Aphasia Book Club, you ask? It sounds improbable. Five years ago when I first read a notice for the group, which meets weekly at the Echo Park Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, I thought it must be a misprint, even a joke. Like many others, I mistakenly assumed that difficulty in speaking or reading implied a deficit in intellectual acuity. It’s not true.
Aphasia is a language problem. It’s a condition, but a treatable condition. Literally meaning “without speech,” aphasia, as defined succinctly by neurologist Antonio Damasio, is “a breakdown of the two-way translation that establishes a correspondence between thoughts and languages.” Most often the injuries to the brain are the result of strokes or aneurysms.
“You’ll never find more motivated readers than those who can no longer take reading, or the ability to discuss what they’ve read, for granted,” says public services librarian Francie Schwarz.
Just as money was a stand-in for value, so the alphabet was a stand-in for meaning, separating words into letters for ease of reordering. This beautiful invention allows us to shape whole universes of meaning out of a small number of letters.
Alphabetical order, however, had a much longer and more circuitous road to dominance. A Place for Everything tells this complex and layered story. The alphabet has always been learned in a set order – but it was ages before this order was used for anything other than memorising the letters. Alphabetisation arrived piecemeal and for centuries remained one arrangement among many.
On a summer day in the early 1900s, a stroll down an amusement park boardwalk could include a roller-coaster ride, a ring toss, or a freak show. It might also feature a decidedly more bizarre attraction: the glassed-in compartments of living, breathing, tiny babies. Designed to show off the new technology aimed at keeping premature babies alive, infant incubator exhibits were sideshow spectacles for decades — one was a seasonal mainstay at Coney Island from 1903 to 1943.
The creepy novelty of incubator exhibits is one of several eerie early 20th-century enticements in Elizabeth Hand’s Curious Toys. Hand takes a break from her photographer-sleuth Cass Neary series (Generation Loss, Available Dark, Hard Light) to set this stand-alone novel in 1915 Chicago’s Riverview Park. Demolished in 1967, Riverview is a flickering fixture in the city’s imagination — in 2017, the Chicago Tribune remembered the amusement park as “a melding of heaven and hell, seedy and serene, glitzy and garish.” Hand, as is her wont, homes in on its darkness. Seen through the eyes of Pin Maffucci, the scrawny 14-year-old daughter of the park’s fortune-teller, this Riverview is all underbelly.
Set on the fictional Quarry Lane estate in west London, these 10 tack-sharp tales report back from the frontline of breadline Britain, exploding myths of social mobility and masculine invulnerability. Bold, abrasive and slyly funny, each story pivots on a moment of unexpected tenderness and human connection, glimpses that are made all the more affecting by the hardscrabble lives depicted.