I am writing this on a laptop in a room designed almost entirely for reading physical books—a room that now bears “the ghostly imprint of outdated objects,” as Price puts it. Prolonged arrangement of the body in relation to a book seems to require a whole range of supporting matter—shelves, lamps, tables, “reading chairs”—not strictly necessary for the kinds of work a person does on a screen. Take away the book and the reader, and the whole design of the room starts to feel a little sad, the way a nursery feels once the baby grows up. Insert, where the reader was, a person on his device, and function becomes décor—which, Price suggests, is what books now are for many of us. As their “contents drift online,” books and reading environments have been imbued “with a new glamor,” turned into symbols of rich sentience in a world of anxious fidgeting. When Wallace Stevens, the supreme poet of winter dusk, celebrated the “first light of evening,” it was likely a reading lamp. The glow of a screen as darkness encroaches seems, by comparison, eerie and malevolent.
But it was never the books as objects that people worried would vanish with the advent of e-readers and other personal devices: it was reading itself. The same change was prophesied by Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the movie age. People fretted again with the advent of the radio, the TV, and home computers. Yet undistracted reading didn’t perish the moment any of these technologies were switched on. This is in part because, as Price argues, it never exactly existed to begin with. Far from embodying an arc of unbroken concentration, books have always mapped their readers’ agitation—not unlike the way a person’s browsing history might reveal a single day’s struggle, for example, to focus on writing a book review.
Indeed, fairy stories have always been radical. The particularities of any one fairy story may differ, but the point is this: another world exists, largely invisible or obscured but right alongside our own. It is not governed by our hegemony but has its own traditions and rules. It is often older than ours, and though its existence may be denied by figures of authority, the elders — the grandmothers, the spinsters — whisper their tales of a different kind of world to the children before they sleep. If you are keen enough to sense where the boundary between worlds is stretched to only a translucent scrim, and brave enough to break through it, you will find something that takes your breath away. And though nowadays compendiums are plentiful, fairy tales have an oral tradition of much longer standing; the democratic nature of this tradition, in combination with its content, is what led Propp to credit it with a “revolutionary dynamic.” Often, in fairy tales, the good triumph over tyrants thanks to ordinary powers of cunning, kindness, or perseverance. In The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit makes the point that in fairy tales power is rarely the right tool for survival: “Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness — from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.” Perhaps this aversion to absolute power was another reason that Tolkien was drawn to the fairy story. When asked if the “one ring to rule them all” was an allegory of nuclear weapons, Tolkien replied, “Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power (exerted for Domination).” These stories are some of the oldest in our collective memory, and yet they continue to be told. If they did not need to be, we would stop.
On September 12, 1895, a Nebraskan named Jessie Allan died of tuberculosis. Such deaths were a common occurrence at the turn of the 20th century, but Allan’s case of “consumption” reportedly came from an unusual source. She was a librarian at the Omaha Public Library, and thanks to a common fear of the time, people worried that Allan’s terminal illness may have come from a book.
“The death of Miss Jessie Allan is doubly sad because of the excellent reputation which her work won for her and the pleasant affection which all librarians who knew her had come to feel for her, and because her death has given rise to a fresh discussion as to the possibility of infection from contagious diseases through library books,” the Library Journal, published by the American Librarians Association, wrote in October of 1895.
Allan’s death occurred during what is sometimes called the “great book scare.” This scare, now mostly forgotten, was a frantic panic during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that contaminated books—particularly ones lent out from libraries—could spread deadly diseases. The panic sprung from “the public understanding of the causes of diseases as germs,” says Annika Mann, a professor at Arizona State University and author of Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print.
In a recent New York Times opinion piece, author Jessica Knoll opens her argument against the wellness industry with an anecdote about a lunch meeting with other successful women. Instead of simply ordering, the women narrated their decisions—not explaining their choices or sharing any allergies but recounting their restrictive diets, adding value judgements, and volunteering their insecurities with their bodies. Knolls describes this business lunch to introduce a norm and to point out why she finds it flawed. Instead of jumping into strategy or asking about initial ideas, this lunch starts with women discussing their diets and disparaging their bodies. She goes on to share advice that she received from a dietitian for re-framing her relationship in food in response to this norm: Treat your love of food as a gift.
The characters of Lara Williams’ new novel Supper Club do just that. Roberta, who works at a fashion website and spends her free time cooking, starts a women-only supper club with her roommate and coworker Stevie. These suppers consist of elaborate feasts, foraged for and cooked by the members, but mostly Roberta. The goal of the club is for its members to reclaim their love of food and purposefully inhabit a space, and the women do so by eating decadent meals completely and loudly, creating messes in the rooms in which they dine and on their bodies.
After a while you get used to people wishing you dead. In my case it helps that the ones making the suggestion do so lightly. Often there’s the catch of a laugh in their voice. It’s that stifled amusement, the giggle before the darkness, which alerts me to what’s coming. I am on stage in a small theatre or comedy club, the meat of my live show behind me, and I am taking questions. I am working my way from upstretched hand to upstretched hand, trying to be the most entertaining version of myself that I can. “Jay, so… Ha!” Here we go. “What would be your death-row dinner?” The audience laughs. The audience always laughs. By asking the question the balance of power appears to have shifted, and brilliantly. There I am up on stage, owning the space. And now here’s a member of the audience bringing me back down to earth by asking me to imagine I am about to be put to death for some crime of which I am obviously guilty. Then again, they have heard the question only once; I have heard it dozens of times. I reply. Some of the audience laugh. Some of them look puzzled. Others look utterly furious. As far as they’re concerned, I really haven’t played the game at all.
The idea of last suppers, be they caused by the judicial system, suicide or misfortune of health, has long fascinated me. It seems such a simple question. You are about to die. What do you choose to eat? But it isn’t simple at all. For a start, we eat to keep ourselves alive. That’s the whole point of consuming food. It’s literally a bodily function. But if you knew your death was imminent, the basic reason for the meal would have gone. You’ll be long dead before you starve.
Imagine a world where the son of God is alive and leading a struggling church gospel band. It’s also where a new, highly advanced line of service robots must confront their programming after being designed to resemble lawn jockeys, and a hitchhiker inadvertently finds himself on a road trip along the Underground Railroad.
Welcome to the imaginary town of Cross River, Md., the setting for Rion Amilcar Scott’s vivid “The World Doesn’t Require You.” The fiction collection is a rich, genre-splicing mix of alternate history, magical realism and satire that interrogates issues of race, sexism and where both meet here in the real world.
By reducing the principal players from a quartet to a trio, limiting the professional frame of reference to the cinema, and essentially reversing the construct from a momentary convergence of disparate figures to subsequent reverberations of a single encounter, Koe focuses less on the moment than its aftermath.
Rob Hart's The Warehouse is an entertaining read as a slightly dystopian cyberthriller. But start looking at how plausible it is, notice all the ways in which the things Hart describes — awful healthcare, limited employment opportunities, and global monopolies — are already here, and it becomes a horrific cautionary tale that makes you wonder if we're already too far into a disastrous future, or if there's still some hope for humanity.
“It was true that I had no idea how to endure being alive and everything that comes with it,” Saul reflects. “Responsibility. Love. Death. Sex. Loneliness. History.” Levy handles her weighty themes in this slim novel with a lightness of touch and a painfully sharp sense of what it means to look back on a life and construct a coherent whole from its fragments.
At the beginning of this lucid and insightful study of linguistics, David Shariatmadari states: “There are good reasons language is such a battleground and frustration: it is also a source of delight, of self-esteem and solidarity.” He might have added that it is a topic that writers and their publishers keep returning to, whether in David Crystal’s How Language Works, Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue or in any of the other books, specialist and general alike, that proliferate in the reference section of bookshops all over the country. Yet Don’t Believe A Word is too wise, and too personal, to be regarded as just another book on language: it entertains just as much as it informs.