Offhandedly, de la Mare described the drama-free book club of her dreams to her friend: one where all she had to do was meet people at a bar with whatever book she was reading. No forced deadlines. No reading books she didn’t want to read. No vacuuming the house. No preparing deviled eggs or canapés.
Gluhanich loved the idea. Why not make it a reality?
Few large groups of English speakers have borne as great a burden of stigma as black people. In the time of slavery, that stigma was enshrined in law—and even after emancipation, legal measures have been used to ensure that black people could not easily vote, could not access decent education and transportation, and so on. Since the civil rights era, many legal barriers to equality have been removed, but society has yet to catch up. As of the second decade of the twenty-first century, black people are almost five times as likely to be jailed as white people, despite making up only 13 percent of the population. It’s not surprising, then, that the dialect many black people speak is stigmatized, too—to such a great extent that it’s often denied the status of dialect, becoming merely “bad” English. That assumption has become so ingrained, it’s even taken up by some black people themselves.
Goya. A small word, but one that contains multitudes. It is one of those mythic beasts, the “untranslatables,” the foreign words that supposedly lack any equivalent in English. Lists of them spread virally online. Someone may have shared one with you on social media: it might have included utepils, sgrìob and saudade—of which more later. But for now, let us examine goya.
In addition to being visually striking, Halley VI provides researchers with a more spacious and comfortable living and work environment. It is set on hydraulic stilts, allowing operators to lift it up out of accumulating snow drifts. And if the entire station needs to be moved — it sits on a drifting ice shelf — skis at the base of those stilts make that possible.
“Before, these projects were all just about keeping the weather out,” Mr. Broughton said. “Engineers would be told, ‘This is the weather, this is the wind speed, these are the restrictions.’ But now these projects are about using architecture as a means of improving both well-being and operational efficiency.”
The Mathematical Bridge is a wooden footbridge across the River Cam, connecting the old and new parts of Queens' College in Cambridge. The bridge is much admired because of its intriguing design—it is constructed entirely out of straight timbers, but has an arched shape.
In The History of the University of Cambridge, author Edmund Carter praises the bridge as “one of the most curious pieces of carpentry of this kind in England”. The timbers of the bridge are “curiously joined together, and supported on abutments of rustic stone-work, between which is a passage for the Cam, 40 foot in the clear, and of such height, that the waters in a common flood cannot reach the lowest timbers thereof.”
While race dominates, Reid is far too engaged a writer to let it define a narrative that has equally incisive observations to share about everything from maternal ambivalence to dating mores and dining fads. Hypocrisy and forgiveness get a look in, and in some respects, this is a novel that’s as much about money and class as anything. All in all, it’s a cracking debut – charming, authentic and every bit as entertaining as it is calmly, intelligently damning.
Now Greenwell is back with “Cleanness,” a collection of stories that revisits that teacher’s experience in Bulgaria, a country the author knows from his own stint as a teacher at the American College of Sofia. Three of these nine stories have appeared in the New Yorker — and almost all of them are extraordinary. Although the form is smaller, the scope is broader, and the overall effect even more impressive than his novel. Greenwell’s style remains as elegant as ever, but here it’s perfectly subordinated to a fuller palette of events and themes.
In Miranda Popkey's slim but potent first novel, Topics of Conversation, sex, desire, and failed relationships are ever at the fore. Her unnamed narrator, a troubled young woman, reports on a series of conversations with various other women — a classmate's mother, fellow graduate students, fellow single mothers — over a span of 17 years following her graduation from college in 2000.
This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way. That compass — provided by friends, influences, collaborators — stays steady. “I need no savior,” Smith writes, “but their love.”