irish debut infuses magic realism with critical and feminist theory, but the generous dose of horror movie imagery brings a left-field project firmly into the literary mainstream. Like all the best horror, it’s an impressive balancing act between judicious withholding and unnerving reveals: you don’t want to go into it knowing too much.