Submerged in the depths of depression during college, I wandered into a rare book store on Manhattan’s West Side in search of momentary peace. There, the glimmer of a 35th anniversary edition of The Phantom Tollbooth caught my eye.
I had savored reading and rereading The Phantom Tollbooth back in elementary school. Popular with generations of young readers, it tells the story of a boy named Milo who complains of endless boredom and finds a mysterious package in his room. In it, he discovers a fantastical world called the Lands Beyond that he must navigate to free twin princesses who are imprisoned in the Castle in the Air. The book charts these territories with such vivid specificity that young readers feel as if they are entering too.
If there’s any universal truth, it’s that rejection happens to all of us at some point – especially in publishing. Most writers have entertained at least one 3am fantasy about an editor coming crawling back. Even Animal Farm was rejected by Faber & Faber, a decision now (understandably) regretted.
Orwell’s rejection is just one of many that have made their way into legend. Extravagant rejections of authors, from JK Rowling to Vladimir Nabokov, fascinate all of us. We like to remember that geniuses are fallible, and that nobody gets it right every time. But apart from these famous stories, we don’t talk about the everyday experience of rejection in the arts, and its role in the creative process. By venerating these big stories of rejection we make rejection itself feel remarkable, when it’s actually the norm.
Our motel for the night was surrounded by fields and cornfields. We checked in and parked in front of our room. I unloaded my bags, changed into my bathing suit, and headed to the outdoor pool. And I took a book with me: an Everyman’s Library collection of James Merrill’s poetry. I bought it in Paris this January, at the Abbey Bookshop. The Abbey Bookshop is snug and crowded—there are lots of piles everywhere—which I like. You can search through the stacks and see what you find. I keep many of my books at home in stacks, so I find the bookstore’s stacks comforting. That day, I was trying not to buy anything as my suitcase was already pretty full, but this book was perfect because it was so small: just the size of my palm. I put it in my purse and carried it around the city for the week and read it in cafés and on park benches. And then when I got home, I left it in my purse, so I would always have some Merrill if I needed him.
It seemed funny that my book was in rural Virginia now, far from Paris.
The San Francisco peninsula is the ideal environment for commuter rail. Here, even the wealthy use public transit in large numbers, and that's been true for decades. The Peninsula's rail-friendly geography—a linear string of suburbs 50 miles long but never more than about 5 miles wide, hemmed in by bay and mountains—ensures you're never too far from a train station. Most of these suburbs have a historic, walkable main street or downtown district not far from the station, too, like a string of pearls on the necklace that is the Caltrain line.
So wouldn't you kill to have your business right at one of these stations enjoying its steady stream of foot traffic? Or your apartment right nearby where you can head out your door and hop on the train? These are spectacularly convenient, desirable locations; they should be the most developed places in their respective cities, and we should see the intensity of land use gradually drop off to low-rise offices and single-family homes as we move away from them. We’re far more likely to see just that in other countries with rail: commuter rail stations in suburban France, Spain, the Netherlands, Japan, and so forth are hubs of concentrated, walkable development. So why do so many of the Caltrain stations look like if you waved a magic wand and made the rails and boarding platform vanish, you’d never know they had been there?
One rainy Monday, shortly after her 21st birthday, Ella Risbridger left her London apartment, intent on ending her life. “I had fallen out of love with the world,” she writes in her book “Midnight Chicken.” Depressed and anxious, she had recently quit her job; she rarely left her apartment, except on that particular day when she tried to step in front of a bus headed to Oxford Circus. That this plan failed is thankfully evident in the beautiful book she has written about her life before and since.
“Midnight Chicken” is ostensibly a cookbook — there are more than 80 recipes here, from breakfast to dessert — but it’s more than a list of instructions on how to make a really good roasted chicken, proper Bolognese or salted caramel brown butter brownies. It’s a candid account of how making these foods — or any foods, really — can be a profoundly rejuvenating experience. It is also, slyly, a love story that takes a bittersweet turn halfway down the first page of acknowledgments.
Shortly after the griddle is flipped on at Mama’s Chicken in Hyde Park, the day’s parade of customers starts to trickle in. Pickup orders are called out from a worn formica counter in back: biscuit sandwiches, hot cakes, wings, cheeseburgers, tacos, red beans and rice.
But no self-respecting regular strolls out of Mama’s with just breakfast (or lunch) in hand. An esteemed institution in South Los Angeles, the 55-year-old market’s claim to fame, and perpetual bestseller, is its chicken sausage links, sold in 2- and 5-pound boxes, each emblazoned with the bold claim: “The Best in the World.” On holiday weekends, when the store might go through a few hundred pounds of sausage a day, lines can stretch into the parking lot.
As the narratives of Quichotte and his creator start to merge, the novel’s focus on lost children reunited with their fathers and estranged siblings reconciling grows sharper. Its simplest elements achieve its most moving effects. Set against the backdrops of Trump’s America, Brexit Britain and Modi’s India, Quichotte is also the story of Muslim migrants passing through hostile territory, a tale of rescue and escape. In this case, Rushdie’s maximalist mode is a perfect fit for a moment of transcontinental derangement.
Many awaken wishing they’d drunk less the night before. Many fewer wish they’d drunk more. Shortsightedness is also common among nonhuman animals. Birds, for example, often choose small but immediately available portions of food over much larger ones that arrive after a brief delay.
How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller’s eye to this question in her new book, “The Optimist’s Telescope.” She is also deeply informed about the relevant science.